The Joys of Thirty-something

The road to acclaim for Harvard's Afro-American studies department has been littered with potholes, but after 30 years, the unit finally appears to be cruising.

By Ronald Roach

In 1969, Black students, faculty members, and administrators at Harvard university had no idea that their differences over a new academic program devoted to Black studies would send Harvard on a 20-year course of neglect and at times even hostility toward the discipline. 
Student activists who rejected the original plans for an Afro-American studies program as too weak, pressured faculty members to approve plans for a full-fledged department. Faculty meanwhile —  both on campus and within the academy — dismissed the field as little more than an academic flash in the pan.
As one university official puts it: "There was a nominal commitment. But there was no intellectual or emotional investment" by Harvard to make Afro-American studies a respected program.
"We had a very difficult time in making that into a first-class department. It was very hard," says Dr. Henry Rosovsky, retired dean of the arts and sciences faculty at Harvard and an early proponent of Afro-American studies.
Three decades later, Harvard's Afro-American studies department has emerged in complete synchronicity with the university's much vaunted place as a higher education leader. In 1999, Harvard's Afro-American studies department shines because an all-star team of scholars renowned for their work and their influence hold tenured faculty positions there — academic luminaries like Drs. Cornel West and William Julius Wilson, and the department's charismatic chair, Dr. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. (see Dr. Entrepreneur pg. 18).
It is the brilliant scholarship and affable, yet resolute leadership of Gates — a self-described intellectual entrepreneur — that most people credit with having transformed Afro-American studies at Harvard into a national leader. So stellar is the department's current reputation on campus that its introductory course, taught by West, is now the fifth-largest undergraduate course at Harvard, enrolling 450 students last fall.
"It is the best course on campus," says  Theodore Nathaniel "Teddy" Maynard, a Harvard junior who is majoring in Afro-American studies. "A lot of students take the class just because [West] is such a dynamic speaker.... In a way, I see [Gates and West] as using this White institution to validate Black studies."
Some scholars would counter that the discipline's growing acceptance has occurred despite Harvard. Nevertheless, the university's Afro-American studies department has become a model of excellence that other American colleges and universities are striving to emulate.