With that sentence, Dean Rosovsky reflects the frustration of ten years of wrangling, rhetoric, and demonstrations over the substance and direction of Afro-American Studies at Harvard. The department had its tenth anniversay last April, and no one--students, faculty or administrators--can look back over these years complacently.

After a decade, the department has one and one-half tenured professors and eight concentrators. Since 1971, the number of concentrators has dropped 76 per cent and course enrollment 58 per cent. Its junior faculty is discontented and its students are furious. Last spring, while Eileen Southern, the chairman of the department, was away on a semester sabbatical, junior faculty met with Dean Rosovsky and the Faculty Council to voice their dissatisfaction with her. At the same time, a series of demonstrations charged the administration--and Rosovsky in particular--with a systematic campaign to destroy the department.

But while the students chanted, Rosovsky moved quietly to put the errant department in order. In meetings with departmental junior faculty, the Faculty Council and President Bok, Rosovsky discussed how to shore up the faltering department. Last week, he unveiled a plan he believes can restore some direction and vitality to Afro-American Studies--the creation of an executive committee of five senior faculty to run the department. The committee, composed of prominent scholars who have intellectual connections with Afro-American Studies, has several tasks, Rosovsky says:

"to define a sense of intellectual mission" for the department;

to act as Afro-Am's senior faculty and guide it in making key policy and personnel decisions over the next few years;

to recruit scholars aggressively for tenured professorships in the department.

The committee members--C. Clyde Ferguson, professor of Law; David Donald, Warren Professor of American History; Richard Freeman, professor of Economics; Orlando Patterson, professor of Sociology; and Eileen Southern, professor of Afro-American Studies and Music--will work first on developing a clear intellectual goal for the department, Ferguson says. Once the committee has agreed on what the intellectual thrust of the department should be--whether policy-oriented or primarily academic, for example--then the committee will find it easier to seek out scholars. "Getting a focus begins to tell you who you want, why you want them and how to go about doing what you say you want to do," Ferguson notes.

Patterson agrees with Ferguson's assessment of the committee's goals, and adds that it will also be examining the department's curriculum, its teaching and its faculty quality in an effort to "bring the department in line with other Harvard departments." He notes that perhaps the most important task of the committee is to convince the Harvard community, especially its students, of the intellectual legitimacy of Afro-American Studies. "Students are acutely conscious of the fact that the study now has relatively little status, and have a right to be concerned," he notes.

Nor does Patterson mince words about the current problems of the department. "If a student leaves this University with a degree in Afro-American Studies, it should carry the same weight as any other degree at Harvard--and I suspect it doesn't now," he notes.

But despite such frank assessments of the department's troubles, Rosovsky, Ferguson and Patterson say they understand what is hanging on the committee's work. "People have already watched what we're doing here and it's easy for other institutions to say, 'If Harvard can't do it, we can't,'" Rosovsky says. Ferguson agrees. "What happens here will influence other programs all over the country--a failure might very well have the effect of stunting and stifling efforts that were so painfully commenced," he notes.

Afro-American Studies' birth at Harvard was indeed painful. The department, created in the aftermath of the Harvard strike of 1969, can't seem to shake that era's legacy of tension, fear and bitterness. Even the Faculty vote establishing the department sparked a major controversy, for the body had committed the exceptionally rare action of disregarding a committee recommendation.

After a year of study, a faculty-student committee chaired by Rosovsky, then professor of Economics, recommended setting up an interdisciplinary concentration that would combine a traditional field such as history or economics with Afro-American Studies. But after the student strike, pressure mounted to create a full-fledged department that would permit an uncombined major and allow students unprecedented governing powers. Although Rosovsky vehemently protested this proposal, the Faculty voted for a department in an emotionally-charged meeting in April 1969.

A newly-appointed committee moved quickly to establish the department by setting up courses and searching for scholars. The committee soon encountered what was to be an increasingly familiar problem--it could not find scholars it wanted to tenure. Southern, the second tenured professor of the department, was not appointed until 1975.

A committee appointed to review Afro-American Studies (known as the McCree committee after its chairman) had highlighted this problem three years previously in 1972. The McCree report criticized the University's failure to appoint more than one tenured faculty member and recommended that it move quickly to bring the number of tenured faculty up to four.

Although the McCree report urged haste in hiring tenured professors, Afro-Am found itself the center of controversy again in 1975, when department members and students charged the University with racism and discrimination in its decision not to offer tenure to Ephraim Isaacs, then associate professor of Afro-American Studies. Isaacs had been recommended for tenure by the department in 1971; four years later, President Bok accepted an ad hoc committee's decision not to offer Isaacs tenure.