Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 55
own faculty and staff, design its own curriculum, and service its student
concentrators without any control or oversight by others. It was also assumed
to be a more permanent structure than a program. Some institutions
established Afro-American studies departments without much ado.
In others, like Harvard, departmental status remained a bone of contention
years after it was established. The more it was resisted, of course, the more
it appeared to be worth fighting for and defending.
The argument against it was mainly that a department normally represented
a discipline. Afro-American studies, being interdisciplinary in
character, should, critics said, be organized into a program made up of faculty
from the various departments serving it. Its defenders most often
claimed it was a discipline defined by its particular perspective on a topic
none of the other departments offered.In these terms the argument was tendentious.
As defined by the nineteenth-century German university, departments
were identical with academic disciplines. By 1969, however, that had
ceased to be true of American university departments. Interdisciplinary departments
had developed within the sciences, and occasionally area studies
were departmentally organized.On the other hand,a perspective,which was
what Afro-American studies offered, could hardly be thought of as a discipline.
Whatever it once was, a department is now largely an administrative
convenience. Afro-American studies departments have worked reasonably
well in some institutions, Berkeley and the University of Indiana being examples.
It did not work well at Harvard, and its problems illuminate some
of the weaknesses of the model.
Departmental autonomy, it turns out, is not as absolute as some believed.
Such autonomy as exists carries problems. Under a program, the
president and dean can, in effect, direct departments to make searches and
appoint competent faculty approved by the program’s committee. The department
has the power and budget to make recommendations for appointment,
but, lacking other arrangements, it must find scholars willing
to take positions in Afro-American studies alone. In practice, most senior
scholars with major reputations insist on joint appointments with the departments
of their discipline. So, most often, an Afro-American studies department’s
appointment is contingent on another department’s approval of