“Morgan’s record already has shown her scholarship will be sorely missed,” he said. He pointed out that Morgan, a leader in the field of African American culture and language and the founder and director of the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute, was formerly awarded tenure at UCLA, and now has been awarded tenure at “Stanford, an institution as fine as Harvard.”
Dawson also said that this affair will undermine the Af-Am department’s ability to retain faculty members and bring in new ones. He said it will be difficult to recruit new professors because “there is a perception outside the University that Harvard is not as welcoming to African American studies as it was in the past.”
Dawson’s words echo issues raised during the West-Summers dispute of 2002.
In Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, published this year, West recalls the clash and accuses Summers of not showing enough regard for the Af-Am department. He writes of rumors he heard that Summers “had reputedly made remarks about putting the famous Afro-American Studies Department in its place” and “had held meetings with department heads and deliberately skipped over the Afro-American Studies head, Professor Gates.”
West also writes that “Summers revealed that he has a great unease about academics engaging the larger culture and society—especially the youths of hip-hop culture and democratic movements of dissent and resistance.”
When asked in a recent Crimson interview about West’s characterization of their exchange, Summers said, “The past is the past. Everybody has their own recollections.” He declined to comment further.
A DEPARTMENT IN DECLINE?
When pressed on his own future within the Af-Am department, Dawson, who is on leave this year, said he was “talking to people to see what the future of the department is.”
But Gates said he has “every intention of being a permanent part of the Harvard faculty,” and that he will lead the department in a new round of recruiting that will continue to draw top professors.
“You can’t literally replace people like Bobo and Morgan,” but other capable professors will be found to “fill in” the necessary holes, he said, adding that “[Harvard] Afro-Am retains its number one status” despite the losses.
But sociology department chair Waters stressed her disappointment that Bobo is departing.
“The sociology department is very upset about this. This is a major loss for us. Professor Bobo is a superstar.…He’s just wonderful in every single way,” she said. “He’s totally irreplaceable. He’s a unique person who we were so fortunate to have, and we are very, very upset at the loss. Very.”
Bobo and Morgan will teach the Fall courses they are listed as offering in the 2004-2005 FAS Courses of Instruction, but they will not offer the combined five spring term courses for which they are slated, including Bobo’s African and African American Studies 97b, “Topics in African American History and Society: Mass Incarceration and the Future of Black America,” a tutorial required of all concentrators. Gates said the tutorial would be assigned to another professor.
—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.