Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine

Chapter Six: The Ambiguity of Success

  The Ambiguity of Success Storming the Citadel T -  at the University of Pennsylvania held momentous long-term prospects should Fontaine thrive. When African American scholars taught at the college level at all, they had careers at black institutions, all of which were economically constrained. The white scholar now rarely taught at them and left when he could. Howard University and its tradition of African American research epitomized the desires of most blacks. Academics at Howard (and Fisk and Atlanta) found it impossible to move into any other major research university—white segregated schools— where a few, by dint of perseverance, had gotten graduate degrees. Nonetheless , the atypical white institution of any sort that invited a black scholar to teach received an acceptance with alacrity. A survey of – related that no black professor held a permanent appointment in all of white academia. A  study had six African American doctorates at white schools, one apparently with a lifetime appointment. By the end of  the magazine Ebony reported some sixty African American teachers at nonblack schools, and even if we suspect this number, the postwar period was opening up white institutions. A much later and perhaps more reliable survey took appointment at ‘‘flagship’’ state universities as a criterion. This study showed that African Americans did not appear on many of these faculties, even in minimal numbers, until the s. So change occurred very slowly. Most black teachers in white schools had modest instructorships at peripheral schools clustered in Chicago and New York City. But by the late Ambiguity of Success  s, Cornell employed a black musicologist, and Columbia a microbiologist . Some older scholars were spending their last active years out of the segregated world. The sociologist Allison Davis received a full-time appointment at the University of Chicago in . Chicago, which led in breaking down the color line, proudly proclaims him the first African American to have had such a position in a white institution. But administrators relegated Davis to the Department of Education, a program peripheral to the traditional arts and sciences, and only a grant of money from the Julius Rosenwald Fund made his job initially possible. Chicago tested other black men differently : the university did not permit the recently appointed Abram Harris to teach graduate students in his field of economics.1 Philosophers were most unusual. The single prominent one, Alain Locke, taught most of his life at Howard but by the late s lectured at the New School for Social Research in New York City. From the time Locke received his doctorate in  until the late s, ten black men had gotten the advanced degree in philosophy. No blacks taught the subject in the Ivy League.2 Moreover, for the fifty years after World War I, the discipline of philosophy occupied a central role in the collegiate system. The philosophers adapted a conception of the thinker in higher education from nineteenthcentury Germany. They perceived themselves as the bearers of the tradition of Western thought that began with the Greeks, progressed through the medieval period, and reached a pinnacle in modern philosophy: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz; Locke, Berkeley, and Hume; Kant; Hegel, and those who followed. The men in this pantheon had reasoned about the human niche in the universe and presented the accumulated insights to an educated elite. Now philosophers in American higher education carried this elevated enterprise upward and forwarded the foundational values of the West. Essential to the growth of moral integrity, philosophy represented the best way for (usually male) undergraduates to understand human beings in the cosmos, but the field also offered conceptual assistance to the natural and social sciences . Finally, the philosopher had a prudent social function, tendering aids to reflection about the soul’s anxieties but warning against untoward political expression. Fontaine believed deeply in this conception. His peers in philosophy often delivered on it at the undergraduate level, where students would take a range of courses in the history of Western thought, and in selected areas of expertise such as logic, ethics, metaphysics, and the theory of knowledge.    But the constricted nature of graduate training displayed the self-serving and interested nature of philosophers’ conceptions of their studies. Their cramped professionalism contrasted with the claims of wide-ranging genius and social insight. We can see these limitations by focusing on the cultural context in which professional philosophy existed in the United States in the period from the s to the s...