Historically, education has often varied by curriculum, access, and stature based on location, race, gender, economic status, religion, and time period. In addition, many educational institutions and much scholarly research have been significantly impacted by private foundation support. This essay discusses the politics of knowledge as it relates to gender and race as well as the impact of philanthropy on the production of knowledge with these groups. While many aspects of these themes have changed in the past sixty years, many of them remain highly contested.
The three previous History of Education Quarterly articles that provide the starting point for this discussion—written in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s—reflect on how issues of race, gender, and philanthropy determined who had access to higher education throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote 1 In addition, these works explore who is allowed to produce knowledge as scholars and work as faculty in American higher education. The articles by James Anderson and Mary Ann Dzuback discuss the history of blacks and women in scholarship and employment in predominately white American higher education institutions. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann discusses the role of philanthropy and foundation support in the shaping of academic disciplines, scholars, and institutions. Anderson's research also provides significant evidence of philanthropy's role in shaping curriculum and black institutions of higher education. Extending the work of these scholars, this essay highlights historical intersections of race, gender, and philanthropy in the shaping of academic employment and scholarship.
With rare exceptions, women of all races and blacks, regardless of gender identity, were overwhelmingly hired as faculty in institutions specific to their identity. As students, and later as faculty after they began to gain entrance into these institutions, they were taught a male Eurocentric curriculum. In the 1960s, however, the explosion of student activism due to the Civil Rights Movement, opposition to the Vietnam War, and the subsequent women's movement, forced the inclusion of women, people of color, and working-class people as well as the demand for more women and faculty of color.
From the earliest beginnings of the modern American research university, scientific racism and sexism - infused scholarship. Charles Darwin's 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, ushered in the “scientific” study of racial superiority and inferiority, giving rise a half-century later to intelligence testing that “objectively” proved blacks and women had lower intelligence than white men and boys.Footnote 2 Reflecting ideas of social Darwinism current in this period, Dr. Edward H. Clarke, a medical doctor, published a book in 1873 entitled Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls.Footnote 3 Clarke's publication advertised that he was a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as a professor at Harvard College. He cautioned that women's education must be different from that of men, and he warned of the physical danger if this warning was not heeded. He wrote that women's physical makeup and stamina were so different from men's that higher education that mimicked that of men would result in race suicide, as it would lead to a significant reduction in women's ability to reproduce. Moreover, masculine higher education would erase women's femininity and “true womanhood.” Clarke's book was so influential that the first edition sold out within a week. For a decade and a half after its publication, the book went through sixteen editions.
It was against this backdrop, with their intellectual inferiority firmly established in American scholarship, that women and black people attempted to enter the academy in search of higher education. Women and African Americans were able to matriculate in predominately women's colleges and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) established for them, and only in rare instances did black students attend a predominately white institution.Footnote 4 Since intellectual pursuits were deemed a white male prerogative, and most women and black people were barred from many disciplines for the degree (told there was “no utility”), obtaining an advanced degree was initially hard earned.Footnote 5
Women, African Americans and the Doctorate
The first doctorate in the country was awarded at Yale in 1861, with the degree based on the German model of scientific research. During the 1870s, graduate studies expanded throughout the nation. Awarding doctorates to African Americans and women did not begin until this decade. Edward Bouchet earned a PhD in physics from Yale in 1876, becoming the first black person in the nation to earn a doctorate. Helen Magill, a white woman and Swarthmore alumna, earned a PhD in Greek from Boston University in 1877.Footnote 6
While African Americans and women of all races had difficulties penetrating the white male-dominated world of academia, African American men had access to institutions by virtue of their maleness that women did not. In contrast, white women frequently had access to institutions that were not available to African Americans because of racially exclusive admissions practices. By the end of the century, numerous graduate programs were opened to white women. As a result, white women quickly surpassed black doctoral recipients of any gender. While the number of white women doctorates grew, their employment opportunities were initially slim.
