Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

72 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
The earlier crises have passed. Administrators, faculty, and students
no longer hear or make demands comparable to those of the 1960s and
1970s. There have been costs, however, particularly to the traditional concept
of the liberal arts. The extraordinarily high costs of higher education
(especially in the private institutions) have provoked parental and student
demands for a clear and immediate payoff. As a result, many colleges have
drifted into a preprofessionalism that undermines the traditional concept
of general and liberal education. Black parents and students, no less than
White, now search for the most direct route to the professional schools. Students
may want to study the fine arts, philosophy, music, or literature, but
they are quick to give them up in favor of what they think is“good for them”
professionally, economics, political science, biology, and so forth. In this
sense, Afro-American studies is just one more field perceived by many undergraduates
as being of marginal utility. The assumption is, in fact, faulty:
most professional schools are indifferent to a student’s undergraduate field
of concentration; in most instances, a major in Afro-American studies has
been considered an asset by admissions officers. But combined parental
pressure, personal ambivalence, and overly cautious academic advising
tend to push students into the conventional and well-worn paths.
There will, of course, be those students who see their professional careers
(in law, government, business, or medicine) as being enriched by a
knowledge about Blacks in America,and there will be those who follow their
tastes and intellectual interests despite the trends. With the political motive
no longer compelling, it will be from among this minority of Black and
White undergraduates thatAfro-American studies will draw its students and
its future scholars. And programs and departments of Afro-American studies
will become more attractive as they bring the most sophisticated methodologies
of the social sciences to bear on contemporary Black issues and as
they enliven discourse in the humanities by the broadening of perspective.
In small Afro-American studies departments and programs, high
quality of faculty and teaching will be even more essential to success than it
is in larger departments and programs. Great care must be given—more
than in conventional and larger departments—to faculty appointments and
questions of promotion and tenure. Needless to say, even one tenured pro-