The Afro-American Studies Department in order to do its work needs tenured professors and research money. The two are inextricable. Having the DuBois Institute within the department as the original prospectus of 1969 called for would solve the problem of research money. Not imposing joint appointments would solve the problem of securing tenured faculty for the department.

If Bok's word is to be believed, money is going to be very difficult to raise. Yet by some perverse logic, Bok and his committees, by separating the institute from the department, have pursued a strategy designed to place the department in an either/or competition with the institute. Either one gives money to the institute or one gives money to the department. Such a position could hardly be called logical though it apparently passes for logic. With increasingly scarce resources such a strategy makes no sense unless one envisions either the death of the department or of the institute, or of both. Might one not suggest that the force behind this "logic" seems to be similar to that which animated Professor Dunlop on this matter. At a time when there was money from the Ford Foundation to fund the DuBois Institute, while it was still attached to the department, the then dean, Dunlop, did not pass this information on, saying, in direct contradiction to this fact, that foundations were not interested in funding an institute unless it was university-wide. Yet when an official of the Ford Foundation said that there had been no such stipulation attached to its funding, the dean was never called to task. Of course, this was pre-Watergate and since then one presumes that the public appetite for prevarication has greatly diminished.

It seems that the plan to separate the W.E.B. DuBois Institute from the Afro department has no relationship to funding whatsoever. In fact it is being advocated despite the realities of both present, past and future funding possibilities. It appears that the separation of the DuBois Institute from the department is being encouraged as a way to increase competition between the department and the institute rather than minimize it. This competition is not only damaging to both, it is unnecessary and artificially contrived.

The imposition of joint appointments is a similarly damaging contrivance. Objectively it gives the department a second-class status amongst other departments in the University since no other department has such a virtual requirement. That fact could be ignored if it were not for the additional fact that other departments have such an abysmal record on the hiring of Black faculty. A look at the results of the affirmative action efforts of these departments would show that. It does not make sense to saddle the Afro-American Studies Department with the poor efforts of other departments. Yet the University's chief affirmative action officer, Walter J. Leonard, insists on terming the Afro-American Studies Department--the only department that meets the affirmative action guidelines--"crippled." Surely the "cripple" departments, viewed from this perspective, must be those without a single Black faculty member, tenured or otherwise.

What emerges from this discussion of the current situation is a university administration, led by its president, hell-bent on betraying Black people and their democratic rights to the forces within the faculty and administration that voted against the Afro-American Studies Department in 1969. Equality of access to educational resources did not mean then nor does it mean now access to a classroom in which Black history is absent or denigrated. Equality has always meant the right to determine a program of education best suited to the needs of a given community. It is this right which was voted on in 1969. I, for one, refuse to believe that 251 members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted for a program of Black studies out of "fear." This vicious rumor, a tenet of conservative faith, must be laid to rest. I believe, instead, that they voted out of an analysis of the importance of Afro-American Studies and an understanding of how best to secure a serious pursuit of that objective. This understanding has been conspicuously absent from the present discussions--perhaps now out of fear of reprisal from administrative sources.

In 1969, Faculty conservatives argued that Afro-American studies should not have departmental status at Harvard, but rather should be directed by a committee composed of Faculty members from the established departments. With the reduction of the number of tenured faculty promised the department, with the separation of the DuBois Institute from the department and with the imposition of joint appointments, the conservatives have moved ever closer to a realization of their original proposal. A 1973 Faculty vote that barely reaffirmed the continuation of Afro-American studies as a department is the only thing standing between the conservatives in the Faculty and the complete success of this white-supremacist project. It does not require a conspiracy theory to say that some conservative faculty members in conjunction with some administrators have been working since 1969 to sabotage the construction of the Afro-American Studies Department and to erase the effects of what they saw as a temporary setback.

Finally we come to dwell on what should be an insignificant point--a simple matter of common courtesy. You, Mr. Bok, occupying the president's chair, are responsible for being aware of the subtleties of protocol. Is it more than chance that you neglected to place a phone call to the chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department before announcing the appointments to the advisory board? Do you normally cause chairpeople of University departments to find out about decisions of such magnitude through a newspaper? That is what you did in the case of the Afro-American Studies Department. For that affront alone, you should catch Hell. Nous n'avons pas garde less cochons ensemble.

Wesley E. Profit '69 is a teaching fellow in the Afro-American Studies Department.