Historian Margaret Rossiter chronicled the difficulty the first generation of white women doctorates experienced. In her article “Doctorates for American Women, 1868–1907” she noted that graduate education and scholarly research were viewed as a “manly accomplishment” reserved for white men. Many white women (and black men) earned degrees in Europe since they were often made to enroll as “special students” in many graduate programs in the United States. Despite these obstacles, with the growth of women's colleges and the need to staff them, many barriers began to fall. Yale, Brown, Stanford, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Chicago started to admit women into their doctoral programs. Rossiter reported that while twenty-five white women had earned doctorates by 1890, within ten years, the number had grown to 204.Footnote 7
Doctorates for African American men and women came at a much slower rate. Only seven black men had earned a doctorate by 1900 and no black woman had earned such a degree. In the first decade of the twentieth century – only four more black men had earned the degree. In contrast, ninety-three white women earned doctorates in 1920 alone. By this year, twenty black men had earned doctorates since 1876. No black women earned such a degree until 1921.Footnote 8
Black students were at an academic disadvantage in qualifying for many graduate programs. High schools didn't exist in many areas in the South until after World War II, and most black colleges were still unaccredited and did not offer college-level courses.Footnote 9 Even W. E. B. Du Bois, when doing graduate studies at Harvard after earning his bachelor's from Fisk University in 1888, was required to earn a second bachelor's degree (which he did in 1890), since most of his Fisk courses were not accepted. He then studied at the University of Berlin beginning in 1891 and returned to Harvard, where he earned his doctorate in sociology in 1895, becoming the first black to earn a PhD from Harvard. Black women students were the most disadvantaged of all, since they were overwhelmingly in teacher training programs to fill much-needed teaching positions for black schools throughout the South. Not being in baccalaureate degree programs negatively impacted black women obtaining graduate degrees until the 1920s.
While academic preparation explains the absence of black doctorates in the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, racism was a factor as well. For example, when Percy Julian, a Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian of his graduating class at DePauw University in Indiana in chemistry in 1920 was awarded a fellowship to pursue a master's degree from Harvard. However, the award required the recipient to be a teaching assistant and eventually Harvard withdrew the award, noting white students would resent having a black instructor. Hence, this meant Julian could not earn a doctorate at Harvard. He sought to apply to other institutions and one of his professors at DePauw was advised to dissaude him: “Discourage your bright colored lad. We couldn't get him a job when he's done, and it'll only mean frustration. Why don't you find him a teaching job in a Negro college in the South? He doesn't need a Ph.D. for that.”Footnote 10
Julian was finally able to enroll at Harvard with the assistance of an Austin Fellowship. After earning a master's in chemistry from Harvard, Julian earned his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Vienna and became a renowned chemist. He spent a sizable part of his professional career teaching at Howard University (an HBCU), but was denied a tenure position from his alma mater, DePauw, because of race.Footnote 11
Black women applicants also confronted barriers in pursuing graduate studies. One gifted applicant, Leila Smith Green, applied in 1938 to pursue a doctorate in organic chemistry at Radcliffe College so she could work with prominent Harvard professors. Green was a Howard University graduate with an impressive academic record who had amassed scholarships from Howard to support her undergraduate education and graduate studies at Howard. She applied for a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund for support. As a part of the selection process, Rosenwald officials asked Will W. Alexander, a white Methodist minister in Atlanta and executive director of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation from 1919 to 1930, his opinion of Green's application. He responded that after personally interviewing her, he found her “mature and well-balanced”—more than her youth would have indicated. However, he commented, “The only question that remains is how much weight to attach to the testimony of her professors at Howard as to her preparation and ability for the work in chemistry which she proposes to undertake.”Footnote 12
The fact that Alexander would question the highly supportive references of Green's Howard's professors is galling. He was a minister and not a chemist. It was unclear if his skepticism of the positive reference for Green was because she was a black woman at an HBCU or because she was in the field of chemistry, or both. He further commented that although he couldn't attest to her technical training in chemistry (although her references addressed that), he said, “She has a good record at Howard and unless we give her a chance, she will not go to school next year.”Footnote 13
Green was awarded the fellowship and received rave reviews from her Harvard professors. They testified that she was the superior student that her Howard professors had indicated. After her first year, P. D. Bartlett from the Harvard chemistry department wrote in his report of Green: “Miss Green has shown herself to be a remarkably good student—in fact her midyear grade was the highest in the class.”Footnote 14 He said her work and ideas were original and he urged the Rosenwald Fund to continue their support of her for the next year. Another professor, William Ross, said of Green, “She has proved herself to be both capable and independent. Her research is quite good,” and he noted all of her professors had very high respect for her and he also recommended her continued financial support.Footnote 15 Finally, Louis Fieser, chair of the organic chemistry department, wrote: “Miss Green is a student of outstanding ability and has been doing work of the highest grade. . . . She seems to me to be highly deserving of continued support from the Rosenwald Fund.”Footnote 16
