Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 73
fessor who is mediocre or worse can seriously damage or even kill a program.
But even poor choices of junior (untenured) faculty may have woeful consequences.
Great patience, sustained attention to scholarship and teaching,
and a willingness to dismiss marginal faculty even in the face of emotional
and political opposition are thus called for. Black and White faculty and administrators
must also resist the temptation to make Afro-American studies
appointments a substitute for meeting affirmative action goals.
After an increase in the sixties and seventies in the number of Blacks
entering graduate schools, there has been a sharp drop in the eighties. The
increased numbers of Blacks pursuing academic careers was an anomaly of
the past decade. Earlier, the chances of a Black scholar being appointed to
the faculty of a northern university were extremely slight—so much so that
very few Blacks chose to pursue scholarly careers. Projections of the academic
job market for the next fifteen or twenty years are not promising for
most fields in the humanities and social sciences. High costs and relatively
lengthy periods of training for the Ph.D. (seven years on average as opposed
to three years for law and two years for business) will push many of the best
and brightest Black undergraduates into nonacademic fields. The number
of Blacks enrolled in doctoral programs has been declining and very few
Blacks are coming forth to fill faculty vacancies. If this trend continues, affirmative
action in faculty hiring will be moot as far as Blacks are concerned.
Of course, the field of Afro-American studies need not depend on
Black scholars alone, nor should it. It is desirable, furthermore, that Blacks,
like other academics, should choose their fields of study on the basis of personal
interest and intellectual commitment, not of race. It is nevertheless
natural to assume that consequential gains in our knowledge of Afro-
American life, history, and culture depend in large part on the presence of
significant numbers of Black scholars in the humanities and social sciences.
The prospect of declining numbers of Black scholars thus portends more
serious problems for the field than small class enrollments do.
Given the still uncertain status of Afro-American studies departments
and programs throughout the country,probably the best institutional support
for the development and extension of the field of study will come from one or
two centers or institutes of advanced study devoted to the subject. It seems to