Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 29
Crisis of Establishment
Between 1966 and 1970, most American colleges and universities added to
their curricula courses on Afro-American life and history, and most made
efforts to include Blacks on their faculties and administrative staffs. The fact
that schools like Macalester, Bowdoin, Colby, Reed, Dartmouth, and Carleton
(to pick just a few names), which were relatively free of pressure,
joined the rush argues that there was something more to explain it than the
threat of students disrupting academic life. Like all other aspects of the
movements for peace and civil rights, the demand for university reform by
Black students was national in its impact as well as local in particular manifestations.
In some sense, the urge for change was everywhere; whether or
not a campus had militant Black students making demands, the urge for reform
was in the air.
I suggest three motives, independent of immediate student pressure,
that compelled college administrators and faculty to join the march for
change. First, there was, particularly among liberal-minded academics, a
genuine sense of American higher education’s complicity in the social inequities
resulting from racism-indifference to Black undergraduate enrollment,
insensibility to non-White subject matter in the curriculum, and the
discouragement of Black scholars. Second, it had become fashionable to
bring Blacks onto staffs and faculties, just as it had earlier become fashionable
to recruit “hardcore, inner-city kids” for admission. The sense of competition
among institutions should not be discounted; the legitimate
purpose of the act too often was joined by the wish to do at least as well as
comparable institutions. Third, in their effort to attract the “best” applicants
from a generation of teenagers noted for their social consciousness,
college administrators felt it important to look reasonably open to change,
to appear to be progressive without compromising integrity. A course or
two on Black history or culture could achieve that end.
The great majority of institutions added courses pertinent to Afro-
Americans and, as a direct result or not, experienced little or no student disruption;
most changes involved merely a course or two and could hardly be
called a program in Black Studies. Yet, from 1966, student disorders were