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Charles Hamilton Houston quote

 
  News & Views
 

Black Studies at the Crossroads: A Discussion With Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. Upon appointing Professor Gates to this position, interim Harvard president Derek Bok said that, since coming to Cambridge in 1991, Gates took “a field of study that was floundering at Harvard and transformed it into the leading department of its kind.”

Sociologist William Julius Wilson, whom Gates recruited to come to Harvard from the University of Chicago, states, “In all my years as an academic, I have not known anyone who could match his intellectual leadership and interpersonal skills. He just has an amazing ability to build. He has done more to create a positive image for African-American studies than any other scholar in the world.”

A native of West Virginia, Gates is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University. Studying under Wole Soyinka, he earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in English literature from Cambridge University. In 1981 he won a MacArthur Foundation genius award. Before coming to Harvard he was a member of the faculty at Yale, Cornell, and Duke.

Since coming to Harvard in 1991, not only has Gates been the driving force in building the African and African-American studies department to the top of the academic heap, he has continued to be one of the most, if not the most, accomplished scholars in the field. He is a prolific writer, lecturer, editor, and television producer. He has authored several books including his most recent work, Finding Oprah’s Roots, which is about tracing the genealogy of African Americans back to their African ancestors. He has edited Encarta Africana, a CD-ROM encyclopedia, the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, and most recently the Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This notable book by Harriet Beecher Stowe opened the eyes of many white Americans to the horrors of slavery. In the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies than any other book with the exception of the Bible.

Gates has also taken on the role as a major sleuth pursuing clues on the origins of African-American literature. As an assistant professor at Yale in 1982, Gates came across an old book titled Our Nig authored by Harriet E. Wilson. Gates was able to determine that the author was a free black woman who published the work in 1859. He later came across a manuscript with the title of The Bondwoman’s Narrative written by Hannah Crafts. The manuscript says that Crafts escaped from slavery in North Carolina and penned the work in 1857. To date, Professor Gates has found no historical record of a woman named Hannah Crafts but has corroborated some of the events that the author describes in the book.

Not only is Gates a prolific writer and scholar but his work is highly regarded by his peers. Professor Gates often heads the field in JBHE’s annual citation rate count for black scholars in the humanities. And he also is highly cited by scholars who publish in social science journals. Professor Gates holds 44 honorary degrees, the National Humanities Medal, and an American Book Award. He has been named one of the 25 most influential Americans of any race by Time magazine.

Last summer Professor Gates stepped down as chair of the African and African-American studies department at Harvard. “Fifteen years is enough,” he said at the time. But now that he has relinquished the department chair, he continues to be active in the university and with a multitude of outside projects. Not even a series of painful leg operations has slowed him down.

Manning Marable, head of the black studies program at Columbia University, has disagreed with Gates on the proper course for black studies. But nevertheless Professor Marable says what Gates has accomplished “is a monumental achievement that is almost unparalleled in academe since World War II. His cutting-edge work has profoundly impacted not simply the field of African-American studies but, more broadly, scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences that critically examines the meaning of race in American life.”

JBHE sat with Professor Gates recently to discuss the current state of black studies at American colleges and universities. Gates reveals that many college administrators do not believe that black studies is a legitimate academic discipline and therefore are reluctant to grant the discipline the permanence of departmental status.

But Professor Gates is encouraged by the commitment of some universities — most notably the new black studies initiative announced by Princeton — to the future of black studies. He believes that a solid core of 10 to 15 black studies departments at America’s leading universities will be sufficient to maintain a strong academic future for black studies.

Here is our discussion of the current state of black studies and what the future holds for this academic discipline.

JBHE: Very few of the nation’s 25 highest-ranked universities have granted departmental status to black studies. Why do you think so many high-ranking universities have kept it as a program?

Professor Gates: On the one hand, at places such as Prince-ton and Harvard and Yale, the administrations have made dramatic commitments — impressive commitments — to the field as a discipline. The most recent example is that of Princeton, which is unprecedented. You have to remember that we have about 26 professors in the department here at Harvard, but the department grew incrementally over a long period of time.

At Princeton, on the other hand, here is a new commitment to 11 full-time faculty positions which translates into 22 joint appointments if they decide to go that way. There’s been nothing like that ever that I’m aware of. No administration has made a commitment as dramatic to African-American studies as has the administration at Princeton under the direction of Shirley Tilghman. And that’s quite impressive. It augers very well for the field.

A rising tide can indeed lift all boats, and I think professors and administrators in African-American studies throughout the country should be beating the door down to their president’s office and their provost’s office and saying, “Look at what Princeton is doing. Look at the commitment Harvard has made over the last 15 years. Look at what Yale is doing, etc.”

