Collecting the Best - Is It for the Best?

When Henry Louis Gates Jr. became chair of the Afro-American studies department in 1991, he made luring the renowned University of Chicago professor William Julius Wilson to Cambridge one of his priorities.

Shortly after Gates became chair, he flew to Chicago for lunch with Wilson. Over the next five years, each time Gates saw Wilson, he would ask Wilson when he planned to trade Hyde Park for Harvard Square.

Finally, in 1995, in a discussion of race and politics in the living room of Vice President Al Gore '69, Wilson told Gates that he might be ready to move. Gates quickly invited Wilson and Harvard's entire Afro-Am. department to a dinner party at his home.

Less than one year later, Wilson's appointment as Malcolm Wiener professor of social policy at the Kennedy School of Government was announced.

Wilson is the most recent addition to Harvard's star collection of scholars in Afro-American studies. Joining him are Professor of Philosophy K. Anthony Appiah; Professor of the Philosophy of Religion Cornel West '74, snagged from Princeton in 1995; the recently imported Lawrence D. Bobo, formerly of the University of California at Los Angeles and Visiting Lecturer on Afro-American Studies Jamaica Kincaid.

But for all the credit Gates has received for bringing his team together, few have openly questioned if this concentration of black academia has a downside. Has Harvard been greedy in depleting Afro-Am. departments nationwide? And is the field of Afro-American studies worse off for it?

Scholarly Depletion

Harvard's gain is another university's loss, and numerous African-American studies departments have been losing of late. Yet scholars at the schools left behind say they are not angry at Harvard for snatching their biggest names.

Arnold Rampersad, who stepped into West's shoes as director of Princeton's African-American Studies committee, says an institution cannot be blamed for trying to attract top faculty.

West was treasured at Princeton, Rampersad says, personally teaching more than half of African-American studies students.

"It was a big loss and you never quite get over a loss like that," he says. "But it's not an appropriate occasion for anger."

At the University of Chicago, meanwhile, which lost Wilson to Harvard this year, Co-Chair of the Committee on African and African-American Studies Kenneth Warren is similarly resigned.

"I don't think that Harvard or any of the individuals who are a part of that institution can be faulted for trying to build the strongest department," Warren says.

Gates' persistent luring of Wilson, Warren says, is accepted practice in American academia.

"I don't think there's anything unique about Afro-Am that it should be excepted from the kind of give-and-take" of other disciplines, he says. "There was nothing at all unusual or questionable about [Wilson's] decision."

Not All Rosy

While putting together a department of high-profile scholars may not itself be problematic, some say that such a department does then threaten to marginalize similar departments at other universities.

"The problem emerges when there is a popular perception that the only interesting things going on in a field are coming from a particular institution that is able to garner a lot of attention in the media," Warren says.

Although Harvard cannot be faulted for accumulating high-profile scholars, agrees Professor Eddy L. Harris of Washington University in St. Louis, there may be harmful side effects.

"My problem with [Harvard's] getting all that attention is that...the general public might think that that's the most important African-American studies department, or that they have a lock on African-American intelligentsia," says Harris, visiting professor of African and African-American studies at Washington.

Given that "Skip Gates has a piece show up in The New Yorker every 15 minutes," Harris says, Americans may believe that all the important work in Afro-American studies transpires in Cambridge.

"There are equally wonderful guys around at my university," he says. "Other voices and other minds bring different points of view, so that people don't think that black America is some big monolith, marching lock and step behind Skip Gates and company."

Collaborative Benefits

But Appiah contends that the media attention given Harvard's Afro-Am. department is not unique to his field.

"Harvard gets lots more coverage than other people in lots of areas," he writes in an e-mail, citing the prevalence with which Harvard's law and medical schools are quoted in the media. "I don't know how to decide what's fair in this context...but it is no doubt out of proportion to our real importance in Afro-American Studies as in other fields."

"Only if you think there's a real dearth of scholarly merit in Afro-American [studies] (so that concentration means there's nobody any good anywhere else--which is a preposterous notion) is this field different from any other," he adds.

Indeed, Gates, who could not be reached for comment, draws personal praise from many colleagues for his work in assembling the Harvard department.

Rampersad calls Gates "a very rare and singular individual."

