A Young Scholar Assists A Troubled Department

Harvard's Afro-Am department has only one permanent faculty member, a small pool of prospective junior professors, and an increasingly frustrated student body. And while administrators engage in a mad scramble to find professors to staff the moribund department, one young scholar has stepped in to help keep Afro-American studies alive during rough times.

Rei Terada only received her Ph.D. from Boston University last year. But Terada, who is in the middle of a one-year appointment as lecturer in Afro-Am, has earned the respect of her Harvard colleagues and students with both her scholarship and her teaching skills.

"I have nothing but good things to say about her," says Bonnie Costello, an associate professor of English at Boston University who advised Terada's disertation. Costello says that Terada has a "quiet nature" but exudes warmth and self-confidence. "At B.U.," says Costello, "she was a great success as a teacher."

This year at Harvard, Terada teaches Afro-Am's junior humanities tutorial, a task which allows her to share with students her expertise in Carribean post-colonial poetry. Terada takes a particular interest in the work of Carribean poet Derek Walcott, and espouses a multicultural approach to the study of North and South American literature. In fact, Terada is a poet herself, applying her scholarly work to the creative process.

Barbara Johnson, the chair of Harvard's Afro-Am department, says that as the leader of the junior humanities tutorial in Afro-Am, Terada has been "very devoted to the students." Johnson also speaks highly of Terada's scholarship.

"She writes very well and is a very good interpreter of poetry," says Johnson.

More Than a Year?

Terada's talents have led some Afro-Am concentrators to recommend that Harvard offer her a junior professorship. Terada, in fact, applied for a junior position here, but could not wait through Harvard's long selection process, and instead accepted a junior professorship with the University of Michigan's English Department.

"She applied to many jobs. The Harvard appointment was only for a year," Johnson points out. "She received several good offers and she chose Michigan."

But Terada's limited appointment at Harvard has not prevented her from speaking out in support of a strong Afro-Am department here. Terada says that student protests, such as last semester's 23-hour sit-in at University Hall, are necessary to draw attention to the plight of the department.

"I think it's great," she says. "I think the effort to rebuild [the Afro-Am department] is going as fast as it is because of students, because there are students committed to their department."

"Because things have been so difficult the undergraduates have banded together," she continues. "There was something there that needed to be dramatized."

Terada says the University is making a genuine and thorough effort to revitalize the Afro-Am department, but acknowledges that there are difficult hurdles to be crossed.

"The attitudes within the department differ," says Terada. "Afro-American studies is doing a good job but there are some difficulties coordinating searches."

Terada says that efforts to appoint senior faculty have thus far been unsuccessful because no scholar is willing to come to Harvard and build a department from scratch. But Terada says she thinks that situation could change if Duke Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. accepts a recent tenure offer from Harvard.

"I think [Gates] would not only be an original scholar but he will be able to bring other people into the department," Terada says.