I think particularly once Princeton starts to raid other universities, which is how the game is played, at the senior level, I think that this will force administrations either to renew and reinvigorate their commitment to the field or else to indicate that they are not interested in sustaining their previous commitment. That’s where the problem lies. I think the future of the discipline is enormously complicated right now. We are at a real crossroads, because either universities will have to invest more resources to move programs into departments to offer, certainly, bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and Ph.D. programs, or they will say, We can’t compete anymore. And they will allow their programs to atrophy. And that’s what we have to be vigilant about.

I remember talking to my mentors, Charles Davis and John Blassingame, both of whom unfortunately are dead, and, this is in the late 1970s when we couldn’t even envision that Yale, which is where I was at the time, would allow us to become a department. And I remember Charles saying, “If by the year 2020 we have 10 stellar departments of African-American studies, then their labors, the labors of the founders of the discipline, the people who ran these departments and programs starting in 1969, would not have been in vain.” I never forgot that.

JBHE: Why is departmental status so important for black studies?

Professor Gates: The salient feature of any meaningful department of African-American studies must be the right to give its own tenure. Without that, it is not a serious player. If we have to go hat in hand to the English department or the sociology department and say, “Please hire this person we want to hire and then we can have half of him,” then you’re doomed from the very beginning. If you’re lucky, it works out, but you have no control.
The reason we were successful, the reason we have been so successful at Harvard, is that we have the right to make unilateral tenure appointments and very rarely during the 15 years as chair did a sister department say they weren’t interested. It happened once or twice, but it didn’t happen very often. You go in as an equal rather than as a subordinate. And that is the key thing.

JBHE: Why have university administrators been reluctant to go along with giving black studies departmental status?

Professor Gates: I think administrators have been reluctant to upgrade programs and departments because it signifies a permanent presence in the curriculum. It’s when they have to get off the proverbial pot and say African-American studies is as serious as the English department or the classics department.

JBHE: How important is it to have a commitment from the top levels of the administration?

Professor Gates: The miracle that happened, under Harvard president Neil Rudenstine, was that he actually believes to this day that African-American studies is as fundamental to the lifeblood of the liberal arts at Harvard University and anywhere else in the American academy as is English, history, sociology, or economics. That was an extraordinary commitment to the field on the part of one of the country’s truly great and visionary administrators. We all get a lot of credit for what we have done here, but having him as a president, as we learned when we then had to deal with Larry Summers, was a God-send. After driving Cornel West away, Summers ended up committing a tremendous amount of resources to our effort, particularly to the African component. But it must be remembered that he was under tremendous pressure to do so.

JBHE: Do you think the prospect of black studies hiring their own faculty scares administrators away from granting departmental status?

Professor Gates: Absolutely. But I don’t think it’s a fear of radicals, because frankly, how many black professors really qualify as being radical today? Thirty years ago it may have been the case. Today many university administrators don’t think African-American studies is a real field. I think there are still vestiges of racist thinking, and I can think of no more polite word for it. They think it was created as a result of student lobbying and student pressure, and very vulnerable administrators in the late 1960s succumbed to this pressure. Many of the black studies departments were created so that they would self-destruct. This was the case at Harvard. But it didn’t self-destruct and we are still here.

JBHE: What do you see on the horizon for the field of African-American studies?

Professor Gates: Now we can’t have a black studies commitment like the one at Princeton at every university in the United States. So the question is ultimately, where will the great centers of learning in African-American studies be located over the next 20 years? I think Charles Davis was right. If we have 10 great Ph.D.-granting entities, then our labors will not have been in vain. I hope there are more, but I want there to be at least 10, and I think we are very close to that now.

The key is the right to grant tenure and to have adequate financial support. This enables you to fund your graduate students and faculty research. This produces a great academic entity.

Many administrators are hoping that African-American studies will be folded into “ethnic studies.” But I think ethnic studies is one of the most bizarre entities in the history of the academy. The whole world other than Europe and the West fall, all people of color, fall into ethnics? What kind of department is that? Ethnic studies never made any intellectual sense to me.

JBHE: Recently the research firm Academic Analytics ranked doctoral programs in more than 100 disciplines. (See page 14 of this issue of JBHE.) Harvard came in first by a large margin in African-Americans studies. Michigan State was ranked second. Does this surprise you?

Professor Gates: I was very surprised at the position of some programs. First of all, the fact that they ranked our field is an index of how important we’ve become, but I cannot imagine that Princeton is not second to Harvard, quite frankly.

