Since They Parted Ways

By the time his department’s offices in the Barker Center flooded over the summer, it seemed as if Skip Gates’ troubles had reached Biblical proportions.

It hasn’t been an easy three years for the long-time Chair of African and African-American Studies (AAAS). The department that Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. had turned into a Harvard institution and arguably the best field of its kind in the world has recently lost some of its brightest academic stars. Cynical commentators have called it the end of an era.

But these days, Gates is nothing if not optimistic as he prepares to vacate his post this June. Despite losses that have superficially damaged the department’s reputation, a closer look reveals that it is stronger and more sophisticated than ever. From the AAAS family’s increased focus on African Studies, to the opening of a newly unified Du Bois Institute (the department’s research arm), to the five recently-extended tenure offers to new professors, Gates is confident that he will finish his 15 years as Department Chair triumphantly.

“There is only excitement,” he says, “because Afro-Am is back. Afro-Am is black, and Afro-Am is back.”

THE HOUSE THAT GATES BUILT

The department of African-American Studies celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2004. Although Af-Am has now been a fixture at Harvard for a generation, it wasn’t until 1991, when Gates took charge as Department Chair, that it truly embarked on its rise to greatness.

President Neil L. Rudenstine, who served at the helm of the University from 1991 to 2001, gave Gates carte blanche to build the best Af-Am Studies Department in the world. With the President’s stamp of approval, Gates embarked on the task of recruiting the best scholars he could find.

One-by-one, Gates checked names off the fantasy list he had first jotted down for Rudenstine over lunch in ’91.

“Professor Gates is a prodigious recruiter,” says Karen C.C. Dalton, the current Assistant Director of the Du Bois Institute. “We’re incredibly fortunate to be able to attract really top-flight people, and in the end, when you’ve got great minds and great energy, good things happen.”

“Good things” is an understatement. From 1993 to 2001, the department could do no wrong under the leadership of Gates, former Carswell Professor K. Anthony Appiah, and former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74. More than 500 students regularly packed West’s introductory course in Afro-American Studies, Af-Am 10, eager to experience his dynamic lectures. Gates palled around with Bill Clinton (the man whom Toni Morrison referred to as our first black president). Gates, West, and the whole Af-Am team were an academic powerhouse.

But this “Dream Team” was short-lived. West decamped to Princeton after a very public spat with University President Lawrence H. Summers in 2002, and Appiah, who had announced his resignation before West did, accompanied him. Then, last year, Tishman Professor Lawrence D. Bobo left for Stanford with his wife, Professor Marcyliena Morgan, after Summers denied her tenure. Professor Gwendolyn Du Bois Shaw, meanwhile, left to be a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Finally, after Professor Michael C. Dawson returned to the University of Chicago this fall, the bloodletting was over.

Through it all, Gates was the department’s rock. He had been offered a spot at Princeton, like West and Appiah, but instead of jumping ship, chose to stay home and rebuild his relatively tattered department.

Through it all, Gates was the department’s rock. He had been offered a spot at Princeton, like West and Appiah, but instead of jumping ship, chose to stay home and rebuild his relatively tattered department. Happily, three years after deciding to stay on, the House that Gates Built is as sturdy and inviting as ever.

LOOKING TOWARDS AFRICA

Overshadowed by the personnel issues that beset AAAS, several hugely important developments within the department have gone largely unnoticed. The most crucial of these is the department’s increased focus on the African side of AAAS, which inspired a formal name change in 2003.

Gates insists that the increased emphasis on African studies reflects his master strategy for the department. “It was always my plan that we would build in Af-Am Studies first,” he says, “And then build in African Studies.”

Step one was to create an official faculty of African Studies. There had long been a committee devoted to the continent, but unlike broader committees like Social Studies, this field demanded a professorial team of its own.

“A committee can’t make faculty appointments, it can’t really mount courses,” says Watts Professor of Music Kay K. Shelemay. African-American Studies provided “a very logical home” for African Studies.

Professor of English and current AAAS Director of Undergraduate Studies John Stauffer believes that the name change “really reflected a direction that the department had already been taking for a while. Intellectually, pedagogically, institutionally, it makes a lot of sense.”