African American women suffered from both gender and racial discrimination. While the concept of intersectionality is thought to be a recent concept, in reality, it was first voiced by Sojourner Truth, black feminist and abolitionist. At the Woman's Rights Convention (white women's rights) in Akron, Ohio, in May 1851, after hearing a male speaker discuss genteel treatment of women, she famously gave her “Ain't I a Woman” speech.Footnote 17 In 1892, black educator Anna Julia Cooper wrote A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South. In this feminist text, she noted that the nation was facing a “woman's problem” and a race problem and black women were excluded from both. Despite the barriers that white women experienced in education, black women found themselves barred from admission to white women's colleges except in token numbers.Footnote 18
In 1921, three black women earned doctoral degrees, the first in the nation. Their profiles were similar to the earliest white women who earned these degrees—products of educated and privileged families. Eva Dykes earned a doctorate in English from Radcliffe College, Sadie Tanner Alexander earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and Georgiana Simpson earned a doctorate in Germanic languages from the University of Chicago. Only Dykes attended an HBCU—Howard—and as was customary, she had to earn a second baccalaureate degree.
The number of black women PhDs remained extremely low and it wasn't until the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rosenwald Fund began awarding graduate fellowships to African Americans to enhance the faculties of black colleges seeking to obtain accreditation that more black women were able to earn doctorates. While all black PhDs did not want to teach in black colleges in the South, the reality was that this was their only alternative other than teaching at the high school level. This is what happened to the afore-mentioned Edward Bouchet, who, despite his doctorate from Yale in physics, spent his entire career as a high school math and science teacher. However, unlike Bouchet, all three black women doctorates were instantly offered teaching positions from multiple HBCUs. Dykes and Simpson both taught at Howard University, but Alexander, the economist, never became an academic. Unable to obtain a position in her field, she went on to earn a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and became a law partner with her husband, Raymond Pace Alexander.Footnote 19
African American Scholars and Academic Exclusion from White Institutions
Anderson's essay describes the dilemmas that black PhDs faced in seeking employment outside of HBCUs. It was the prevailing view by white academics that this was the most logical place for black PhDs. For example, with the Rosenwald Fund and the General Education Board fellowship (through the Rockefeller Foundation) available throughout the 1930s and 1940s, black women students in white institutions were highly recommended by white professors even in the male-dominated fields of science and math, primarily because they believed these women could find jobs in HBCUs. For example, Beatrice Yvonne Black, a 1939 graduate of Smith College earned a master's degree in mathematics from Brown University. As she continued in the doctoral program, her dean at Brown, in a progress report to the Rosenwald Fund administrator, noted the dearth of black mathematicians. He indicated that, as an African American woman, she would be more marketable than a white woman “or even a white man,” which in 1941 was clearly not the case then or now.Footnote 20 Another one of her Brown professors echoed the dean's belief that Brown would be highly employable—more so than a white woman: “I am aware of the need for better preparation of the professors of mathematics in Negro colleges. Miss Black will find a position much more easily than would a white woman taking a PhD in mathematics, and she ought to be very useful.”Footnote 21
The reality was, no white women's colleges hired black women regardless of their academic talent. As Anderson noted in “Race, Meritocracy, and the American Academy,” there was an explosion of faculty growth throughout the country after World War II.Footnote 22 The postwar era also resulted in increased efforts to integrate white academic institutions. Felice Schwartz, a wealthy white graduate of Smith College, founded the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students (NSSFNS) in her hometown of New York in 1947 specifically to urge white colleges to admit black students.Footnote 23 While the campaign to have black faculty hired at white institutions of higher education was spearheaded by an official of the Rosenwald Fund, Schwartz's initiative was funded by a $10,000 grant from the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation.Footnote 24
Like Rosenwald administrator Fred Wale, Schwartz was alarmed that there were only six black women students out of a student body of two thousand at Smith. As a result, she wrote white colleges asking them if they had black students and if not, why not. The ones that responded stated they had never had black applicants. Schwartz then asked them if “qualified” Negro students applied, would they be considered. The yes responses resulted in her establishing NSSFNS. When she graduated from Smith in 1945, she returned to New York and, along with volunteers from the National Student Association, sent over 18,000 letters for black high schools and students in the South as well as high schools in the North informing them that if there were any “Negro” students interested in going to college to please contact her office.