When you consider the citation index, when we had Cornel West and K. Anthony Appiah, along with William Julius Wilson, we dominated the social science citations. Now, Cornel and Anthony are at Princeton. If you look at the humanities, you had Cornel, Anthony, and me high on that citation list, and two of those people are now at Princeton. So just the move of Anthony Appiah and Cornel West to Princeton would place the university near the top of the citation rankings, a key component of the index for ranking doctoral programs. Harvard’s challenge is going to be to retain its No. 1 position as Princeton continues to develop.

JBHE: Are citation rankings really that important?

Professor Gates: I think professors in the field of African-American studies have to be more acutely aware of the importance of the citation index. One of the greatest services your journal performs is publishing the citation index. Until you did that, many people in the field didn’t even know it existed. But this is what administrators look at, certainly at Harvard. When they are determining raises for individual faculty, they ask, “How many citations did you get? What is your influence?”

We have been very stubborn about insisting on two books for our junior faculty, and even senior faculty. Sometimes, over the years, I’ve tried to recruit senior faculty. They would have one book and I’d say, “This is not going to fly until you publish a second book. You’re a great scholar, but we are very rigorous about this. When you publish your second book, you call me the day the manuscript is finished.” The number of books per faculty and the citation index, they are two of the crucial indices that I think are very important in ranking doctoral programs in African-American studies.

JBHE: What other things are important in building a strong black studies program?

Professor Gates: We are so deeply endowed at the Du Bois Institute, and the university’s financial commitment to the Ph.D. program and the department is very firm. It’s not going to go anywhere, so that won’t be a problem. But the question is growth.

Princeton will have a lot of energy; it will be attracting people. I hope they are very deliberate about the choices they make. When you’re starting off, you think nobody will come and you can’t believe that you can do it, so the tendency is not to aim high enough at the beginning. But it is important. That’s the lesson that Neil Rudenstine drummed into my head. Make a fantasy list; put Toni Morrison on the list, put Cornel West on the list; put William Julius Wilson on the list, even if they say they won’t come now, you can wear them down. And that’s what happened. Every year I talked to Cornel. Every year I talked to Bill Wilson, and eventually they came to Harvard. That’s what Princeton will have to do.

JBHE: The fact that Harvard and Princeton have a strong commitment and the funds to back it up, won’t that scare some other universities from trying to compete in the black studies area?

Professor Gates: That’s interesting. I don’t know. Do you think Harvard scares others from competing in fields like physics or chemistry? I mean this model is just what departments at these schools do. Once the administration decides that they want to develop deeply into a field, they put tremendous financial resources into it, whether it’s computer science or microbiology or whatever the field might be, and that tends to have the opposite effect among their peer institutions. It tends to make them more competitive. It’s counterintuitive but that’s how it works. If Harvard decides it wants to study the brain, for example, in an interdisciplinary fashion, which is what has been happening over the last few years, then other schools say, well, we need to study the brain too. That’s what I am hoping will happen with black studies.

There is no doubt that Neil Rudenstine’s commitment to African-American studies has filtered down during the 10 years he was president, and affected the attitude of presidents at the other major research institutions in the country  toward African-American studies. It gave it legitimacy in their eyes; if Harvard was doing it, well, we should do it too. And I think the fact that Princeton has now made this dramatic commitment will also have that impact. It won’t have the impact on places that don’t have resources. It will have that impact on places that do have resources.

JBHE: What role do you think students have in all this? Does having a strong black studies program make a huge impact on recruiting top black students?

Professor Gates: The black student yield at Harvard is as high as it’s ever been and I think one reason — the reasons are complex — but one reason is the presence of a strong department of African-American studies. I believe it makes parents more comfortable knowing that the field, and by extension their identity and the identity of their child, is taken seriously here. It matters to me, as a parent. So I would imagine it would matter to other parents. At least that’s what I tell myself. As soon as I see figures on the black student yield, I fire off a note to the president, the provost, and the dean saying, see, that’s because of us. I have no idea if it’s true, but I’d like to believe that it is.

JBHE: Do you encourage black students who enter Harvard to major in African-American studies?

Professor Gates: Every year I try to speak during freshman week to all the black students and their parents. One of the things I say, curiously enough, is I don’t care if you major in African-American studies. I just want you to take one course, preferably a history course, in African-American studies. When Cornel was here, I would say I want you to take Cornel West’s introductory course, because I want you to understand the history of racism, the history of antiblack racism. I recommend this to incoming black students because, sooner or later, no matter what their major, they, as black people functioning in America, will bump their heads against this barrier and they won’t know what it is unless they have studied it. And that barrier is called antiblack racism. It is important to their survival that they know what it is and how to recover from that injury, because it is a wound that will be inflicted on all of us and all of our people.

JBHE: Do you recommend white students take black studies courses?

