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The Ford Foundation and African Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Extract

Like any respectable modern organization, the Ford Foundation has computer printouts showing in fat volumes of lists and tables what it has done. Some of these compilations trace the record from the beginning of the Foundation’s national and international programs in 1950. An international interest was there from the start, because the study group that in the late forties advised the Foundation’s trustees on what they ought to do successfully urged that they should devote major attention to world problems of peace and international understanding. The first specific attention to Africa south of the Sahara came in 1954 with a half-dozen grants and a series of what were then called “foreign study and research fellowships.” Fellowships for Asian and Near Eastern studies had started earlier, in 1952, and some of them went to young scholars working on the Maghreb, Egypt, and places down as far as Sudan and Ethiopia.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1976 

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References

NOTES

1. There were a total of fifty-eight advanced research awards to U.S.

2. Richard D. Lambert, Language and Area Studies Review, Philadelphia, 1973, p. 109. The political scientists dominate the African social scientist group more than any area except Southeast Asia in his study. The record for economists (55) is about average among the world areas.

3. UCLA is a mixed case which was funded in both ways.

4. These grants ranged in amount from $60,000 to $900,000 and generally followed priorities stated by the universities receiving them. An analysis subsequently showed that only some $330,000 were clearly assigned for African studies, but there were substantial funds for libraries, graduate fellowships, and other purposes which were not allocated by region.