The End of an Era: Af Am Looks to Rebuild After Year of Turmoil

On the Department of African and African American Studies’ website, there are four small photos featuring professors in the department. Three of the photos change every second, like a flipbook, so that a visitor to the site will get to see pictures of all of the department’s faculty members.

The fourth photo, situated in the center of the website, does not change.

That photo features Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Af Am’s chair since 1991, and a department mainstay even as other high-profile professors—including Cornel R. West ’74, K. Anthony Appiah, Lawrence D. Bobo, and Michael C. Dawson—have come and gone.

Soon Gates’ picture, too, will likely change.

At the end of the next academic year, Gates will step down as chair and hand over the reins of a department that, for the past 15 years, has been uniquely his. When he arrived, Harvard Af Am had only one senior professor and a handful of students, but under Gates’ leadership the department rose to the pinnacle of its field during the late 1990s.

But since the department’s heyday, Af Am has stumbled upon troubled times.

Former Fletcher University Professor West’s departure for Princeton in 2002 after a bitter public dispute with University President Lawrence H. Summers heralded the end of the Af Am “dream team.” That same year, Appiah, the former Carswell professor of African American studies, also went to Princeton, citing personal reasons.

This year, the department lost another three faculty members—Dawson, Bobo, and Bobo’s wife Marcyliena Morgan. And now another professor, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, who is an assistant professor of the history of art and architecture and of African and African American studies, says she may leave as well. Shaw, who does not have tenure at Harvard, will be a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania next year, and she says she hopes to receive a tenure offer there.

Students, too, have been leaving the Af Am department. The number of students enrolled in Af Am courses has plunged from 1,056 in the 2001-2002 academic year to just 332 this year.

And the shakeups have had reverberations beyond Johnston Gate. The department, though still considered by many the best in the country, has lost much of the prestige in which it once basked.

But Gates says the department is looking to rebuild. Two years after the Committee on African Studies merged with the African American Studies department, he says he is on the verge of making three tenured appointments in Af Am, as well as five in African studies in a push to make that program the best in the country.

With the loss of several top professors, dwindling class enrollments, a diminished reputation, and Gates’ decision to step down as chair, the Af Am department’s honeymoon is over. Whether or not the planned new hires and the as-yet-unnamed new chair can return the department to its former prominence remains to be seen.

A YEAR OF TURMOIL

Unlike the departures of West and Appiah—who say they left for personal reasons—this year’s exodus of professors can be primarily attributed to tenure decisions.

The losses began last summer, when Summers denied tenure to Morgan, a former associate professor of African and African American studies, even though the Af Am department voted unanimously to give her tenure.

According to Gates, “The decision not to promote Marcyliena Morgan had a chain reaction, leading to the departures of Lawrence Bobo and Michael Dawson.”

Adrift at Harvard, Morgan accepted a tenure offer from Stanford, and Bobo, who is her husband, decided to leave with her. The former Tishman and Diker professor of sociology and of African and African American studies, Bobo was one of the University’s premier sociologists and a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. He also served as acting chair of Af Am while Gates was on leave during the 2003-2004 academic year.

By the end of the fall semester, Dawson, a former professor of government and of African and African American studies who came to Harvard primarily to work alongside Bobo, announced his intention to return to the University of Chicago after only three years at Harvard.

Now the department may be on the verge of losing yet another professor.

Shaw’s permanent departure is not definite. She has not yet resigned from her post at Harvard, and will likely return if Penn does not offer her tenure next year.

But she says if Penn does offer her tenure—and she hopes it will—she would accept the offer.

And Gates says that Harvard cannot match any tenure offer made by Penn.

“We would expect a candidate in her field to have published considerably more than she has published so far. What Penn has done might be called a preemptive strike, and I applaud them for their cleverness, but we have very vigorous standards for promotion from within, and a crucial aspect of those standards is a candidate’s record,” Gates says.