Within two years, the organization had a paid staff, scholarship funding from three sources, and an impressive interracial advisory committee that included Jane Bolin, the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School and the first black woman admitted to the New York Bar and, by 1939, the first black woman judge in the United States. The advisory committee also included NAACP chair Channing Tobias, attorney Susan Brandeis (daughter of US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis), Frank H. Bowles of the College Entrance Examination Board, Time editor in chief Henry Luce, financial analyst Daniel Bernstein, and Lyle Spencer, head of Science Research Associates and an authority on educational tests and guidance programs.Footnote 25
The NSSFNS was highly successful. Its 1950 annual report noted the organization had counseled over 764 students. Of this number, 218 black students applied to nearly 200 colleges. Of this number 161 colleges accepted 197 black students. The organization received a major grant from the Ford Foundation in the early 1950s to recruit in the South. By the 1980s, the organization had shut its doors. After the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the introduction of the Equal Opportunity Program the same year as a result of the Higher Education Act of 1965.Footnote 26
Black Women and Intersectionality in Faculty Employment
Dzuback's article overlaps with Anderson's in their discussion of faculty openings for black and white women faculty. Just like HBCUs were the lifeline to academic employment for black scholars, the growth of single-sex women's colleges was the same for white women. While white institutions overwhelmingly barred blacks from faculty positions (as well as barring black women admission to their institutions), coeducational institutions were the most difficult places for white women to find employment. Between the end of the Civil War and 1890, prior to the need for advanced degrees, white women became 13 percent of coeducational faculties and 72 percent of women college faculties. However, this data was not sustained into the twentieth century once PhDs were required. Historian Patricia Albjerg Graham notes that faculty opportunities for highly educated women were greater in the late nineteenth century than by the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 27 While women made up 36 percent of the faculty in 1880, a century later, they were only 24 percent. Graham notes that the normal schools that employed large numbers of women in the 1800s had transformed into state colleges and later state universities offering courses far beyond teacher education.Footnote 28 This impacted the number of women on the faculties of such institutions.
Rossiter's important work on the history of women in science was pioneering in not only highlighting the many women in academia who studied and obtained degrees in various aspects of science and math, but the difficulties they experienced obtaining faculty positions in fields other than home economics. She noted that while that field was devalued in academe by male academics (because it was believed it had no intellectual value and was comprised of more than 90 percent women), it was full of women who were scientists and economists but who couldn't obtain faculty positions in their academic fields. In addition, being married to men who were scientists and/or faculty, blocked them from employment in many institutions due to antinepotism laws (something that impacted women academics regardless of discipline).Footnote 29
White women graduate students often received the same advice from their male advisors as black women, but for different career paths. While black women were expected and groomed to teach at HBCUs, Dzuback notes that white women graduate students were rarely recommended for faculty positions that were not in a women's college.Footnote 30 Dzuback states, “The women's colleges were for women critical entry points to academic life.”Footnote 31 The hiring of women faculty at top women's colleges set them apart from the public and other institutions that omitted them.
