Thirty years after its founding, the Afro-American studies department has become one of the best in the nation--an unexpected feat, considering its controversial creation.

The department's inception represented a major coup for student activists, whose reforms rode a wave of enthusiasm for change that transformed much of the University.

In succeeding decades, students at Harvard and across the nation broadened their protest to include a call for ethnic studies departments, institutional structures to support the study of the various ethnicities that make up our national population.

But in spite of a major nationwide push in 1995, the movement for an ethnic studies department at Harvard has stalled.

In May of that year, students on the Academic Affairs Committee of the Harvard Foundation for Race and Intercultural Relations completed a comprehensive report advocating the creation of an ethnic studies concentration.

But Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles and then-chair of the committee on ethnic studies, Jorge Dominguez, responded with a letter saying "[t]he creation of narrowly-defined administrative or curricular entities in the FAS would be misguided."

Today, only a handful of students and scholars are interested in fighting for ethnic studies as a department. Others claim the study of American ethnicity should take place within existing disciplines.

Harvard now boasts a Latino Studies Initiative and a South Asian Studies Initiative, among other groups, but the goals of these groups are different, and those who support ethnic studies no longer present a united front.

The Last Great Push