Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

60 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
programs, but mainly offered predoctoral fellowships to four or five advanced
graduate students a year. The object of the predoctoral program was
to identify promising graduate students and to support them through the
successful completion of their dissertations. Funding for that program (from
the Henry R. Luce Foundation) ran out in 1981. Funds for the balance of the
institute’s program were provided by the university.
In the past three years, the institute has sponsored major art exhibits,
lectures, and concerts. With funds from the Ford Foundation, it has inaugurated
an annual lecture series and, since 1983–84, it has supported in residence
two senior scholars a year. It has appointed four postdoctoral
research fellows each year since 1980–81. Proposals are now being designed
for multiyear research projects on criminal justice, economics and public
policy, public health, and education. The intention is that the Du Bois Institute
will generate major research projects on questions and problems related
to Afro-American life and experience, sustaining a broad range of
scholarship.
The Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African
Studies was established by the University of Virginia in 1981 with a mandate
to encourage research and teaching in all the geographic components
of the Black experience: the African, Afro-Latin, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-
American. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the institute supervises the
university’s undergraduate Afro-American and African Studies Program;
sponsors colloquia, lectures, and conferences; and others both pre- and
postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities and social sciences for research
and writing in Black Studies.
At UCLA, the Afro-American Studies Program is a quasi-institute in
form. It supports research by graduate students and postdoctoral scholars.
This program offers no instructional courses.
The research institute seems the most attractive and useful instrument
to develop serious scholarship in this field. So far, none have succeeded
in establishing themselves. There are several reasons: (1) there are
too few high-quality scholars in the field to support several competing
centers; (2) ideology has tended to dominate some, weakening their appeal
to some of the best scholars; (3) lack of capital funding has forced