Starting in the 1920s, the opportunity to teach at leading women's colleges resulted in white women scholars excelling in growing social science research and departments. Fields such as sociology, economics, history, and political science grew and were critical in discussing the economic and social issues of the era. Dzuback notes the difference in opportunities for women faculty based on the type of institution and whether it had a male president. Wellesley College, called the “female Harvard,” was mandated by charter to have a woman president and an all-women faculty. In a study of the institution, historian Patricia Palmieri notes that senior women faculty were “dominant, assertive and highly achievement-oriented.”Footnote 32 Vassar built a distinguished history department. Barnard College, the sister college to Columbia, relied on the institution's male faculty until Barnard's dean, Emily Putnam, agreed with Columbia president Seth Low to switch hiring of two professors in Columbia's School of Political Science in exchange for hiring separate professors for Barnard students. As a result, the percentage of women faculty increased at Barnard from 21 percent in 1900 to 61 percent by 1940.Footnote 33 Mount Holyoke hired women scholars who were committed to research to build strong social science departments. Although Bryn Mawr's president M. Carey Thomas hired male faculty who established economics and history departments, Dzuback notes these men hired women faculty members and the institution established a graduate department of social economy and social research that awarded master's and doctoral degrees.
White women scholars in the leading women's colleges were able to “advance knowledge” by being able to teach and conduct research in their fields, have regular sabbaticals, travel to conferences, and expand library collections to reflect the women's areas of study. They were also able to hire a critical mass of women faculty at their colleges as well as be mentors to one another and to women students.
These advantages were beyond the reach of black women scholars. Most of the leading women's colleges either did not admit black women or did so only on a token basis.Footnote 34 Hence, the thought of a black woman gaining a faculty position at one of these institutions was beyond reality at this time. Anderson's essay notes the growing number of black women scholars, who were in the social sciences that were booming at these women's colleges as well as in the sciences and other disciplines. As noted earlier, the first black women did not earn a doctorate until 1921. Over a twenty-year period, the Rosenwald Fund awarded 523 fellowships to black Americans; slightly more than a third (193) went to women.Footnote 35
Many stellar black women scholars with doctorates were available by the early 1940s. These included Merze Tate, the first black woman to graduate from Oxford who also held a PhD from Radcliffe in politics and international affairs; Adelaide Hill, a Smith College graduate with degrees from University of Pennsylvania and Radcliffe; Estella Scott and Bonita Valien, who both had doctorates in sociology, from the University of Pennsylvania and University of Wisconsin, respectively; Mamie Clark, who had a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University; and Mabel Murphy Smythe-Haith, with a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin. There were many others.Footnote 36
Of the 381 blacks who possessed doctorates by 1946, only forty-five were women.Footnote 37 Unlike white women scholars who often had difficulty obtaining faculty positions on coeducational campuses unless they were in a perceived female-dominated discipline such as home economics, black colleges in all disciplines readily hired African American women. Even the all-male Morehouse College employed black women professors.Footnote 38
The efforts to gain faculty positions for black scholars coincided with the Truman Report of 1947, Higher Education for American Democracy. The report called for an end to racial, economic, religious, gender, and geographical barriers.Footnote 39 Despite this important report, which strongly urged increased diversity in American higher education, it had little impact. Anderson reported that anthropologist Allison Davis, who was appointed as a full-time faculty member as a professor of education at the University of Chicago in 1941, was the first full-time black faculty member in the nation.Footnote 40 Shortly afterward, in 1942, psychologist Kenneth Clark became the first full-time tenured black faculty member at City College of New York. He was followed by Marion Cuthbert in 1944, who was appointed the first black tenured professor at Brooklyn College. Cuthbert had a doctorate from Teacher's College, taught in the sociology and anthropology departments, and counseled students in the personnel department at Brooklyn College. Mary Huff Diggs became the first black tenured full professor at Hunter College. Finally, John Hope Franklin, who earned a doctorate in history from Harvard, was appointed professor and chair of the history department at Brooklyn College in 1956, becoming the first black department chair in the state of New York. Franklin's appointment was viewed as so significant as a major racial breakthrough that it was announced on the front page of the New York Times.Footnote 41 This appointment, coming two years after Brown v. Board of Education outlawed school segregation, provided significant optimism on racial progress. With these historic appointments, the New York colleges were in the vanguard of appointing both black men and women to their faculties during the 1940s and 1950s.