The inability of Morgan and Shaw to receive tenure at Harvard has played out against the backdrop of broader faculty concerns with gender diversity and the decline in tenure offers made to women since Summers became president.

Shaw, who has been at Harvard for five years, says that while she supports the recent recommendations of the two task forces on women—which are geared toward recruiting and retaining female and minority professors—those efforts do little to help untenured professors already within Harvard’s ranks. Shaw says many faculty have come to call these professors the “lost generation.”

“Quite frankly, for many of my colleagues, it is too little, too late,” Shaw writes in an e-mail. “It is notable that most of our peer institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania...have long had more impressive records on the hiring, promotion, and intellectual support of women scholars than has Harvard.”

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby denies that a “lost generation” exists, saying that Harvard has long demonstrated a commitment to gender diversity.

“I think there are large areas of change in the past years that have made a big difference in terms of the number of appointments” of women professors, he says.

Summers played a very public role in West’s 2002 departure, and now some professors pin blame on him for the losses of Bobo, Morgan, West, and Shaw.

“It is probably fair to assume that at least some, and perhaps most, of these departures would not have taken place under [his predecessor] Neil Rudenstine’s presidency,” Cabot Professor of English Literature and of African and African American Studies Werner Sollors writes in an e-mail.

“There is in our department, as in many, a wide range of opinions about the President, but I do not think that the general mood is one of enthusiasm for either style or substance of his administration,” writes Sollors, who was the single tenured Af Am professor at Harvard when Gates came from Duke in 1991.

Still, Gates has repeatedly denied that conflict exists between himself and Summers.

“Just because you disagree with someone doesn’t mean you have a bad relationship with him,” says Gates, who did say he disagrees with Summers’ decision to deny Morgan tenure. “In the end, the president has sole power to appoint professors at Harvard.”

TEACHING TO EMPTY SEATS

While the department’s professorial ranks took a severe hit this past year, its class enrollment increased slightly from last year’s totals. But when measured against levels from a few years ago, the number of students has plummeted since West’s departure.

In the fall of 2001, West’s course Afro-American Studies 10, “Introduction to Afro-American Studies,” drew 579 students alone. That year, Af Am 10 could be taken for Core credit; since West left, the course was overhauled and no longer qualifies for Core credit. Af Am 10 enrolled just 17 students last year, though it attracted 46 students this year.

Gates says that one remedy for small enrollment numbers is to offer more large lecture courses, which the department currently lacks but “will be offering over the next two years.”

Concentration statistics have followed a similar pattern as enrollment statistics. Fifteen students concentrated in Af Am this year, up from 11 students last year, but down from 21 students in 2001-2002 and 34 students in the 1997-1998 academic year.

Gates says he is confident that the eight potential faculty hires—who would not join Harvard until next spring at the earliest—will attract more students to the department’s classes.

He declines to divulge the names of any of the professors currently under consideration for tenure, but according to Geyser University Professor William Julius Wilson, the list includes Mahmoud Mamdani, a political scientist who is currently the director of Columbia’s Institute of African Studies; James H. Sidanius, a professor in UCLA’s psychology department; and Christopher R. Udry, an economist at Yale.

Gates adds that he thinks Harvard’s growing African languages program—which is directed by Senior Preceptor in African and African American Studies John M. Mugane, offers 14 languages, and is the largest program of its kind in the country—will also draw increasing numbers of students in the future.

Brandon M. Terry ’05, a joint government and African and African American studies concentrator, says he believes Gates’ decision to step down as chair, which will allow him to teach more courses, will also increase enrollment in the department.

Wilson, who also holds an appointment in the Af Am department, said that while he would like class enrollment numbers to be high, they are not the department’s primary gauge of success.

“At a place like Harvard, we measure success in terms of the impact of the scholars in the particular field where they are studying,” he says.

LOSING ITS LUSTER

In addition to the impact on student enrollment, the string of professor departures dating back to West has also taken a toll on the Af Am department’s public image.

