Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

34 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
Sciences. In effect, they wanted to be a separate college, dealing on budgetary
and other matters directly with the chancellor. They were especially concerned
that the traditional disciplines (that is, the university faculty) should
have no say about course content or faculty appointments.
Each division within the Department of Ethnic Studies developed differently.
Native American studies has remained quite small. Chicano and
contemporary Asian studies, while larger, has never developed a strong academic
emphasis; the latter, in fact, has concentrated on “community outreach”
rather than scholarly programs. The department’s history has been
marked by internal conflict among its divisions and, in its relations with the
university, by conflicts over budget and autonomy. In all of the department’s
divisions, student participation in policy and management was assumed to
be necessary. The Afro-American studies faculty, after some tumultuous
years marked by internecine fighting (in 1969, faculty and students came
armed to meetings) and an undefined academic program, left the ethnic
studies department in 1974 and joined the College of Letters and Sciences.
In 1972, the university forced a change in the leadership of Afro-
American studies by replacing its nontenured director with William M.
Banks, a psychologist who was appointed with tenure. It was through
Banks’s leadership (despite student boycotts of Afro-American studies
courses) that Afro-American studies elected in 1974 to join the College of
Letters and Sciences as a normal university department. It has since become
one of the stronger departments of its kind in the country, with several notable
tenured faculty. It has been aided in this by the fact that some other
departments at the university (notably, history) have long been offering
courses on aspects of Afro-American life. 16
Yale University
By all accounts, the Afro-American studies program at Yale is the strongest
and most respected in the country. It has been a healthy program from the
beginning, and that fact has much to do with the way it came into being:
intelligent and wise leadership from faculty, students, and administration
and a genuine spirit of cooperation among them. From the fall of 1967, the