When ““Skip’’ Gates arrived to chair the Afro-Am department in 1991, it was an academic wasteland – ““a corpse,’’ he says – with a handful of students and just one professor, who happened to be white. Gates, a literary critic whose prodigious energies have made him a force inside and outside academia, set out to attract a ““dream team’’ of scholars to Cambridge, Mass. Last week the team landed another faculty superstar: sociologist William Julius Wilson, whose writings on race and economics have informed public-policy debate for two decades, is leaving the University of Chicago for Harvard. ““We now have one of the finest groups of academics dedicated to the study of Afro-American life and culture in history,’’ says Gates.
Though synergy has proved elusive for many institutions, the concept was critical in luring Wilson. He and other department luminaries call themselves ““progressives’’ – ““serious about the life of the mind and about intervening in the public affairs of the country,’’ explains philosopher Cornel West, who came to Harvard from Princeton in 1994. Wilson, 60, has resisted Harvard before, but believes he no longer has that luxury. He thinks the country requires a ““community of scholars’’ to fuel national debate. ““Bold, new, comprehensive initiatives are urgently needed to address the growing problems of poverty and joblessness in the inner cities,’’ he says. His faith in the power of collaboration answers critics who see the move – Harvard’s gain, Chicago’s loss – as a wash for black scholarship. ““I’m convinced,’’ says Harvard provost Albert Carnesale, ““that the sum of the whole will prove greater than the sum of the parts.''
Wilson will assume a chair at the Kennedy School of Government, an institution already replete with famous academics. But his joint appointment at Afro-American studies reflects the growing credibility of the discipline. Afro-Am, says Gates, ““has a role to play not as a self-esteem factory or as a place where people harbor hatred and anger, but as a new academic field.’’ Some of the most important work will take place at Gates’s dinner table, where his team gathers regularly. It was there last spring that he asked each person to stand and speak to Wilson ““from the heart’’ on why it was imperative he come to Harvard. It worked – and now, with Wilson aboard, it probably will work again.