“I think Harvard’s Afro Am department has lost some of its luster because it has lost five major names,” says John Rickford, director of Stanford’s program in African and African American studies.

In November 1996, the New York Times described Harvard’s Af Am department as a “powerhouse” and “perhaps the most celebrated assortment of scholars in America.”

Almost a decade later, scholars across the country do not offer such a glowing assessment.

Rickford says that the department continues to be the best in the country, but that if it continues to lose professors, that might change.

“If Skip [Gates] were to leave, or if more people were to leave, than the future would be more uncertain,” he says, adding that now, “the collegiality, the feeling that you were really setting the pace for everybody else around the world [is gone].”

Bobo also acknowledges that the department is not what it once was, and that his own and his colleagues’ departures have contributed to the decline.

“Can the department recover the sense of electricity and sheer excitement circa 1996-2000? Probably not,” Bobo writes in an e-mail. “But will it continue to serve the Harvard community well and lead the nation for some time to come? Without a doubt, yes.”

Scholars at other institutions specifically criticize Harvard’s department for devoting insufficient resources to the social sciences.

According to Ralph A. Austen, co-chair of the University of Chicago’s committee on African and African American studies, Harvard’s Af Am department emphasizes cultural studies, an approach that he argues fails to address the more controversial aspects of the African American experience.

Culture is “an area where you can be very positive,” Austen says. “People here [at Chicago] would say that’s okay, but we’re more scholarly.”

Nathaniel Norment, Jr., the chair of Temple University’s African American Studies department, says his department does not look to Harvard for leadership, since Harvard focuses too much on traditional disciplines such as religion and philosophy and not enough on social activism and “the African American life situation as a unique academic discipline.”

Wilson dismisses Austen and Norment’s criticisms as “not very well informed.”

“We still have a very, very strong contingent of people who are interested in the social sciences,” he says, citing in particular Jennifer L. Hochschild, who is the Jayne professor of government and of African and African American studies, and Kimberley M. DaCosta, who is an assistant professor of African and African American Studies and of social studies.

Gates adds that Wilson himself has had a greater impact on government policy towards African Americans than any other scholar in the world.

Thomas Holt, a professor of history at the University of Chicago who used to hold an appointment in Harvard’s Af Am department, says there is little doubt that the losses of Dawson and Bobo, both social scientists, have diminished the department’s strength in that area. But he does say that weakness in that area “is only a recent development and does not reflect any long-term trend in the department’s focus.”

AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

Gates says the eight faculty appointments he hopes to make this upcoming year are geared towards improving the African wing of the department.

Harvard’s current emphasis on African American over African studies has earned the department its share of critics.

“Harvard’s is a controversial program. [Gates] does not have a strong Afrocentrist program, so people who are Afrocentrist would not want to call it number one,” Rickford says.

The five recruits in African studies, according to Gates, are in the areas of anthropology, developmental economics, literature, religion, and politics.

“If we are successful in our recruitment efforts, Harvard will have an African studies department as splendid and as renowned as our department of African American studies,” he says.

But if the department is to return to its past position of prominence, it will have to do so under a new leader.

Gates says he decided to step down as chair because he has been at the post for too long.

“Fifteen years is long enough. I was beginning to feel like Mobutu,” he jokes, referring to the former dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sésé Seko.

Gates’ role as chair has differed sharply from that of the heads of Harvard’s more established departments. Those departments typically change chairs every few years, and the role of the chair is largely to keep the already-strong department on course. Gates, however, has had to take a more active role—actually building, rather than simply maintaining, the department’s reputation.

His decision to step down will present the department with its largest test to date—whether, for all its troubles, it will be able to stand alone, without the stewardship of the man who has been its shepherd for the past 15 years.

Gates is confident that despite the host of problems the department has faced over the last three years, it will continue to set the pace in its field.

“I wouldn’t step down if I thought the department were vulnerable in any way,” he says. “Once we make these appointments, the department will be as strong as ever.”

—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.