While most of black women scholars taught in HBCUs, their gender meant lower salaries and being stuck in lower ranked faculty positions. During the 1950s, women faculty at Howard confronted the administration regarding discrimination in salary, promotions, and other appointments.Footnote 42 The black women's faculty at Howard reflected a who's who of the top black women scholars of their era. While most black colleges were primarily of high school grade, by 1925 Howard enrolled over two thousand college-level students with more than 150 professors. It was the preeminent black university that boasted ten schools and colleges (including medicine, dental, pharmacy, divinity, law, and social work) that became fully accredited during the presidency of the first black president, Mordecai W. Johnson (1926–1960).Footnote 43 Hence, an appointment to the faculty at Howard provided high status although often not high pay.
Race, Gender, and Philanthropy
Anderson's and Lagemann's essays emphasized the role of philanthropy in shaping the growth of institutions, the curriculum, and educational and public policy. In addition, as Lagemann notes in her example of the Carnegie Corporation, it was established to provide funding to shape and build certain fields and scholars’ careers. With the growth of black colleges and universities after the turn of the twentieth century (except for the thirteen black land-grant state colleges funded through the Second Morrill Act of 1890), black private institutions depending heavily on support from private donors, organizations, and, later, foundations. Anderson's work demonstrates the virtual monopoly that northern philanthropists and foundations held over the early development of black education in the South. They were concerned with training a nonpolitical black workforce steeped in industrial education and home economics that would serve and not disrupt the economic and racial social order. White northern foundations worked in tandem with white southern school authorities, and groups like the General Education Board funded by John D. Rockefeller, the Southern Education Board, the Anna T. Jeanes Foundation, and the Rosenwald Fund shaped the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial education that the funders viewed as the most appropriate for rural southern black people.
Andrew Carnegie, who Lagemann discusses in depth, was a major donor to the black industrial education effort and provided the Tuskegee Institute, an industrial school, its first large endowment.Footnote 44 Lagemann notes which fields of knowledge the foundation invested in and developed and which approaches to these fields would be most authoritative and have the most impact on public policy. The Corporation was very interested in the field of sociology, as well as in establishing standards of intellectual rigor.
Lagemann's study of Carnegie is an outstanding example of the influence such an institution had on the “politics of knowledge” and the racial and gender effect of such funding. The Carnegie Corporation provided funds to institutions and individuals to “advance knowledge” in public policy as a response to “technological developments, political movements, ideas, and groups of people.”Footnote 45 Carnegie had already given away $180 million prior to establishing the corporation, primarily to found public libraries throughout the world. However, he provided a major gift to Tuskegee and was a staunch advocate of industrial education for blacks in the South.Footnote 46 The formation of the Carnegie Corporation paralleled the growth of black colleges in the South.
No better example of Carnegie's philanthropy and the politics of knowledge is the case of W. E. B. Du Bois. Aldon Morris's recent study of Du Bois's years on the faculty of Atlanta University, a private liberal arts college established by the American Missionary Association, chronicles his struggle to secure funding for his research and the department of sociology that he established.Footnote 47 The years he served on the faculty (1898–1910) reflect vividly how the “politics of knowledge” impacted a black scholar and institution. Du Bois graduated from Fisk University, a liberal arts college in Nashville, Tennessee, also founded by the American Missionary Association, studied in Berlin for two years, and earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 1895, becoming the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. Despite Du Bois's outstanding educational background, including his two years in Germany, the only teaching positions he could obtain were at black colleges. On his inability to find a teaching position outside of a black college, he recalled, “White classmates of lower academic rank than I, became full professors at Pennsylvania and Chicago.”Footnote 48
Morris's study of Du Bois's academic life provides a detailed portrait of the politics of knowledge. Du Bois was offered a professorship of history and economics at Atlanta University in 1897. Two years later, he published a sociological study on black Philadelphia, entitled The Philadelphia Negro. Du Bois's arrival at Atlanta University resulted in him establishing one of the first sociology departments in the nation. The Atlanta University sociology department had a strong research component that focused on the sociological and economic factors of racial inequities.Footnote 49
During the twelve years that Du Bois was at Atlanta University his team of researchers produced scholarship on the scientific study of race, and he edited and published fourteen studies that his research teams produced.Footnote 50 Just as Hampton University and the Tuskegee Institute sponsored annual conferences focused on industrial education and rural education, such as farming and domestic work, Atlanta University also held annual conferences, but they focused on urban black life and issues. And while the well-funded programs at Hampton and Tuskegee stressed helping the “crude and primitive” formerly enslaved Africans become civilized, Du Bois's conferences stressed scholarly research and developed social scientists who collected data that challenged the overwhelming view that blacks were intellectually and cultural inferior to whites.
