Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

56 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
its candidate. Such arrangements presuppose goodwill and respect among
the departments involved. In such ways, autonomy can work against the department’s
efforts. Furthermore, even when university budgets were more
ample, it was impossible for an Afro-American studies department to provide
faculty in all of the disciplines thought useful to it. As a result, they are
forced to depend on a very limited program (history and literature) or rely
on other departments’ offerings.
Whatever the expectation of those who struggled to create departments
rather than programs, joint appointments are the general rule
throughout the country. Sometimes this resulted from administrative fiat,
sometimes out of necessity. Ewart Guinier, the first chairman of Harvard’s
department, had no joint appointment himself and attempted to make the
question of departmental autonomy and integrity rest on the power to promote
a junior person to tenure from within. The president and the dean,
responding to university-wide criticism of the department’s program and
standards, in 1974 made promotion from within the Afro-American studies
department conditional upon joint appointment. Guinier failed in his
effort to force this issue in his favor. This case illustrates another important
limit to departmental autonomy. Appointment and tenure matters must be
concurred in by university-wide and ad hoc committees (in Harvard’s case
these committees are made up of outside scholars appointed by the dean),
and, finally, only the president makes appointments.
The practice of joint appointments is a good thing when it works well.
It dispels suspicion about the quality of a department’s faculty, especially
necessary in a new field in which standards and reputation are in question.
Furthermore, it gives Afro-American studies a voice and an advocate within
the conventional departments, which is quite useful for communication
and goodwill. In this regard, the practice achieves some of the good features
of programs. Whether imposed by the administration or adopted as a matter
of convenience, however, joint appointments may be the cause of problems
and friction. A candidate may fail to win tenure in the second
department, its faculty claiming a failure to meet their standards. Since
questions of standards are seldom easy to resolve, these decisions are likely
to cause antagonism and ill will. Joint appointments also raise questions of