Professor Gates: When Cornel was here we were teaching a thousand kids a semester. Most of them by definition had to be white. It’s a subject. Unless it’s a valid academic subject that everyone can study and everyone can teach, then it’s not a real academic subject. If someone said I couldn’t teach Shakespeare because I am not of Anglo-Saxon descent, we would launch a campaign and try to get him fired for being a racist. The same logic holds in reverse for black studies. You’re not inherently a good student in African-American studies because you’re black. In fact, often, black people think they know it already or somehow it’s intuitive. But they have to learn that it’s a subject and they have to approach it rigorously, just like they do any other subject.

JBHE: Why do you think very few historically black colleges and universities have African-American studies programs?

Professor Gates: I think this is one of the biggest mistakes in the history of the historically black colleges and universities. I think a place like Howard or Morehouse or Spelman should have the dominant center for African and African-American studies in the world. It’s a no-brainer to me. But I don’t think they take it seriously as an academic field. And with Howard’s library and archival resources it certainly is a candidate to fulfill that role. With Morehouse getting the Martin Luther King Jr. papers, it’s a candidate to fulfill that role. Howard University is an ideal place to develop African and African-American studies, but I don’t see any signs the administration has identified that as a priority, and I think that that is a shame. I find it very frustrating, quite frankly. I would like to see a commitment from at least the wealthier historically black colleges and universities, that commitment expanded, and particularly at Howard, Morehouse, and Spelman.

JBHE: Since the founding of JBHE 14 years ago, we’ve done surveys on black faculty levels at all the top schools. Our main purpose was to make the information public and hopefully to make universities more competitive in hiring black faculty in all major disciplines. But what we have seen is that there has been very little progress in hiring black faculty who are not involved with African-American studies. What can we do to increase black faculty generally?

Professor Gates: That’s tough. Whenever we have first- or even second-generation college-educated students, the tendency for them is to go into the professions, become investment bankers, lawyers — to go for the gold. It takes a while until people are comfortable economically for them to think about doing something so unprofitable as being a professor. Even the best paid professors in the United States make nothing compared to their friends who work on Wall Street. So it takes a while.

JBHE: Yet still there are tens of thousands of black academics in the country and Harvard has very few on its faculty, particularly in areas outside of black studies.

Professor Gates: Unfortunately, most of us in my generation, and I don’t think that has changed, most African Americans who have Ph.D.s do African-American or African studies. Where is a black Cornel West in any other field outside of African-American studies? I am defining it broadly, meaning even if a black scholar calls himself a sociologist, what does he generally study? He studies black people. There are very few black people who have attained the highest levels in their field who are not writing about black people.

JBHE: Is this so because they have been steered to African-American studies or have met resistance from academic disciplines?

Professor Gates: I think those of us who entered the academy see it as a political commitment, even if we are not explicitly political.  I use the analogy of being a Talmudic scholar, that what you’re doing is resurrecting the text of your people, you’re explicating them, you’re conserving them, and it’s a very important aspect of who we are, of our identity, to propagate the tradition, protect it, explicate it. And that’s a marvelous thing. I certainly feel that way, and I think I feel that way because I came along in the 1960s when becoming involved in African-American studies was a political commitment. I wasn’t an AfroAm major, but I was fascinated by the subject. I did American political history under John Blum, but by the time I got to England and started my graduate work it was clear that I was going to write about African and African-American literature. And it was clear to me that that was a way of making a political statement; doing something that ultimately would be good for my people. And I think that attitude has continued.

I can beat on the Harvard president’s door all day long and say, hire some black biologists, but if they’re not there, they can’t hire them. And if they are there and doing well, they must have a thousand job offers. The only way, in the short term, and even Larry Summers realized this, to increase the number of black people at Harvard is to increase the number of people teaching African and African-American studies.

JBHE: If there is one black scholar who is not on Harvard’s faculty whom you could convince to come to Cambridge, who would it be?

Professor Gates: Cornel West. I did everything I could to persuade Cornel to come back, and I will continue to do so. Every day for the last five years, I’ve missed Cornel and Anthony Appiah. Anthony Appiah is my best friend in the world. Cornel rightly interpreted that Princeton President Shirley Tilghman’s new initiative was in part about retaining him. And he doesn’t feel he could leave given that initiative. I mean it’s an amazing initiative. I don’t think people realize what a brilliant program it will be and how expensive it is to commit to 11 new faculty positions. I’m sure that as their faculty grows they will have a graduate, a Ph.D. program, as well. And again I say, Hallelujah, thank you Jesus, because that will only strengthen what is possible for us to do at Harvard, and what is possible for Yale to do.

JBHE: What do you think will happen first, a black president of Harvard, or a black president of the United States?

Professor Gates: The United States. It would be much easier to have a black president of the United States than a black president of Harvard.