Patterns of Advanced Training in African Studies

• The Funding of Coursework
• The Funding of Doctoral Research
• Synthesis

• Discussion: The Problems of Students

"Reports of decline in research about Africa are not supported by the numbers of dissertations produced each year" (Lauer 1989:183).

 Joseph Lauer is the acknowledged compiler of records on higher education in African Studies. The crude numbers with respect to dissertation production on Africa in the USA, since 1951, are as follows:
 
 

The disciplines, however, follow semi-independent patterns of growth and change, as might be expected, and training and research about Africa can change in composition without changing the total volume. Unlike the overall trend, dissertation production in African history peaked in the mid-1970s and then almost halved by the mid-1980s (NCASA 1991:13). In fact, this pattern of change in historical scholarship may well account for the general sense of decline to which many allude, since the same report notes in its comparative conclusions, "it is history that dominates area studies" (p 75) in numbers of faculty appointments. Anthropology, by contrast, may have held its own or even advanced a little: for 1980-86 Africa claimed 12% of applications to the NSF Anthropology Program (which includes Archeology and Biological Anthropology), with a success rate of 31%; in 1986-91 Africanists submitted 13% of proposals, and had the tied-highest success rate of 40% (Plattner, Hamilton and Madden 1987; Plattner and McIntyre 1991; Plattner, Aronson and Abellera 1993).

 We tabulated dissertations by discipline, as reported in the ASA News, for the years 1986-94, to compare with the figures for 1974-87 produced by Lauer. His admonitions to caution apply; note, for example, that for the first period the 1987 numbers may have been incomplete, and for the second, the 1994 numbers were certainly incompletely submitted by the time the record was calculated. But the figures do provide strongly suggestive guidelines.
 
 

Source: Lauer for 1974-87; ASA News, data reported by Lauer, compiled by Kemp, for 1986-94.
 
 

There are two striking inferences to be made here. First, economics, business and education-none of which is represented in the classic area studies format and most of which would be based in professional schools rather than colleges of arts and sciences-have been a far more important part of training relative to Africa than has normally been recognized, and they have held their own over time. Secondly, agriculture, the sciences, and planning have risen marginally in the rankings, with the more classic area studies disciplines (history, political science, anthropology and the humanities) maintaining or losing ground a notch or two. One plausible interpretation would be that policy-relevance has been a strong and strengthening criterion for dissertation research.

 To some degree this pattern must reflect research funding. But it probably also reflects the national origins of graduate students. The US educates the world at the more advanced levels, including Africa. Using the very rough criterion of a recognizably African name as dissertation author, we looked at the disciplinary distribution of African versus non-African students. The results, for 1986-94, are as follows:

Source: Data from ASA News. Reported by Lauer, compiled by Kemp.

Of course, some African students will be US citizens, so the inferences have to be carefully drawn. There is, however, a rather striking distribution here, with African students concentrated in what are understood in our own educational systems to be "applied fields," while the more theoretical disciplines are still over half non-African.

 Different commentators would see very different dynamics here: one might deplore the lack of support for African scholarship in the disciplines that have high intellectual profiles while another might applaud the greater concentration of African work in disciplines that are considered to have greater relevance to the immediate challenges of the continent, and yet another might simply see a lag time between the two, since a rising proportion of scholars who originate from the "areas" of area studies seems to be a general pattern. For example, Raphael reports that "as of 1989, the majority-about two thirds-of Ph.D. dissertations written in this country with a Southeast Asian focus have been written by Southeast Asian scholars and...the most important works in the area will be written, if they aren't already, by those living there" (1994:99). By these comparative criteria, African Studies in the U.S. is a few percentage points behind Southeast Asia in its education of nationals and Americans who originate from the region. It may be that the policy-relevant disciplines represent the wedge into American higher education, and the intellectual breadth will follow. One version of this view, which I and many others share, is that policy relevance and intellectual profile should converge at some points. As the world changes, the nature of those changes becomes an intellectual agenda of the highest order. The mechanization of agriculture and the use of contraceptives are not simply technical decisions to be studied in applied disciplines, for instance, but part of the global system. And those who study the global system can no longer be illiterate with respect to the "technicalities" through which visions are turned into realities.