But what’s in a name, anyway? Step two was to organize a program in African languages, a field that had previously been sorely neglected at Harvard. Enter John M. Mugane, who came from Kenya to study at the Universities of Arizona and Ohio as a graduate student in 1988. Gates plucked him from Ohio’s ranks in 2003. Mugane is now a Senior Preceptor in the department, and the Director of the African Language Program. He is an embodiment of the department’s new tenor.

Mugane believes that “there is no way you can go and transform a place if you can’t speak to the people.” He encourages students to focus their attention on learning the languages that will help them foster a “dialogue” with Africa, either by eventually studying abroad in Africa or by simply better-appreciating African culture.

Mugane had to pick from among more than 2000 African languages to create a cohesive program. “You cannot be broad enough,” he says. “But at the same time, you offer as many language courses as are needed by Harvard for academic reasons.” The list was pared down to three, and today, undergraduates are encouraged to choose from among Swahili, Yoruba, and Twi. That said, if you demonstrate a need to take another language, Mugane will find you a tutor.

It’s a program that is decidedly geared toward the interests of students, and those who have taken language courses cannot help but gush.

For Chevelle L. Dixon ’07, the new opportunity to learn African languages is what attracted her to AAAS in the first place. “Professor Mugane is really awesome,” she says. “He not only challenged me to look at things I was interested in, but also in a new perspective. Now, I’m going to be studying abroad in Kenya.”

Kwame Owusu-Kesse ’06 raves about his course in the West-African language Twi. “It’s the language that’s spoken at my home, but I was never taught it,” he says. “And now I might have an opportunity to actually communicate with my family in a way that they would love.”

A MISSION THAT SPANS THE ATLANTIC

For Mugane, “The whole theme of the African Studies concentration and committee…is transforming Africa through knowledge.” His sentiments reflect what many in the department see as a larger social mission. West, with his outspoken politics, was the first to bring this activist bent to AAAS. Three years since his departure, the impulse for social action continues to resonate with the department’s faculty, but it has been incorporated more subtly into the larger curriculum.

In Africa, Professor Shelemay sees a continent “that has a lot of pressing needs and that has tended to be less supported by everything from foreign aid to political attention.” Even though she is a music professor, she believes “you can’t just think about what people sing, you have to think about what they eat and how they live.”

The social mission of AAAS continues to serve as an important motivator for students and faculty.

“Positive social change is part of my agenda,” says concentrator Bethany L. Hoag ’06. “I want to go back to Africa and work there.”

Stauffer believes that for the academic world at large, scholars are meant to serve as “beacons” that can influence policymakers. In that sense, the public prominence of AAAS dovetails with its larger social mission. Along with his social awareness, the distinction that West helped bring to the department continues to lend its scholars unique opportunities to have their voices heard by an international audience.

RESEARCH UNDER ONE ROOF

Blocks from the Barker Center, the voices are softer, but the message is just as resounding. Tucked away in a nondescript Brattle Square office building at 104 Mt. Auburn St. is a brand-new facility that specializes in research and fellowships on African and African-American Studies.

Though the art is still being hung on the walls and some of the construction debris remains, it’s easy to envision this new Du Bois Institute as a truly dynamic research environment.

After he steps down as Department Chair at the end of this year, Gates will continue to serve as the Director of the Institute, which will host the grand opening of its new facility on November 16. Gates is particularly pumped about the Institute’s new home because it brings together all of AAAS’ disparate research projects, previously scattered around campus.

Dalton, Assistant Director and longtime affiliate of the Institute, echoes Gates’ enthusiasm. “We’ve never had the opportunity to have the sort of synergy that comes when you have intellectual pursuits within proximity of each other,” she says. “Now we have that for the first time, and so it’s a really exciting time for us.”

The new Institute will house office space for a yearly-rotating group of 12 to 15 fellows in African and African-American research. It will also be home to a gallery space and play host to several long-term research initiatives, including Dalton’s own pet project, the Images of Black and Western Art Research Project and Photo Archive, as well as the African-American National Biography Project. The Institute will also serve as the hub of a new publication, the Du Bois Review: Social Science of Race, to be edited by Lawrence Bobo and Michael Dawson, who continue to be cozy with the Du Bois despite their relocation to Stanford.

