Populating Afro-Am

Two years ago Harvard approached three prominent Afro-American historians with offers usually considered too good to refuse: tenure--in this case in the University's ten-year-old Afro-American Studies Department.

Since, as one Faculty member noted last week, "the assumption has always been that if Harvard offers someone a position they will come," University officials were duly surprised when two of the three scholars promptly rejected the offers.

Now Harvard is in the market again--searching this time for professors of literature and "a social science other than history." And despite the 1980 rejections, officials are confident that they will be able to fill the posts.

"People two years ago might have had questions about whether the department would continue to exist because of political upheavals coming out of the past," Nathan I. Huggins, Dubois Professor of History and Afro-American Studies and chairman of the Afro-Am department, said last week.

But since then, Huggins added, the department has attained "greater stability" because of "quite clear support" from Dean Rosovsky and President Bok. This support as well as his own decision to leave a tenured position in history at Columbia University and come to Harvard should encourage other senior scholars in the field to follow.

The Afro-Am department has traditionally had more difficulty attracting Faculty members than other departments, Huggins said, adding that the interdisciplinary nature of the program makes many potential candidates wary.

Although History and Literature and Social Studies are also interdisciplinary programs, both are committees that extensively utilize Faculty members in other departments. Many other universities handle Afro-American studies the same way, Huggins said.

Thomas E. Crooks, special assistant to Rosovsky, yesterday stressed the urgency of the Afro-Am Department's search, adding that the department--which lost one full professor and several non-tenured Faculty members last year--is critically understaffed.

The department now has two tenured members--one half-time professor and one jointly appointed to the Music Department.