As matters stand now, the department lacks a single full-time tenured faculty member who is wholly within Afro. Ewart Guinier '33, professor of Afro-American Studies, is presently semi-retired and teaches only during one semester of each academic year. Southern holds tenure in the Music Department as well as Afro; she is a musicologist by training, and she was nominated by the Music Department for a joint appointment in Afro. The April 22, 1969, Faculty vote that established the department called for the tenuring of two full-time faculty members in Afro. The 1972 McCree Report on the department recommended the appointment of four full-time tenured Faculty to the department as a top priority, adding that such appointments should be made before the department approved any more joint appointments.
Yet eight years after the 1969 Faculty vote and five years after the release of the McCree Report, Afro still maintains the dubious distinction of being the only department in the University without a single full-time tenured professor wholly within the department. Isaac's ill-fated tenure nomination in 1971 epitomizes the hassles that plague junior faculty members in Afro who apply for tenure, according to many concentrators.
Most of the details surrounding the decision not to offer Isaac tenure have already been documented, but the procedures instituted to consider his nomination continue to disturb many concerned students and junior faculty who wish to remain at Harvard on a tenured basis. Among other questionable practices that marked the events leading to the rejection of his nomination, Isaac notes that not one member of the ad hoc committee established to consider his application "knew anything" about his specialization, although the committee members were chosen with the full knowledge of Isaac's field of academic research.
Moreover, Isaac says that his nomination, sponsored exclusively by Afro, was submitted to the ad hoc panel along with two other candidates who had been nominated by other departments and who were under consideration for joint tenure appointment. He adds that the University never told him that his candidacy would be referred to the same ad hoc committee reviewing two nominees sponsored by other departments with disparate specializations. Finally, Isaac alleges that "at least one member of the committee was known to have a conflict of interest with, and antagonism to, the development of African subject" within the department.
Isaac subsequently filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in March 1976 charging that the University had refused to give him tenure on the basis of race and nationality. "I decided to go to court because of the broken promises, the irregular procedures and the deep-seated discriminatory manner in which the department and I have been treated," Isaac says, adding he believes that he was denied tenure because of a "behind-the-scenes attempt to not hire people wholly within the department." Isaac says that he does not object to the concept of joint tenure appointments, but he says that such appointments, should only be made after Afro acquires at least two full-time tenured professors with a complete commitment to the department.
As Isaac prepares to leave Harvard this month upon the expiration of his contract as an Afro associate professor he says that the issue of no full-time tenured faculty in the department remains a matter of considerable importance because "any legitimate department is a department because it has full-time tenured faculty." Isaac's comments point to perhaps the one most significant and unsettling question concerning Afro in the minds of concentrators and junior faculty: what form will the department assume in future years of the present "Americo-centric" and increasingly humanist trends continue?
Some concentrators have accused Dean Rosovsky of attempting to undermine the department in its present form and transform Afro into a committee-type program that awards degrees but which would lack the status of a full-fledged department, charges that Rosovsky has emphatically denied in the past. Rivera voices the fear that Rosovsky will undertake a full-scale review of Afro in the near future; such a review would note the steadily decreasing numbers of undergraduates concentrating in the department, and Rivera asserts that the University might use these statistics to recommend a change in Afro's status to a committee program structure. He and other concentrators fear that the University in coming years will try "to shut Afro down or turn it into something completely ridiculous that means nothing to black people."
Southern's three-year term as chairman of Afro is due to expire in 1979, and the appointment of her successor may hint at the course that the department will chart in the 1980s. The alleged "Americo-centric" direction of Afro stands little chance of being reversed in two years, as the steady exodus of pan-Africanists like Isaac from Harvard and Afro shows few signs of stopping. The Afro offices at 77 Dunster will probably preserve the outward stability of the department for the foreseeable future, but that appearance remains a deceptive one, and conditions in Afro may once again wax turbulent if someone should decide to reopen one of those currently airtight boxes in Pandora's closet