Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

30 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
increasingly common, and no college or university could be indifferent to,
or uninfluenced by, events at San Francisco State, Cornell, Harvard, Wesleyan,
and so on. It was widely assumed that disruptions of the sort that had
occurred at those institutions could be avoided, if at all, only by swift and
significant reform.
With the spurt of Black enrollment in 1966, students and administrators
began a process of negotiation aimed at correcting the problems perceived
by Black students. One problem was that many Black students felt
themselves to be educationally disadvantaged compared to their White
peers; they wanted remedial programs that would compensate for their poor
high schools (poor because White society made them so) and poor study
habits. Problems also arose because of a deep sense of alienation from the institutions
and their goals. This alienation was often expressed by defining
schools as “White,” as a part of a “White, racist system.” Blacks’ success and
achievement within these institutions could come only if they“Whitewashed
their minds” and alienated themselves from “their people” and “their community.”
In this view, while college may have been a necessary route to upward
mobility, success within the college would be purchased through the
denial of one’s “Blackness” and through co-optation by the system. This was
the Black version of the widespread (and,among many youngAmericans,the
rampant) alienation from mainstream, conventional, middle-class America.
For Black undergraduates, the solution to this dilemma was an assertion of
Blackness: beauty, culture, community, etc. The newly developing Black student
associations, therefore, pressed to make the college environment congenial
and hospitable to what they described as Black values and culture.
They wanted student activities for Black students, Black cultural centers.
Sometimes they asked for separate dormitories (or Black floors or sections
of dormitories); they established Black tables in dining halls and treated
White students with the same hostility and contempt they assumed Whites
had for them. They almost always pressed for the appointment of Black faculty
and for the introduction of courses “relevant to us as Black people.”
Black student leaders found some sympathetic ears among faculty
members, administrators, and White students, but their demands also created
hostility among the same groups. To some, the demand for remedia-