 One of the forces behind the emphasis on applied disciplines during the 1980s must surely be the USAID effort to train Africans in the U.S. Many have been trained to the PhD level through the ATLAS/AFGRAD program run through the African American Institute. AFGRAD provided US academic training (at all levels) for over 3,000 Africans from 46 countries (ATLAS Brochure). The ATLAS project explicitly targets "disciplines critical to development such as economics, business administration, public health, agriculture and engineering"; there is a special focus on the education of women; and the institutional oversight involves both development and academic agencies (AID, AAI, the Council of Graduate Schools, The African Academy of Sciences, The National Association for Equal Opportunity Higher Education [which represents 117 HBCUs]), Arthur D. Little, Management Systems International, and the host countries).

 The ATLAS project has clearly been large enough to affect the African Studies student body and the distribution of dissertations. According to the faculty, the number of African students who are financed by their families or governments is very small and declining, in contrast to the financial support for students from other areas of the world. Changes in U.S. national policy will therefore have a very great effect on the profile of our student body in African Studies.

There seem to be two different enterprises here-the core area studies disciplines, that are still more than 50% American, and the applied disciplines that are often over 75% African. Do they both go on at the same academic institutions, benefitting from shared intellectual and library resources, collegiality and faculty expertise in the particular challenges of research in Africa? Again we used a rough measure to gauge the overlap: the proportion of PhD dissertations in each discipline that was produced between 1986 and 1994 by the federally-funded Title VI centers (taken as a group), and the proportion of those that were African-authored. This does not really allow us to infer directly the influence of Title VI status because most of the National Resource Centers in the area studies are at large public universities that have strong applied training programs (through Land Grant status, for example), lower tuition and often stellar reputations as well; hence, they would clearly attract some students regardless of the federal support. Obviously there is African research expertise at other universities as well, although the quality of the library resources may be very inferior. It is worth noting here that the major African Studies Programs are blessed with absolutely extraordinary librarians, who basically serve the needs of the entire research community.

 With these provisos in mind, we can still get some sense of the theoretical/applied synergies by making a tabulation of the type of university from which degrees are being granted in "African Studies" and "The Study of Africa."
 
 

Source: ASA News. Data reported by Lauer, compiled by Kemp.

 (Note: Small numbers for column 2 in Geography and Philosophy place these data outside of consideration.)

The universities with Title VI centers produced 30% of all Africa-related PhD dissertations 1986-94, and 27% of all dissertations by scholars with African names. They were particularly predominant in History, Languages, Literature and the Arts, with all the social sciences grouping at about 25% of Africanist dissertations produced. The African scholars are distributed similarly in Title VI centers as in higher education in general: considerably more diffused in agriculture, philosophy/theology and political science; a little more diffused in economics/business and most other disciplines; more concentrated in anthropology and communications. In brief, then, Title VI supports some disciplines more than others, but seems to affect the location of African scholars in African Studies/The Study of Africa relatively little. African scholars are neither flooding into the Title VI centers nor avoiding them.

 This pattern is somewhat mysterious, given the long-term federal investment in area studies centers. Criteria for student placement other than Africa expertise must be at work. Disciplinary strength is undoubtedly one of these, especially for health and demography, which are best represented in institutions other than the Title VI universities. Remote sensing is particularly strong at Maryland-College Park; International Relations may be stronger in the Washington, D.C.-area schools. The local agro-ecology of the region where the university is located may be important for agriculture training; further south may make more sense than Michigan for some students. And pressures to distribute federal resources more broadly than the "same old" places may well play a part as representatives in D.C. lobby for their own academic institutions.

