Black Scholars Feared Stigma Of New Dept.

In 1969, University administrators didn't think there were enough qualified Faculty members to establish a high-caliber department of Afro-American studies.

Even today, when the department is considered one of the best in the country, many of those administrators still think they were right.

"Many of the Black scholars that the Rosovsky committee talked with said they were skeptical about the value of forming a separate department to study African-American history," recalls former Dean of the Faculty Franklin L. Ford. "There were very few great Black scholars out there who wanted to identify their race with their principal teaching responsibilities."

Administrators say there was an element of appeasement in the foundation of the department. In his 1991 book The University: An Owner's Manual, Rosovsky likened the process by which Afro-Am became a department to an "academic Munich"-- a reference to the 1938 conference where the allied diplomats tried to appease Hitler.

Rosovsky staunchly supported the conclusions of his committee, despite student protest. But on April 22, 1969, the Faculty voted to ignore the committee's recommendations and establish the department--"a truly unbelievable moment in Harvard's long history," Rosovsky says.

Ford and Rosovsky both cite the Afro-American Studies Department's unimpressive early history as proof that their initial suspicions about a lack of Black scholars were right.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the current chair of the Afro-American Studies, says his department did not really begin to emerge as a leading academic entity until a few years ago.

"It used to be that everyone we asked to come here would say no," Gates says. "Now everyone we ask says yes."

Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III says the problem was that Afro-Am was established to appease students.

"I think the issue broke down this way: did we want the highest academic standards or did we want Afro-Am supporters to feel that were respected?"

"We chose snow respect for those students," Epps says, "but we didn't get back onto the right academic path until recently."

But while Afro-Am's poor record in its early years remains undisputed, there is some question as to whether the problem was a dearth of potential faculty or Harvard's lack of commitment of finding them.

Thomson Professor of Government Martin L. Kilson, who was the first Black to be tenured at Harvard and was a member of the Rosovsky committee, says that while he disagreed with the proposal for a full-scale department, the problems with Afro-Am had nothing to do with Black professors being unwilling to join.

"The fact that I would have said no had nothing to do with me being Black," Kilson says. "I don't think there was much problem there because most of the appointments we were offering were joint appointments between Afro-Am and another, more established department."

Black scholars did exist in the country in 1969--they just didn't want to come to Harvard, says former student activist Robert L. Hall '69.

"I think that a lot of Black faculty members at other universities were making a point to Harvard in refusing to come here," Hall says, "Harvard's past sins caught up with us in our time of need."

Hall, who was one of the three student members of the faculty search, committee for Afro-American Studies, points to a failed attempt to court University of Chicago historian John Hope Franklin as an example of this trend.

"We sent out 'feelers' to [Franklin], but he wasn't interested," Hall says. "He said, very diplomatically, that he had never been offered a position in Harvard's history department, and that was his field."

"The implication was that he saw us as suddenly wanting him not because he was great historian but because he was Black."

Hall says the search committee was slow to invite scholars to Harvard and was extremely apathetic about the department.

"The process was exceedingly, excruciatingly, deliberately slow," Hall says. "And When we would come close to agreement in committee, something would always happen and we would never get close enough to make an offer."

During the same time period that Harvard searched in vain, Yale was able to construct a prominent Afro-American Studies department, Hall says. In fact, three pillars of Harvard's now-renowned Afro-American studies department were colleagues at Yale decades ago: Gates, Professor of Afro-American Studies and of philosophy K. Anthony Appiah and Cornel R. West '74.

West is currently the director of the African-American Studies Program at Princeton. He will assume teaching duties at Harvard in the fall of 1995.

"Yale showed that it could be done," Hall says, "Harvard's approach was just laughable."

According to Hall, Afro-Am search committee members were advised by other faculty members to try a "sociological approach" to hiring Black professors.

"The line of thinking was 'if you must hire a Black, then here's how to do it,"' Hall says. "There was even a hierarchy of quality: first we were told to look for a British-trained African; next a West-Indian, which was presumably the next-best thing to someone British-trained; and as a last resort, we could maybe find an educated American Negro."

"I think that tells you a lot about the mindsets of some of the people who were supposedly working with us," Hall says. "It was so typical."