Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 77
34 Wesleyan appointed a new chairman/director in 1981: Robert O’Meally, a fine
scholar with strong academic interests. He plans to establish a strong program
with interdepartmental cooperation. The center remains quasiindependent,
however, and it has withstood, because of student loyalty,
past attempts at reform.
35 The Afro-American Studies program at UCLA, for instance, is a quasi-institute.
It offers no instructional courses but provides means for research for
graduate students and postdoctoral scholars.
36 My information about IBW comes from the pamphlet “About the Institute of
the Black World” and from manuscript reports, copies of which are in my
possession.
37 National Council for Black Studies, Black Studies Core Curriculum, Bloomington,
IN: National Council for Black Studies, 1982, pp. 4–7.
38 Undergraduates also report considerable parental pressure to follow courses of
study with a “payoff.” Black students, often able to attend college only as a
result of great sacrifice by their parents, are especially susceptible to
parental pressure to make their education “practical.”
39 Blassingame, op. cit., “Black Studies, an Intellectual Crisis,” pp. 149–168. See
also his “Model of an AfroAmerican Studies Program,” ibid., pp. 229–239.
40 In the winter of 1984, the dean of the faculty at the University of California at
Riverside recommended the disestablishment of the Black Studies department,
Chicano studies) as well as some other small departments. The justification
was both economic and academic. UC Riverside has been an
economically marginal unit of the UC system. It is as yet unclear whether
the recommendation to disestablish will be approved.
41 Cleveland State University requires, for the A.B., four semester courses in Afro-
American studies. The courses are well attended and the students (White
and Black) seem to accept the requirement without undue complaint.
42 By this I mean enrollment for academic rather than political reasons. In the
mid-seventies, many Black students took courses to “support the program,”
voting with their feet, as it were. That phase is past.
43 The claim is made by White conservatives at Harvard despite the fact that all
Black students fall well within the range of all those admitted to the college.
44 Community action programs and all such practical work are not much valued
by traditional academics, who tend to regard them as activities of questionable
merit for undergraduate training. On this question of community
work and Black Studies, see Kenneth B. Clark, “A Charade of Power,” Antioch
Review XXIX (Summer 1969), pp. 145–148, and Stephen Lythcott’s rejoinder,
ibid., pp. 149–154.