 How well this dispersion works to foster good research is debatable. Several years ago, out of concern for the preparation of agriculture students for research in Africa, The Rockefeller Foundation instituted special sessions of summer training for African doctoral students, held at the Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (a Title VI Center). Even so, they are still concerned about the adequacy of the training for research in an African context that is shown in the applications for their research grants for African students (the ADIA project, reviewed by Watts 1994). The element that seems lacking in the proposals submitted to their fellowship competition is rigorous and pragmatic training in field research techniques, as distinct from the standardized methods used for research in countries with reliable and complete official data sets and populations who can participate in phone and mail surveys. (It should be noted that the AFGRAD/ATLAS scholars would not appear in the Rockefeller pool since their entire education is covered by the program, presumably to ensure that investment in their carefully selected candidates is not wasted by the inevitable attrition attendant on competition for research funds.)

 One cannot leave this topic of a perceived differential quality of training between African Studies and The Study of Africa without mentioning the sensitive issue of recruitment. African Studies faculty across the board endorse the competitive process: for acceptance to graduate school, research funds, exams, jobs and so on. Those who advocate particular funds or opportunities for-for example-American minority students, in no way endorse lowering the competitive standards. Special funds are simply a question of keeping the pathways sufficiently open for critically important minorities at a moment when they are particularly narrow. The perception about some African students in applied fields, however, is that country needs have sometimes resulted in recruitment of candidates who would never be competitive in our own context. One faculty member stated quite vehemently that the stellar quality of African candidates from the 1960s cohorts had been very much altered by the urgency of "need" as the main criterion for choosing trainees. One creative way of mediating this problem has been to expand non-doctoral training to provide urgently-needed expertise. Most faculty would surely argue that creating a category of less-prestigious doctorates cannot possibly help the candidate, the country or the reputation of the field within U.S. scholarship. African Studies has had a high intellectual profile so far, and this is its greatest asset in the continued recruitment of such fine students; be they Americans of European ancestry, American minorities, foreigners, or Africans. The challenge now is to adapt its focus, not to alter its standards. Some realization of the problem may well already be helping to redress the situation. Certainly one knows of African students meeting extremely high standards in Africa-based research in technical fields.

 At the doctoral level, then, there are some differences of emphasis amongst the pathways for training, and they must surely be very responsive to the funding priorities in the federal agencies, primarily USAID and the Department of Education. This overview of dissertation production-fraught as it is with methodological concerns-supports the inference that applied and technical studies have risen in profile over the past decade; that they have become predominantly African; that some progress has been made in attracting African students to the theoretical disciplines; and that this new wave of scholars has not been disproportionately placed in universities with area studies centers. As a result the total number of dissertations has continued to expand, and the total domain of scholarship about Africa has also diversified: in disciplinary emphasis, in composition by national origin, and in institutional dispersal.

 Hence, part of the answer to how dissertation production could have continued to expand in spite of all recurrent fears about funding and jobs, is that a substantial and increasing proportion of students has been African, supported by special funding and focused on fields for which the U.S. job market is irrelevant. Another part of the answer has been changed career paths for Americans, into government and NGOs instead of academia. There is still an academic pathway for American students, but it is increasingly fraught by the indeterminacy of research funding, long training courses, difficult fieldwork conditions and uncertain futures. Funding clearly plays a critical role in shaping this demand.
 
 

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 Only in a very few places are students admitted into specifically Africa-focused programs (African Studies at Howard, African History at U. Wisconsin-Madison). Most are admitted into and educated in disciplines. On all issues of standards, from admissions to graduation and including the key funding decisions, students and faculty are under the authority of departments. Even where there are specific funds for Africanist students, such as the FLAS fellowships made available through Title VI, all of the fully-funded students submit to the funding criteria of departments and other agencies at critical transitions from stage to stage of their traineeships.