In addition, Du Bois and his researchers demonstrated that blacks suffered from white racism and ignorance. While such views would seem noncontroversial today to most reasonable scholars, this claim was considered radical at the time. In addition to Dubois’ scholarship, he was also an outspoken activist for racial justice. In 1905, he was founding member of the Niagara Movement, a Civil Rights organization that was the predecessor of the NAACP.Du Bois's scholarship repeatedly challenged that of the prevailing white scholars of his day, which was indeed political in an era where one's scholarship and institutional support depended upon white philanthropists. The first black person to be invited to present a paper at the American Historical Association (AHA), in 1909, he spoke on black Reconstruction. His analysis of Reconstruction caused a controversy when he challenged the scholarship of well-known historians from Columbia University who attributed the failure of Reconstruction to incompetent black men. Du Bois pointed out during the brief period of Reconstruction that blacks held power, established the public school system, and a system of democracy. He argued that the failure of Reconstruction was the result of the federal government not distributing land to the formerly enslaved Africans and poor management of the Freedmen's Bureau.Footnote 51 Taken aback, the AHA didn't invite another black scholar to present until 1940.
As this example from Du Bois shows, scholarship and knowledge were indeed political as well as steeped in racist (and also sexist) assumptions. Foundations like Carnegie were not interested in Du Bois's scholarly research, even as it noted it was mandated to “advance knowledge,” especially in the social sciences and public policy. Carnegie was the major funder for important academic organizations such as the National Research Council and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Du Bois's research and activism were viewed as so extreme to funders that Atlanta University became unable to attract funding. Du Bois's outspokenness and scholarship challenging the racial norms of his era jeopardized not only his research but also the institution's survival. Realizing this was indeed the age of Booker T. Washington, who controlled which institutions received funding from northern industrial philanthropists, including Carnegie, in 1910, Du Bois left Atlanta University to become editor of Crisis Magazine, the journal of the NAACP. Du Bois was essentially driven out of academia.Footnote 52
Nothing contributed to the concept of the politics of knowledge more than the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the push to enroll more black and Latinx students in predominately white institutions. The increased numbers of students of color on these campuses after the late 1960s resulted in their demands for more faculty of color, ethnic studies departments, and culturally relevant research. Studies on the black student protest movement on white college campuses explain the impact of these movements on enhancing the number of black and Latinx faculty, ethnic studies, cultural centers, and increased enrollment of students of color.Footnote 53 Women and gender studies programs and departments emerged to address the absence of women from the curriculum.Footnote 54 The politics of race and gender continue to intersect. Black women's and Latina studies have emerged within the fields of women's, Africana, and Latinx studies.Footnote 55 The fields of queer, gay, and sexuality studies have also expanded within the academy as well. All of these expanded fields within the academy have not gone uncontested.
In 1993, The New York Times published a lengthy article on the changing college curriculum and the politics of knowledge. Noting the “battle” over the Western canon, the article stated institutions were expanding their curriculums to “support a broader, multicultural base rich in the voices of women, minorities and foreign cultures.”Footnote 56 The curriculum is constantly being revised to respond not only to the new voices on campus but to the changing economy and needs of society.
White women scholars and black scholars, regardless of their gender identity, had to confront barriers because of their gender and race. While white women found a refuge in women's colleges, they were the lucky few, since coeducational institutions significantly outnumber women's colleges. For black scholars, until the 1940s and in small numbers, their only option was teaching at a black college. Black women scholars had to confront the dual challenge of equal treatment at HBCUs, even though they played a significant role in educating black students. And they were barred from the opportunities of their era to serve on the faculties of white women's colleges.
The fight for ideas antithetical to the racist and sexist scholarship of major white institutions and the lack of funding by foundations such as Carnegie is best summed up in a comment that DuBois made about the historian Carter G. Woodson upon the latter's death—a comment that to some degree also applied to DuBois himself:
No white university ever recognized his work; no white scientific society ever honored him. Perhaps this was his greatest award.Footnote 57
