From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline

5 The Ford Foundation’s Mission in Black Studies

A new academic program requires hundreds of thousands of dollars for faculty salaries, staff, office space, and equipment. Because an academic program has significant financial needs, university administrators can deliberate for years as they weigh a proposal’s intellectual merits and develop new budgets. Black studies’ sudden appearance during the 1968–1969 school year took college administrators by surprise. There simply had been no time to properly budget a new program. University administrators and black studies advocates turned to their allies in the nonprofit sector for financial assistance when confronted with unanticipated financial needs. In response to urgent requests and a desire to promote racial equality in the university, the Ford Foundation awarded millions of dollars to universities for black studies departments and programs. From 1970 to 1978, the Ford Foundation gave more than $10 million (in 2005 dollars) to universities and other organizations active in the black studies field. The foundation supported academic programs, journal publications, and conferences. It engaged in a second wave of black studies grant-making in the mid-1980s, which continues to the present. The foundation’s reputation as one of black studies’ most generous and steadfast patrons stems from its continuing support of the field. This chapter addresses unanswered historical and sociological questions about the Ford Foundation’s sponsorship of black studies programs. For example , what was the Ford Foundation’s purpose in supporting black studies? How did support for black studies emerge from the philanthropy’s prior comc h a p t e r f i v e The Ford Foundation’s Mission in Black Studies mitments? From a sociological perspective, one might ask how a group outside the university contributed to the stabilization and growth of a social movement ’s outcome. One of this chapter’s arguments is that black studies grants were viewed as a natural extension of earlier work in higher education and civil rights. Inside the foundation, black studies programs were viewed as a tool for integrating American universities because these units brought white and black students together. Black studies programs were often framed by foundation officers as an early form of multicultural education, which institutionalized nonwhite culture for the benefit of mainstream American society. This position brought the foundation into conflict with cultural nationalists, who viewed black studies as an institution created for the benefit of the black community. A second historical point is that foundation grant-making shifted from supporting civil rights to supporting the development of a discipline’s research infrastructure. When the philanthropy gave to black studies programs in the 1960s, foundation officers were responding to the civil rights movement and cultural nationalists. The philanthropy wanted to promote racial integration by sponsoring black studies units in predominantly white research universities. By the late 1980s and 1990s, the foundation adopted a different stance. Instead of responding to external political events,foundation officers focused on developing black studies’ capacity for knowledge production. Black studies professors and their colleagues in the nonprofit sector viewed black studies as having moved beyond an initial conflict stage. Black studies programs needed to be seenastheintellectualequalsof otherinterdisciplinaryprograms,suchasAmerican studies. This chapter argues that foundation actions after the mid-1980s were less motivated by movement politics than by black studies’ institutional development. As the field matured and took its place among the disciplines, black studies supporters in the nonprofit sector thought that it urgently needed a reputation as the center of highly visible research on the African diaspora. The shift from an engagement with black politics to a concern with disciplinary maturity motivates this chapter’s sociological argument. By insisting that black studies adopt an integrationist stance and acquire legitimacy through research , the Ford Foundation tried to enforce the social order found within the American university system, where individuals and entire organizations are judged by their ability to advance knowledge. In the terminology of organizational scholar W. Richard Scott, the Ford Foundation acted as an “institutional carrier,” an organization or other agent that enforces rules in other organizaThe Ford Foundation’s Mission in Black Studies 131 tions.¹ The point made by Scott and other sociologists is that higher education, like any industry, has its own ideologies, practices, and rules that align universities with the broader society.This view suggests that emergent disciplines will find a place in academe only if they can show compliance with the cultural imperative to...