 An examination of students needs to look carefully at each of the stages that make up the total traineeship, and the ways in which students move from one stage to the next. Most funding sources are particular to specific stages, so that the student has to make several transitions over the graduate career: admission, qualification for university funding (tuition and stipend), research funding, support during dissertation writing, and the job market. Most of them involve a fiercely competitive process and attrition of student numbers. In fact, one of the most difficult faculty responsibilities is to judge realistic drop-outs from avoidable losses to the discipline. Because these moments of transition are so sensitive, very small changes in the dollar amounts available can make very large differences and evoke very deep passions. In fact, the debates over student support could well be the basis for the famous comment that academic politics are so intense because so little is at stake. Debate about that "little" represents philosophical differences, internal maneuvering and disciplinary strategizing.
 
 

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The Funding of Coursework

 Unlike the case in the sciences, doctoral students in our own disciplines are rarely recruited to carry out faculty research while being supported during the early years of training on faculty grants. Faculty grant-support may well be an as-yet unexploited resource for us as well, to supply some student support at the research stage. But it will probably never figure in university calculations about how many funded slots to offer a department in the disciplines that make up Africanist research. Faculty ability to raise student support from their institution can be augmented above the university norm by competitive demand. The stronger the faculty, the greater their recruitability elsewhere, the better their case for extracting student support from the Graduate School if they decide to pursue this strategy. As in all else, the profile of the faculty matters.

The highest status programs in some disciplines-the University of Chicago in Anthropology is the prime example-have a structure that fosters attracting the most highly qualified students and giving them the best conditions of study. Some area studies centers at public universities, with less flexible funding, have particularly benefitted from the combination of tuition advantage, academic excellence and Title VI support to build the prominence and competitive edge they have: UC-Berkeley and UM-Ann Arbor in International Studies across the board, MSU in African development issues, Indiana in the African Humanities and Wisconsin in African history. Many excellent students come through other programs that have either solid funding or high disciplinary reputations combined with high student expectations of self-support. The result is a massive patchwork of admissions policies and funding conditions that shapes student recruitment, but always reflects in one way or another the competitive process by which American academia is structured: with respect to faculty profile and student support. Hierarchization of the field is explicit in all this, and will be exacerbated in the impending crunch over funding.

This decentralization of critical decisions about training, and the hierarchies that are created, means two things: that much of what goes on in most universities at the admissions and coursework stage is difficult to influence from the outside, but that small changes at key transition points may exert important leverage. It is the existence of a few FLAS fellowships per year, provided under Title VI, that gives the federally funded centers an advantage in recruitment and that allows faculties to generate various kinds of matching funds within the university. African Studies received a mean of 92 FLAS awards per year between 1985 and 91, or about 6-8 per center, including summer awards (CIE 1995:2).

 The language-promotion policy that underlay the initial philosophy of Area Studies when it was founded in the 1950s still shapes in critically important ways the possibilities for training at the Title VI centers. Under the conditions of the FLAS fellowships, language study has to be taken every semester, which means that only students from a certain range of disciplines find it a desirable course to follow-anthropology, history, language and literature and political science-although political science was losing profile in area studies by the mid-1980s. The course requirements in other disciplines would never allow one fourth of all graduate class time to be devoted to language. When Title VI status is lost, the first thing to go is student language training, under the pressure of the cost of teaching minority languages, the disciplinary control over course requirements, and the desire of faculty and students for flexibility to respond to new training needs. Alteration of the language requirements for FLAS fellowships might alter the disciplinary profile of area studies considerably, but it would be very controversial. In fact, any major alteration of the FLAS system would have considerable reverberations for centers, disciplines, the expectations of research standards and the feasibility of linking new disciplines into the area studies/ international studies agenda.

