Harvard May Offer Position To Colleague Of Gates

Just two weeks after Afro-Am nabbed Duke University's Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard may be primed to strike again.

The University may offer a tenured post to K. Anthony Appiah, a Duke philosopher and long-time colleague of Gates, who will arrive in Cambridge next fall to chair Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department.

For Appiah, who studies African and African-American philosophy, Harvard would be the next logical step. Like Gates, Appiah has changed schools several times in his career. But the similarities do not end there.

Moving Together

After attending Cambridge University together, Gates and Appiah both taught at Yale University. Then they went to Cornell University. Then they went to Duke. The two have taught at the North Carolina school for little over one year.

Although Afro-Am has yet to vote on a potential senior appointment for Appiah, the philosopher has an apparant ally in department Chair Barbara E. Johnson.

"I don't know what the executive committee will decide," Johnson said. But, the English professor added, Appiah has her support. "I think it will be great," she said.

"He and professor Gates make a very good team," said Johnson.

Appiah was in town yesterday and Wednesday to give two talks before members of the Afro-Am and Philosophy Departments at Harvard's Center for Literary and Cultural Studies. Such lectures traditionally indicate a school's interest in a candidate. They are typically used to help faculty decide whether to make an offer or not.

Among those that turned out to hear the lectures were Johnson, acting Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Phyllis Keller, Professor of Sociology Orlando Patterson and Robert Nozick, Porter professor of Philosophy.

The first lecture touched on aspects of African thought and what Appiah termed critical ethnographic philosphy, while the second focused on more specific philisophical questions, such as decision-making problems.

Appiah has published more than seven books, including For Truth in Semantics and Assertation and Conditionals. The Duke philosopher's most recent book is Avenging Angel, a mystery