The Battle Over the Du Bois Institute

For six years — from 1969 to 1975 — a war raged at Harvard over the question of how to establish a research institute for African-American studies.

When Harvard’s Afro-American studies department was founded in 1969, the faculty legislation also called for the creation of a Black studies research institute.

But contending viewpoints among Black faculty, students, and administrators on who would control its development, and ultimately run the institute, stalled progress for years — even as other Ivy League universities founded similar research institutes of their own. Eventually, a group of Black faculty outside the department — convinced its research was limited or flawed — persuaded Harvard’s president, Derek C. Bok, to found an external center for Black studies.

“It was ideological, it was personal, it was deeply unpleasant, and never the twain should meet, and the department remained in serious trouble for a long time,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., University professor and longtime director of the institute.

Though the mandate for a research institute was clear, faculty and administrators could not agree on who would have control over it.

Ewart Guinier, Class of 1933, chairman of the Afro-American department, thought his department should direct the institute — to him, the newfound department’s success would depend on the resources of the institute, and the institute’s scholarship would benefit from the department’s focus on Black studies.

But Nathan M. Pusey — Class of 1928, and Harvard’s president from 1953-1971 — and his administration wanted the University to control the institute.

John T. Dunlop, Dean of the Faculty, informed Guinier that the Ford Foundation — a private philanthropic organization — would fund the institute, but only if it were established on a University-wide basis. Guinier did not agree with the vision and refused to convene the faculty committee overseeing the institute’s development, which he chaired, until Pusey’s administration changed course.

Neither side relented, and for almost two years, from 1970-1972, progress toward the institute’s development stalled.

Pusey’s administration had faced pressure to get the institute running, but the standstill continued even as his successor, Bok, took office.

Bok resumed the push to get the institute off the ground when he appointed a planning committee for the institute in 1973, and later, an advisory board in 1974.

The committee and advisory board’s membership bases — which largely precluded Afro-American department faculty and students — signalled Bok’s growing certainty about making the Du Bois Institute an independent entity.

An Embattled Department

The hesitancy of several faculty members and administrators for the Du Bois Institute to be founded under the Afro-American department stemmed from concerns that the department was not academically rigorous or well-managed under Guinier’s leadership.

The department came under fire after its founding in 1969. Guinier himself was an unusual figure in academia — after having been the only Black student in his class at Harvard before transferring to the City College in New York to finish college, he spent much of his career as a labor activist and had an LL.M. from New York University but no Ph.D.

Immediately, faculty members thought it was malpractice that students in Guinier’s Afro-American department could vote on tenured faculty appointments within the department. They believed professors would not be willing to let students interrogate them.

There were also disagreements over the department’s academic rigor. While both Guinier and his opposition — faculty members outside of the department — thought Black students were not as well-prepared as white students for the academic rigor of Harvard, Guinier wanted to offer more remedial courses.

Gates characterized the disagreements as fundamental questions over how the department “should properly comport itself, who should be hired, what their credentials should be, what courses should be offered, how concentrations should be structured, and how tenure decisions should be arrived at.”

“I got the feeling that Professor Guinier felt under siege — that he was embattled,” he added.

In January of 1973, tensions boiled over. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a motion to restructure the department — discontinuing students’ ability to vote on faculty appointments and calling for the department to add more tenured faculty members — as well as specifying the Du Bois Institute be founded on a University-wide basis. Guinier, unsurprisingly, opposed the motion.

The faculty had made their stance clear, and Bok would be tasked with navigating the prevailing sentiment with the conflicting vision of the faculty within the department.

Bok’s Recourse

Just two months after the faculty vote, Bok appointed a seven-member planning committee for the institute, which was chaired by Walter Leonard, special assistant to Bok, and consisted of several professors, including Guinier and Preston N. Williams, a professor in Religion.

In December of 1973, the committee proposed several recommendations: calling for a multimillion-dollar capital fund for the institute, an advisory board composed of Harvard faculty and “other members of the black community,” and a director to lead the institute.

Guinier and his student supporters vehemently opposed the proposal because it did not state that the institute would have any connections to the Afro-American department.

But Bok seemed to be taking the side of faculty outside the department. When he established a University-wide advisory board for the institute in September of 1974, he did not choose any Afro-American department faculty members — leaving Guinier furious.

In a letter to Bok, Guinier alleged that Bok’s administration had committed “glaring violations” because he believed the 1969 faculty legislation — which stated that the institute should be run by the executive committee of the Afro-American department — was a promise for department representation in the institute’s planning.

Bok turned to his advisory board for guidance after Guinier’s criticism.

In particular, Williams said he crafted a separate report for Bok after consulting with people involved in the controversy, which convinced the president to follow through with founding the Du Bois Institute entirely independently of the Afro-American department.

“I created the document after that set of discussions and presented it to Derek Bok and that brought the Du Bois Institute into existence,” Williams said.

“The institute came into existence after I recommended the severing of it from the department,” he said.

He said he thought splitting the institute from the department would cause “some anxiety,” but that the two entities would ultimately come back together.

After private meetings with Bok in the months leading up to May of 1975 — when the institute was officially founded — Williams said Bok accepted his proposal.

“Rightly or wrongly, I believe, if I had not taken care of that problem that Derek

Bok inherited, there may not have been a Du Bois Center,” Williams said.

Williams, who served as the institute’s director from 1975-1977, said he didn’t know all of the factors Bok had taken under consideration or what ultimately tipped the scales, but “I can only indicate that the action that he took was not taken until after he received the report from me.”

Bok declined to be interviewed for this story, writing that he could not recall specific details on how the Du Bois Institute was founded.

Gates said the institute’s independence from the department was an “act of protest against the practices that were unfolding in this brand new department of Afro-American Studies.”

The Birth of the Du Bois Institute

As Bok finalized where to house the Du Bois Institute, his advisory board was negotiating how to fund it. In January of 1975, the board obtained the institute’s first grant — $72,000 from the Henry Luce Foundation of New York to support graduate students’ dissertation work.

The funding paved the way for the advisory board to announce four fellowships, $5,800 each, for graduate students pursuing Ph.D. theses in fields “relating to Afro-American studies,” in May of 1975. The board solicited applications and started awarding the fellowships.

After six years of drawn-out controversy, the institute had finally come to life.

“The institute is now a reality,” Andrew F. Brimmer, then-chairman of the advisory board, said on May 1, 1975.

But controversies persisted in the months and years to come. Students inspired by Guinier held protests and occupied Massachusetts Hall to protest the institute’s detachment from the Afro-American department and lack of undergraduate representation.

After years of conflict, the department and institute were eventually reunited in 1980 under the leadership of Nathan I. Huggins, who served as chairman of the Afro-American Studies department and director of the Du Bois Institute.

While Gates recalled stories about the “bitterness and anger among the two factions” while the Du Bois Institute still operated on its own, he said the institute thrived in its early years because of Higgins’ scholarship and its awarding of fellowships to leading scholars.

And not even the limited space the Du Bois Institute had could deter its momentum, Gates said.

“Although it didn’t have, shall we say, adequate space — it was housed in the basement of Canaday Hall — the Du Bois Institute, overnight, became the leading research institute in the field of African American studies in the United States,” he added.

—Staff writer Claire Jiang can be reached at claire.jiang@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @_clairejiang_.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.