Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

74 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
me that the movement to make academically legitimate the study of a wide
range of issues and questions having to do with the Black experience in America
has been the most valuable outcome of the struggles during the last decade.
Afro-American studies will achieve greater impact and influence the more it is
permittedtoresonateintheconventionaldisciplines.Standardofferingsinhistory,
American literature, economics, political science, and so on should be informed
and enriched by scholarship in Afro-American studies.
Notes
1 Archibald MacLeish, The Next Harvard, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1941.
2 Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1963.
3 C. H. Arce, “Historical, Institutional, and Contextual Determinants of Black
Enrollment,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan,
1976. Cited in Gail E. Thomas, ed., Black Students in Higher Education:
Conditions and Experiences in the 1970s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1981, pp. 21–23 and passim.
4 Ibid., p. 21; cites 1978 Census Bureau data.
5 James A. Perkins, The University in Transition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1966. The book is composed of lectures delivered at Princeton
in 1965.
6 A provocative recent discussion of the plight of the humanities is Walter Jackson
Bates, “Crisis of English Studies,” Harvard Magazine LXXXV (September/October
1982), pp. 46–53.
7 Perkins, op. cit., p. 22.
8 The assumption was (and is) by no means restricted to predominantly White
institutions. If anything, southern Black schools have been more insistent
on the centrality of the classical and Renaissance tradition of humane letters
than northern White schools.
9 Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Washington,
DC: U.S. Department of Labor, Government Printing Office, 1965.
10 The significance to Blacks of these killings cannot be overstated. In subsequent
years, Black students bitterly compared the great public outcry at the
killing of White students at Kent State to the apparent White indifference
to the killing of Blacks at Orangeburg.