"What a nice place you have here," Nathan I. Huggins, newly appointed chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department, said yesterday on entering the Afro-Am department building for the first time.

Huggins, a professor of history at Columbia University, Monday accepted Harvard's offer to become DuBois Professor of Afro-American Studies and History, director of the W.E.B. DuBois Insitute--a research center for problems facing Afro-Americans--and chairman of the department.

Currently doing research at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, Huggins held separate meetings yesterday with the Afro-Am executive committee, the Afro-Am junior faculty, and the Afro-Am concentrators.

In his meeting with the executive committee, a group formed by Dean Rosovsky last fall to recruit new Afro-Am senior faculty, Huggins discussed the main candidates for tenured positions, he said yesterday.

The executive committee also discussed hiring a visiting professor because Chidi Ikonne and Selwyn Cudjoe, assistant professors of Afro-Am, are taking leaves of absence next year, Orlando Patterson, another committee member, said yesterday.

Several faculty members said yesterday Huggins impressed them with his ideas and sincerity. He will visit again in May.