Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine

Table of Contents

  ix     A Cultured Education    A Student of Philosophy    Ambition Constrained    The Sociology of Knowledge    Social Change and World War II    The Ambiguity of Success    Social Philosophy and Civil Rights    Conservative Pan-Africanism  viii    White Racism and Black Power                     I   of  the American Academy of Arts and Sciences commissioned me to write an essay about philosophy in the United States after World War II and about the way the university system housed this scholarly discipline. The academy did not want a study of great American thinkers in philosophy but an appraisal of how the field served undergraduates and of what connection the area of inquiry had to other subjects and to the outside world. In working on the project, whenever I traveled, I went to university libraries to explore the records institutions might have kept. I was interested in student enrollments, courses taught, interdisciplinary cooperation, and other peculiar aspects of campus life. The pickings were slim. In many cases schools do not keep files from academic departments at all. In other instances relevant documents show up in the collections of deans and provosts and presidents. Where records survive, they look erratic—material for one span of years gets saved, while for another span everything disappears. Sometimes librarians have saved enormous quantities of the personal papers of individual philosophers, and sometimes the material in them pertains to the practices of the discipline at a given time. Sometimes, however, someone seems to have performed triage on these collections of philosophers, or pertinent material does not get preserved. I could never predict what I would find, and I never stumbled on extensive information applicable to my topic. For well over a year, I neglected to search at my own school, the University of Pennsylvania. I had gone to Penn in the early s as an undergraduate philosophy major, and I supposed that I knew the place well. In late December , nonetheless, I decided to visit the University Archives, located in the bowels of Penn’s football stadium, Franklin Field. The existing records paralleled those at other colleges. I located some departmental information in the cartons of mail, publications, typescripts, and lecture notes of long-dead professors of philosophy. Penn had no documentation for some x  stretches of time, but the staff did come across a substantial amount of material from the period when I studied there. In addition, the archivist asked me if I wanted to see the personal manuscripts of William Fontaine, a black man who had taught in Penn’s Philosophy Department for some twenty years. Fontaine had lectured to me. I had vaguely positive memories of his classes, but I could barely recall him or them. It was the mid-afternoon of a gray day shortly before Christmas, and I wanted to get home. Yet I knew in the end I would have to examine everything in the Penn depository, and I was told the Fontaine papers were limited . I would check them. In fact the collection was minute: two pieces of African sculpture, a plaque for a teaching award, and one small box of correspondence . Most of the paper documents consisted of notes for a book Fontaine published late in his life, written on the backs of envelopes and old exams. The box also held a quarter-inch thick file comprising mostly what I call ‘‘flimsies,’’ onionskin duplicates of standard forms noting Fontaine’s yearly appointment status and salary. A miscellany of mail about departmental affairs made up what remained. I flipped through these messages, and my eye caught one that had printed in a bold hand in the top right-hand corner KUKLICK. Over forty years before Fontaine had recommended me to graduate school. I had no recollection that I had known him well enough even to ask for a reference or that I had even applied to the school to which he had directed the letter. The mere existence of the recommendation stunned me far out of proportion to the importance of the words of praise. I could hardly look at the carbon copy. I walked out of the small reading room and asked the assistant archivist if she would get the page with my name on it, photocopy it, and put it in an envelope. I walked home with the envelope, mind spinning, and had my wife look at the piece of paper before I was willing to scrutinize it myself. I am not a...