 The fellowships available to students shape the incoming "class," but the entire career-pathway of a student is influenced strongly by the availability of the entire spectrum of resources. If those are outside, competitive resources for the department or university, they play into the status/quality process that drives disciplinary agendas. Africa can come out very strong through its disciplinary bases if the students can tap into NSF, NEH and other funds that do not rest on area studies bases. Very small changes in the resources available from the interdisciplinary organizations such as area and international studies, however, can make one or other of the transitions of the "international/areas studies" graduate career either more inviting or more daunting, and add to or detract from the capacity of Africa to retain its profile.

 Most interventions in funding for graduate study have been designed to preserve competition without allowing its mechanisms to eliminate all qualified people who come from important categories of the total pool, above all at a time when the selection pyramid is very steep. Funding for the early stages of graduate study for African-American and other minority students has generally achieved these conditions, and has therefore been far more welcome in African Studies than some commentaries imply. Almost all the programs that answered my request for information have some sort of minority fellowships. It has been remarkable, however, to find how consistently these fellowships mediate one hurdle but expect the student to be fully competitive at the next. For example, the Mid-West system (CIC fellowships) for minority students, provides two years of stipend but expects the university to waive tuition and the department to pick up the cost of further studies into the third and subsequent years. The overall pool of funds is therefore a factor from the outset, and a fully competitive situation sets in at the latest at the time of application for research funds. As far as I know, only the NSF, and only for the sciences, has a research competition that is ear-marked for under-represented American minorities.

 As a result of the competitive structure for minority fellowships, I found faculty strongly endorsing minority fellowship programs because they expand diversity without altering standards. Unlike the case for fully-funded outsiders, the quality issue hardly arises. In fact, the director of one of the major programs regretted that competition for these fellowships was so stiff that in one of the major disciplines they had to turn down two well-qualified minority candidates in a single year, along-of course-with non-minority candidates.

 In summary, then, the structure of graduate student funding should now "deliver" a set of ABD candidates that reflects the diversity of the pool of qualified initial applicants. Not all are securely funded on a multi-year basis, and relatively few are well enough funded to allow them to manage without taking jobs. But if the pool is good (a matter to be taken up later), the system may be a rickety Heath Robinson affair-in need of constant tinkering with the components and renovation on the curriculum side-but it works.
 
 

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The Funding of Doctoral Research

 The National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the two Fulbright programs, and the JCAS of the SSRC/ACLS are the most important funding sources for research, although others include National Geographic, Rotary, and Wenner-Gren. The Africa component of NSF is hard to document, since the disciplines apply to different programs. The Fulbright program awarded approximately 60 graduate fellowships to Africa in 1992-93 (SSRC Assessment 1992). The Population Council gave two doctoral fellowships per year in recent years for research in Africa. Over the period 1980-87 an average of under seven dissertation fellowships per year were given to Africa by the SSRC/ACLS, rising to almost 15 between 1988 and 1992, but falling precipitously again as the external funding ran out (Szanton:1991, and supplement from SSRC).

It is worth noting that the Title VI African Studies centers were particularly successful in preparing their students for the SSRC competition. Between 1983 and 1989, 58% of awards went to those centers (Szanton 1991: 30). They accounted for just over half of the total applicant pool.

 What do these resources for research funding add up to, relative to the numbers of trained ABD candidates in the pool for competitive funding? The applicant pool for the International Dissertation Research Fellowships of the SSRC in 1992 was 156 and in 1993, 145. Of these only 10 and 9, respectively, were funded (SSRC supplemental notes). Fulbright supports 60, and others in the academic category probably support a dozen or so more. We might come up with a generous conclusion, then, that 80 or so ABD students, coming from about 80 U.S. universities, get some kind of funding that can cover work in Africa. The rest must work with data sets, available documentary resources and Western-based interviewing (like Gingrich!), or drop out. Whatever the proportion of losses is, it must be high enough to account for considerable attrition. Recurrent crises in the funding of field research are disproportionately discouraging for the entire field. As I take up in Chapter 5, field research needs to be addressed as a topic all its own.

