TY - JOUR
T1 - The patronage dilemma
T2 - Allison Davis's Odyssey from Fellow to faculty
AU - Masghati, E.
N1 - Funding Information:
Warner helped secure funding for the Natchez research from the Harvard Business School, but Davis still counted on indirect support from the Rosenwald Fund to make his field research in Natchez possible. When Davis and his wife assimilated into the Black community in Natchez, they found themselves “role-bound” as respectable, upper-class community members, which kept them from accessing lower-class Black informants.42 The Rosenwald Fund sponsored Davis’sformer student at Hampton, J. G. St. Clair Drake, one of the ringleaders of the Hampton student protests, to serve as a research assistant for the project. Unlike Davis, Drake was a dark-skinned man with a poor, rural upbringing, and he was dubbed by Embree as “not a top man.”43 Davis recognized Drake’s immense potential and used his favored position to extend the umbrella of fund support, despite Embree’s reservations. Recommending new fellows was a major way that Rosenwald Fellows like Davis were able to shape the direction of the fellowship program. By the mid-1930s, former fellows served as an essential resource for identifying new talent worth supporting, interviewed candidates, and at times even served on the fellowship committee.
Funding Information:
In 1931, Davis returned to Harvard to study anthropology with fellowship support from the SSRC, indirectly financed by the Rosenwald Fund. Two years earlier, around the time that Embree established the fellowship program, the Rosenwald Fund also granted $50,000 to the Rockefeller-backed SSRC to support a new fellowship program targeting southern graduate students in the social sciences. The fund intended the fellowships to “attract a higher quality of scientifically
Funding Information:
his first monographs, and ultimately his faculty appointment—were made possible by the financial support of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. As with all foundations, the Rosenwald Fund’s ideological agenda guided its grant-making decisions, which, at times, stood in tension with Davis’s research program. This article highlights Davis’s experiences negotiating fund patronage and examines the ways in which the Rosenwald Fund’s support shaped Davis’s career. In so doing, I establish how presumptions of racial inferiority inflected Rosenwald Fund tutelage and demonstrate the extent to which the abstract principles of meritocracy, expertise, and academic freedom remained secondary concerns for those interested in cultivating African American intellectuals.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2020 History of Education Society
PY - 2020/11/1
Y1 - 2020/11/1
N2 - This article analyzes the role of the Julius Rosenwald Fund in shaping the career of W. Allison Davis, a distinguished anthropologist who became the first African American appointed to the faculty of a mostly white university. From 1928 to 1948, the Rosenwald Fund ran an expansive fellowship program for African American intellectuals, which, despite its significance, remains largely unexamined in the scholarly literature. Davis tied his academic aspirations to Rosenwald Fund support, including for his early research and the terms of his faculty appointment. His experiences illustrate the dynamics inclusion and exclusion of African Americans in the academy; paternalistic promotion and strategic denial functioned as two sides of the same coin. Spotlighting Davis's negotiations, this article establishes how presumptions of racial inferiority guided Rosenwald patronage and demonstrates the extent to which the principles of meritocracy and expertise remained secondary concerns for those interested in cultivating African American intellectuals.
AB - This article analyzes the role of the Julius Rosenwald Fund in shaping the career of W. Allison Davis, a distinguished anthropologist who became the first African American appointed to the faculty of a mostly white university. From 1928 to 1948, the Rosenwald Fund ran an expansive fellowship program for African American intellectuals, which, despite its significance, remains largely unexamined in the scholarly literature. Davis tied his academic aspirations to Rosenwald Fund support, including for his early research and the terms of his faculty appointment. His experiences illustrate the dynamics inclusion and exclusion of African Americans in the academy; paternalistic promotion and strategic denial functioned as two sides of the same coin. Spotlighting Davis's negotiations, this article establishes how presumptions of racial inferiority guided Rosenwald patronage and demonstrates the extent to which the principles of meritocracy and expertise remained secondary concerns for those interested in cultivating African American intellectuals.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096458392&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1017/heq.2020.58
DO - 10.1017/heq.2020.58
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85096458392
SN - 0018-2680
VL - 60
SP - 581
EP - 610
JO - History of Education Quarterly
JF - History of Education Quarterly
IS - 4
ER -