Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

58 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
program. Mainly, they provide such services to undergraduates as counseling
and career guidance. (As at Wesleyan, those services are also available
elsewhere in the institution for all students, Blacks included.) These centers
sponsor programs of interest to Black students, are a focal point for extracurricular
activities, and are, in effect, Black student unions. The existence
of such centers reflects the continued sense of exclusion among some
Black students from such general student activities as campus newspaper,
dramatics, and literary magazines, the sense that the typical campus lecture
or program has little to say to them and that they must maintain “turf” that
is clearly theirs. In places where student-community programs exist, these
centers often serve to coordinate them. If Wesleyan is the rule, the existence
of such centers is likely to result in a weak academic program and student
indifference to that weakness. 34
The Research Center or Institute
Institutes have long been a means to encourage and support advanced
scholarship in the social sciences and, to a lesser degree, in the humanities.
While some are unattached to a university, most major universities have
been eager to house such centers because they are a source of prestige and
serve as inducements to the best and most productive scholars, who, by
means of the institute, can pursue advanced studies among colleagues of
kindred interests and talents while sheltered to some extent from teaching
obligations. Since examples of successful institutes abound, it is little wonder
that persons interested in Afro-American studies would attempt their
own. The results have been mixed, at best. 35
Columbia University, with funds from the Ford Foundation, established
the Urban Center in 1968–69. Because none of the funds were invested
as endowment, and because the university interpreted the terms of
the grant as permitting their use for related projects and programs, the
Urban Center had either to seek other funding or to expire when the Ford
money ran out. Its first director, Franklyn Williams, served only a short
time before taking a position at the Phelps-Stokes Fund. The bulk of the
original grant went for staff salaries and university overhead. Except for