The national survey of African studies faculty conducted in the fall of 2002 has produced a wide range of findings about how faculty view African studies. We asked faculty members for their views on area studies and African studies at their own institutions, their recruitment and training in African studies, their teaching of African studies and study of African languages, study-abroad programs and training for the next generation of African studies scholars, their own careers, interactions with the U.S. government, and much more. Because we took great care to construct a sample frame that broadly replicates African studies programs in the United States, we feel confident that our findings mirror attitudes held by the entire African studies population. Because our survey was large enough, we are able to tease out different attitudes and orientations toward African studies from many different populations: by type of program, size of program, scholarly discipline, faculty rank, race/ethnicity, gender, and numerous other characteristics.

Almost as long as African studies has been a recognized intellectual enterprise in U.S. higher education, scholars have sought to establish its credentials as an academic pursuit and have debated its characteristics. To take the most obvious example, the home page of the African Studies Association (ASA) Web site (http://www.africanstudies.org/) declares, “The African Studies Association was founded in 1957 as a non-profit organization open to all individuals and institutions interested in African affairs. Its mission is to bring together people with a scholarly and professional interest in Africa.”

That there is a strong historical intellectual tradition of African Americans studying Africa is news to some. That there remains a demand among African Americans in the United States to study Africa is also a surprise. That these ideas are challenging to some is ludicrous to others. For many African Americans in African studies, affirming our engagement with Africa over and over is not only a nuisance but also a waste of precious time and intellectual energy. After countless efforts, many African Americans have simply disengaged, refusing to have these futile conversations. Others bear witness in perpetuity to the defense of Black nationality and global Pan-Africanism for themselves, the race, and the enlightenment of disbelievers. Both groups act with calculated rationality, yet denials of African Americans’ interest in, engagement with, and effect on African studies abound. The denial within the community of scholars comes mostly from White Americans but also from continental Africans and other African Americans.

Establishing an African studies program at a historically Black college or university (HBCU) may seem to make as much sense as carrying coals to Newcastle. In fact, though, very few of these institutions have African studies programs. Howard University is an important exception and was the first HBCU to establish an African studies program. That program, which was led initially by Rayford Logan, was created in 1953 following a $50,000 Ford Foundation grant in 1952. Anthropologist Melville Herskovits established the first African studies program in the United States in 1948. Howard University remains one of the few, if not the only, institution in the United States with an African Studies department that has its own faculty and that offers a doctorate in African studies.

In 1996, the Ford Foundation and the African Studies Association published African Studies in the United States: A Perspective by Jane Guyer, a noted economic anthropologist and then-program director at Northwestern University. In that commissioned volume, Guyer outlined, as she saw them, three distinct eras of African studies in the United States. She also collected and analyzed data about the production of knowledge concerning Africa, specifically numbers of doctorates in key disciplines, linkages to African institutions, and intellectual trends in scholarship. The data and perspectives she presented reflected the situation in African studies in the first half of the 1990s and sought to endorse the Ford Foundation funding initiative “Strengthening African Studies.” The purpose of this article is to revisit the question almost a decade later and in particular to reflect upon the specific role of federally funded area studies programs (i.e., Title VI) in the study of Africa.

The future of African studies in the United States will be determined, to a large degree, by the viability of small African studies programs. More of these small programs exist than the large and better-funded Title VI programs. Spread throughout the country, the small programs involve more faculty and students than do the Tide VI programs. In recent years, however, these small programs have been beset by several seemingly intractable problems, including lack of adequate funding from both internal and external sources, isolation, lack of sustained institutional support, competition from other area studies programs on campus, and shifting intellectual and research interests on the part of the local Africanist faculty. This article will both explore these complex interrelated problems and offer some recommendations.

The formal study of African languages in U.S. universities began with the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958. Title VI of that act supported the establishment of “centers for the teaching of any modern foreign language [that is] needed by the federal government or by business, industry or education” and for which “adequate instruction is not readily available in the United States.” The act also authorized fellowships for those undergoing advanced training in these languages. Over the next two decades, a small number of universities successfully competed for the federal funding from NDEA and subsequent acts that established Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships and later Title VI National Resource Centers (NRCs) for African studies.

Despite economic uncertainty and political instability in many regions of the world, U.S. students continue to study abroad in increasing numbers. Recently released data indicate that in academic year 2000-2001, the number of undergraduates who participated in study-abroad programs increased by 7 percent over the previous year. Yet, only 1 percent of U.S. undergraduates study abroad during their college tenures. Of this 1 percent, just under 3 percent participate in Africa-based programs.

At meetings of African studies specialists, informal conversation often turns to the future of area studies and of African studies in particular. In her 1996 monograph African Studies in the United States: A Perspective, Jane I. Guyer goes as far as saying, “No one’s view of the future of African Studies is rosy.” Attacks on area studies during the 1990s, especially attacks coming from scholars with African specialist credentials, such as Robert Bates, stung researchers who work on Africa, most of whom are based in traditional departments. The crux of these arguments seems to be that area studies are becoming irrelevant as the disciplines become more “scientific” in their approach and more sophisticated methodologically.

U.S. policy engagement in Africa has entered a phase of dramatic enlargement, begun during President Bill Clinton’s tenure and expanded—unexpectedly—under the administration of George W. Bush. In the last five years, several Africa-centered U.S. policy initiatives have been launched—in some instances backed by substantial funding increases—in trade and investment, security, development assistance, counterterrorism, and HIV/AIDS. By contrast with the Cold War era, recent initiatives—the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, a counterterrorism task force in Djibouti, President Bush’s $15 billion HTV/AIDS proposal, and the $5 billion Millennium Challenge Account (MCA)—have been largely free of partisan rancor or controversy.

Relations between the U.S. Africanist community and Africa are marked by complex connections, contestation, and challenges engendered by the intellectual, institutional, and ideological diversity of scholarly cultures, capacities, and commitments both in the United States and on the African continent. As we enter the new century, the scholarly enterprise on both sides of the Atlantic faces many perils and possibilities, both old and new, requiring innovative forms of engagement. Historically, as I have argued elsewhere, the patterns of academic exchange between the United States and Africa have been unbalanced. They are patterns that contemporary processes of globalization have helped reinforce and recast.

The sample frame was constructed over several months through the combined efforts of three graduate students and Prof. Larry W. Bowman. Using the Internet whenever possible, and backed by the assistance of colleagues from many institutions, we constructed a sample frame of 1,793 U.S.-based Africanists. Our sample frame includes 46 percent more Africanists than the 1,229 individual U.S. members of the African Studies Association (ASA) in 2001 (1,112 individual members and 117 lifetime members). In all cases we allowed institutions to self-define who they considered their African studies faculty to be. By assembling this broad sample frame of African studies faculty, we probe more deeply into the national world of African studies than can be done even through a membership survey of our largest and most established national African studies organization. The sample frame for this study approximates a full enumeration of the Africanist population in the United States. Therefore, data collected from samples drawn from this frame can with some confidence be generalized to all Africanists in the United States, with minimal coverage error.