 Overall, attrition and long-term languishing rates in our core disciplines are thought to be quite high. Anthropologists suggest as great as 50% loss, with a years-to-degree for the successful completers of between 8 and 9. With its field research component, African Studies is probably similar to anthropology. This sudden narrowing of the eye of the needle at the research stage, followed by very poor support for the period of dissertation-writing, followed in turn by struggle with the job market, represents the most discouraging phase of doctoral training.

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Synthesis

The final topic that needs exploration is the reasons for student and faculty commitment to academic African Studies training, in the face of considerable fragility in the resources and the job market. There are only two plausible explanations. The first is commitment to Africa. Many students come in through undergraduate study-abroad programs and the Peace Corps. Even those who eventually leave academia and African Studies often still express a level of engagement that reflects the formative influence they feel the continent has had on their lives. Active involvement is a great creative force. The other reason is the intellectual challenge. There are still very bright students for whom Africa offers the inspiration they are seeking.
 
 

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 The academic training of Africans in the whole roster of disciplines that make for development-from engineering to pharmacology-is a very large endeavor. The systems analyst for Human Resources Assistance at USAID generated the following table to summarize all African trainees in human resource projects, trained in the U.S., for FY 1985-FY 1995:
 
 

Source: Cristina Mossi, InfoStructure International.

 (Note: The numbers include North Africa.)
 
 

Technical training predominates, but academic enrollments are very substantial. The vast majority from this program, however, have been in masters and professional training, rather than doctoral training.

Discussions at AID made it clear that doctoral programs have become very problematic for the funding agencies, with the exception of the elite ATLAS program whose grantees are very carefully and competitively picked by the country missions, whose full expenses are paid and 90% of whom successfully return after their training. For others, not only are there some misgivings about the length of time to finish, the relevance to Africa of the research and the difficulty of dealing with faculty, but the changes in the tax laws in 1986 meant that every visitor on longer-term training (with tuition coverage, annual stipends and so on) was in a high tax bracket for their support and had to submit extensive documentation. (I have heard the same story from visiting African faculty who were here before 1986 and after, and faced it with graduate students who were suddenly tax-liable for the "income" that tuition scholarships represented.) This provision clearly tips a balance of costs and benefits when an AID country-mission is considering a continuum of funding opportunities in training. They can choose between regular two-week in-country workshops for women entrepreneurs for several years, or one American PhD (this was the example given to me).

 As a result, we begin to see a decline in African graduate students in this country. One of the responses to my letter mentioned that there was already a sense of the relative absence of Africans in the student body. The following table summarizes the changes in numbers of masters and doctoral students funded by AID programs, 1985-94.

Source: Cristina Mossi, InfoStructure International.

From a high of 751 in 1986, the numbers had fallen to 295 in 1994.

 By far the greatest reductions have been in agriculture and arts and sciences disciplines. For simplicity's sake I tabulate the numbers for 1986 and 1994.
 
 

The shift in emphasis is quite marked towards business, education, and energy/environment.
 
 

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Discussion: The Problems of Students

 For the moment, there is still a demand from excellent candidates for the kind of training we offer. The social composition of the student body may well swing back to primarily American if the large funding agencies retreat from doctoral training. The funding rests on a narrow basis. Faculty and programs are bound to fear for the future.

My own sense, however, is that interests are also shifting within the disciplines in ways that we could be taking more into account. The rise in environmental studies, health and demography as components of the development endeavor will revive demand for culturally context-sensitive work in technical branches of ecology. The concern with human rights interfaces with law, and the mushrooming of NGOs creates interest in organizations and women's studies. One of our most theoretically-inclined colleagues is taking time out to retrain in public finance in order to carry out a research project. So the interdisciplinary agenda may well be on the verge of linking new disciplines to each other, and changing training programs quite radically in the process: to go beyond the achievements of connecting the classic core disciplines to one another, to put the contentious relationship with economics in perspective, and to reach out towards the sciences, management, and the professions.

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Jane I. Guyer, Copyright 1996