Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

70 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
to an adequate level of academic competence in a combination of disciplines.
Competency in reading and writing is hardly enough to justify a college education.
One hopes that students would be helped to develop skills in critical
analysis and encouraged in their respect for the intellect their own as well as
others’. Obviously, the critical pose assumed in the National Council for Black
Studies’ dictum—that it “questions the adequacy, objectivity, and universal
scope of other schools of thought”—is adequate. One would hope that such
programs in Afro-American studies would submit their own programs, pedagogy,
and assumptions to as harsh a critical gaze as they level at those of others.
The time is past when questions about the rightness or wrongness of
Afro-American studies are constructive.Afro-American studies exists and has
established itself well enough to continue to exist. Accepting that, it is important
to require it to meet standards comparable to those of any other undergraduate
major. It should produce students with specific knowledge, and the
skills to make use of it, but at the same time a broad enough view of the world
and of human experience to place their special knowledge in a meaningful
context.It is my impression that very fewAfro-American studies programs do
this well. There is nothing about the subject matter of the field, or its focus,
that makes these criteria impossible.
Conclusion
American higher education has changed dramatically in recent years.
A college education is now available to a much broader portion of the
socioeconomic spectrum than in years past. The university’s role in producing
useful knowledge and useful people and in preparing the way for
social reform is now universally acknowledged. The fragmentation of
scholarly fields into narrower specialties has accelerated, undermining the
assumed coherence of broadly conceptual fields like the humanities.
The rationale and efficacy of the traditional liberal arts core in undergraduate
education have been called increasingly into question. This
transformation—now of nearly four decades’ duration—continues, and
Afro-American studies will necessarily be affected as the American univer-