"It's not clear to me that anybody else could have done what he did," he says. "I think Professor Gates deserves all the credit in the world."

Gates' "dream team" has been profiled in The New York Times and other publications, and has been widely acclaimed for bringing together America's foremost black intellectuals.

"When I visited Harvard, I was so excited at the thought of working around all of those scholars," Wilson said in explaining his decision to leave Chicago.

Bobo cited similar reasoning for his decision to leave UCLA.

"It really is the combination of people who are converging on Cambridge at the moment," he told The Crimson in January.

According to Appiah, extended collaboration among Harvard's Afro-Am department, professors has enabled a fuller understanding of each other's work.

"I think an inter-disciplinary community of first-rate people from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical positions is extremely exciting and makes all of our work more interesting," he writes.

Many Afro-Am. professors outside of Harvard say the University's concentrated scholarship also helps to raise consciousness about the field.

"The publicity that the Harvard department has received has always been in conjunction with weighty and substantial projects, such as the Norton volume of African-American literature," Rampersad says, referring to a major work recently edited by Gates. "It simply raises the visibility and the prestige of the field and we all benefit from it."

Julius Nyang-oro, chair of the department of African and Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, says Harvard's work has had a positive effect on his department.

"It's a very good idea to have all those big names in one place," Nyang-oro says. "It does expose African-American studies to an audience it might not otherwise be exposed to."

Nyang-oro says Harvard's program may also have a positive "snowballing effect" by attracting graduate students to the field who then become scholars in their own right, and by pressuring other universities to devote more resources to Afro-American studies.

"If Harvard is paying adequately to the high-profile professors, it means we can make a claim to our own department that they cannot continue to hire professors without tenure," he says. "You cannot afford to be left too far behind Harvard."

Cedric J. Robinson, chair of black studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, says Harvard's commitment to the field helps struggling departments nationwide in their fight for survival.

"The fact that Harvard is now considering a doctoral program in the field is useful to us in convincing and persuading our regents that such programs have academic illegitimacy," he says.

Yet even some of Gates' strongest supporters say the work done at Harvard may be less purely academic than at other institutions.

Professor Ralph Austen of the University of Chicago says Harvard's program is unusually good, but only in a certain way.

"Harvard had a very bad department for a very long time," he says. "What they're doing now is very good, in a public way as public intellectuals, rather than in a strictly academic way."

According to Robinson, Harvard may be key to producing researchers in Afro-American studies, but at the moment, he says, "The important scholars are still in a large part not at Harvard."

Moreover, Robinson argues that the public intellectual has a particular and important role to play in the dissemination of African-American studies.

"There will be some people whose principal role is the presentation of the research and not the research itself," he says. "People appreciate that they are in effect performing a very significant role in the black studies field."

"With maybe one or two exceptions, the strongest research and the most persistent research will be going on outside of Harvard," he adds. "Being a public intellectual takes up a great amount of time and energy."

A Shifty Paradigm

Some professors say that in its public acclaim, the Harvard department threatens to elevate one paradigm of inquiry into Afro-American studies above all others.

"The one concern that all of us have is that no single paradigm should dominate black studies," Robinson says. "It has happened with every discipline in the history of academia and Harvard is in great danger there."

Warren says that Harvard's program seems to be guided by a concern "to advise more or less directly those in a position to set government policy with regard to racial issues."

Several professors cite Wilson's work as an example of Harvard research liable to be taken dogmatically.

"The recent work that Wilson has done has been presented publicly as if it represents a kind of consensus on race and social policy," Warren says. "It represents one point of view. It doesn't represent anything like a consensus."

Robinson says Wilson may be popular at Harvard because he falls within the "political mainstream" and because of the strength of his research, even if his conclusions are debatable.

"Most of ny colleagues in black studies wouldn't find Wilson's interpretations that powerful, but his research is very important," Robinson says.

Harris, the Washington professor, says he recognizes the benefits Harvard's well-known Afro-American studies department may hold for other departments nationwide, notably in making the field more popular among students.

But still he is concerned that Harvard's department--because of the Harvard name and the resources at its disposal--may inevitably be a bit too greedy.

"My fear is that [the department] is like an NBA team with no salary cap, or if you have George Steinbrenner dollars in the New York City market, and you attract the stars and leave the crumbs for everyone else," he says. "That is a problem."