Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 35
Black Student Alliance at Yale had been working, without much success, to
convince the college of the need for courses in Afro-American history and
culture. Early in the spring of 1968, they decided to sponsor a conference
that would draw nationally upon White and Black intellectuals having
something to say about the subject. One of the student organizers, Armstead
Robinson, has written: “We viewed this symposium as an opportunity
to create an atmosphere in which those persons who were in pivotal
positions ... could engage in active and open intellectual exchanges on
questions related to Afro-American studies.” 17
Supported by funds from the Ford Foundation, this symposium to educate
the educators brought together a wide spectrum of opinion (all favorable
to some form of Afro-American studies). Some, like Nathan Hare and
the “cultural nationalist” Maulana Ron Karenga (of UCLA), were deeply
anti-intellectual and hostile to the academy. These were offset by such selfconscious
intellectuals and committed academics as Martin Kilson, Harold
Cruse, and Boniface Obichere. The result was a provocative conference that
gave the Yale community a chance to compare several differing concepts of
Black Studies and to identify the one that might work best at Yale.
The development of the Yale program was helped most by the constructive
attitude of the university’s senior faculty and the deft leadership of its administration,
out of which a program emerged that was an integral part of the
life of the institution.Several of the major departments (including history,English,
and anthropology) supplied faculty and courses to the program, and the
administration allocated the funds to make that possible. Such a program required
trust and respect by all parties.Whatever the reasons that Yale had those
qualities, they were hard to come by at other institutions. The result is that others
have had to suffer painful periods of adjustment to get to the point at which
Yale was able to start.After more than a decade,some are just now getting there.
Harvard University
Harvard’s program might have gone the way of Yale’s except for bad timing,
bad luck, and perhaps excessive distrust on the part of some of those concerned.
Like Yale, Harvard began working on the problem in the spring of