NEW ARRIVALS IN THE FAMILY

Although those two beacons of social science are no longer affiliated with Harvard as faculty members, Gates is working hard to fill in the gaps left by the multiple losses the department has endured.

“We planned this carefully all spring,” he says. “It took us nine months and we decided that once Bobo and Morgan announced they would leave, that the department would be in a crisis if we didn’t act and act expeditiously.”

After all, this could not be Skip Gates’ grand farewell tour if he did not do exactly what he’s been doing since he got here 15 years ago: making faculty appointments. So the man went to work.

In his recruiting efforts, Gates was interested in “reforming [the department] for a new identity.”

“Just as we now have the finest department of Af-Am Studies,” he says, displaying his infectious bravado, “Once we recruit these people…Harvard will also be the leading center for African Studies in the United States.”

Gates has confirmed that one new faculty member, James Sidanius, currently at UCLA, has already accepted a tenure offer to come to Harvard, and, according to several AAAS faculty members, four others have tenure offers on the table.

Sidanius will come to Harvard next year with a joint appointment in Psychology and AAAS. The social and political psychologist took his time mulling over the decision, but ultimately, he says, “The temptation to join such a wonderful group was just too great to resist.”

As always, the credit really goes to Gates and his talents as a recruiter. Says Sidanius, “I’ve had conversations with Skip Gates, and Skip is hard to say no to. He assured me that this was really the place I needed to be.”

Like all the other tenure offers on the table, Sidanius’ appointment is meant to broaden the academic scope of the department—he specializes in the psychology of discrimination and race. According to Shelemay, the new potential faculty members “all either add new perspectives, fill gaps that we think we have, or just add another point of view.”

The other professors who have been offered tenure specialize in an array of fields. Brent H. Edwards, currently at Rutgers, is an expert on African-American literature. Stanford political scientist Claudine Gay is especially concerned with minority politics. Saidiya Hartman, currently a UC-Berkeley English professor, specializes in feminism and psychoanalysis in African-American contexts, as well as visual arts in African-American culture. Finally, Jacob K. Olupuna, of UC-Davis, studies African traditional religion, West African society and culture, and African religion in the Americas.

Due to the pending nature of their tenure offers, these four professors declined to comment for this story. And although no one can say for sure whether all five will come on board, most within the department are extremely optimistic. “No one has a crystal ball,” says Stauffer, “but they certainly seem very excited.”

Gates, too, is sanguine: “Sidanius is the first one sequentially that we offered a job to, so we’re right on schedule.”

What is particularly special about these five new faculty appointments is that they come at a time when the university administration has placed broad “restrictions in hiring,” according to Stauffer. In that light, getting through five appointments is “a huge success story,” he says.

Although it was a sticky tenure dispute with President Summers that spurred the departures of Morgan and Bobo, Gates now has only the most sincere praise to offer the Pres. “Five African-American scholars under President Summers have been offered tenure at Harvard since last spring,” he says. “Summers has really stepped up to the plate in terms of his commitment to sustaining the number one status of the department. He’s been a pleasure to work with.”

STRONGER FOUNDATIONS THAN EVER

Even as famed scholars have left, new ones are on the way, there is reason enough to be optimistic about the future of a department that still retains luminaries like Gates, Jamaica Kincaid, and Guyser University Professor William Julius Wilson. In addition to the new faculty appointments, the increased focus on African Studies and the opening of a unified Du Bois Institute reflect a department that is primed for the future.

During the Cornel West era, Harvard Af-Am was the precocious new kid on the block, a relative youngster wowing everybody in the academic world. Now, although West is gone, AAAS finds itself at the dawn of a new era, having broadened its scope and unified its disciplines.

The new developments within the department only reinforce the qualities that made AAAS so vibrant in the first place, qualities like flexibility, social awareness, and a collection of dynamic personalities.

Ultimately, however, the most succinct and clear explanation for the department’s success comes from its rock, the incomparable Skip Gates:

“Afro-Am is hot, baby.”

—Lena Chen contributed to the reporting of this story.