Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 47
Those who wanted Afro-American studies to be recognized as an academic
discipline generally held that it should emphasize three existing academic
fields: history, literature, and sociology—especially history. 32 Once
one confronted the problem of getting scholars to take Afro-American studies
seriously, one also had the task of explaining how such disparate fields
could be brought together in it. Those who took the matter most seriously
were the most uncomfortable with the character of student demands. As
scholar-teachers, they saw their object as being the development of a teaching
field that would remain academically respectable to their peers, and they
saw as the primary object of any course the giving of an academic competence
to students. Those aims could be hostile to demands for a program as
a quest for power or personal (racial) identity. These conflicts would plague
the supporters of Afro-American studies throughout the seventies.
ThreebasicconcernslaybehindthedemandforAfro-Americanstudies—
the political need for turf and place, the psychological need for identity, and the
academic need for recognition.While they might be discussed as separate questions
for the sake of convenience,they were really inseparable.Individuals could
be driven by more than one of these needs. As long as matters remained at the
reform stage, implicit differences could be ignored.When it came time to build
anddefineprograms,compatibilityamongthevariousagentsof reformbecame
strained.Scholars who once found the“student constituent”useful in establishing
the urgency of the program might well find that student views of an academic
program did not comport well with their own. Students who had hoped
to find psychological and emotional support in new courses might find them
both academically difficult and emotionally troubling.Once the programs were
in place—the need for“turf”having been achieved—Black students might not
even take the courses, or might act as though taking them were a political statement
rather than an academic choice. Furthermore, there came in the midseventies
a generation of students—both Black and White—who were highly
career-oriented. Courses that existed largely to make rhetorical and political
statements had little appeal to students whose main concern was admission to
a professional school. By 1975, the decade of ideology was over.