The Globe Asks: Harvard Professor, or Superman?

Last year, both Harvard and Radcliffe Presidents Neil L. Rudenstine and Linda S. Wilson received glowing profiles in the Boston Globe. This year, there was a bit more balance in a Globe article on Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of the Afro-American Studies Department, but as indicated by the headline ("Harvard's Skip Gates; guru, griot, gaditty), there was plenty of room for sucking up:

"It's a gray day, gray as a gravestone but inside Harvard's African-American studies department the attitude as perpetual spring Henry Louis Gates Jr. has just led a spirited hour of the department he chairs, bounding energetically like an exclamation point on amphetamines."

"Surely the man can't keep up this hyperkinetic pace day after day. The man talks fast, work fast and drives a fast car."

compiled by Joe Mathew's Market B. Ganumill and Gody A. Epstein