"Whenever the administration forms a committee that advises a major chunk of what you are asking for, the tendency is to say 'Good, at least they agreed in principle,'" Harrison says. "The other thing is that it goes 50, 60, 70 percent of where you want it to go, but in the right atmosphere you might want to push it all the way."

And the student strike certainly seemed to offer the right atmosphere for such a push.

The students demanded a formal Afro-American Studies Department and a Standing Committee whose membership would include faculty and six students--three chosen by Afro and three concentrators in the department. The students were to be granted the same status as senior faculty members in votes on tenure and hiring decisions.

Harrison says students wanted a department--rather than a committee--because it could hire its own professors and make course decisions. In addition, the students wanted to create an activist department that would grant them a measure of control over their education, he says.

Days after the takeover, the faculty acceded to the student demands, despite the fact that they had earlier voted to approve Rosovsky's original report.

"I think the faculty felt that they were buying peace," says Rosovsky, who resigned from the Standing Committee immediately after the faculty voted to accept the students' demands. "I certainly prefer peace to all the other alternatives, but I think the price was too high. Too high for the students."

Faculty members agree that the early years of the Afro-Am department were difficult. The first chair of the department, Dr. Ewart Guinier, was not considered academically qualified, according to several faculty members. As well, professors say, outside scholars were reluctant to enter a department which seemed to be controlled by the students.

"None of the eminent people would come to Harvard under the atmosphere of student domination," says Ford Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus David Riesman '31, who at the time was asked to help recruit faculty for the department.

"The origins certainly did make life difficult for the department in the beginning. There definitely was the desire that an Afro-American Department should be much more activist oriented than other departments," says Harrison. "That has very clearly been resolved in favor of a more traditional conception of an academically oriented department."

But while professors today assert that the department has fallen in line with Harvard's more traditional--and less controversial--departments, it still has its troubles.

Only two tenured faculty members are currently teaching in the department, and it has been unable to fill vacant senior posts for the past several years. Many students charge that the administration is unwilling to support Black studies with financial and other support--and that perhaps, is also the legacy of Afro-Am's early years.