When the Afro-American Studies Department extended a tenure offer to a University of Wisconsin literary scholar this year, administrators and members of the department--typically close-mouthed about appointments before they are finalized--were eager to tout the move.

Trying to combat what they said were misperceptions about the department's vitality, administrators and the department's chair, Werner Sollors, made a concerted effort to publicize the possibility of Nellie Y. McKay's arrival at Harvard.

McKay says she still has not decided whether she will accept the offer, but officials say they are trying to convince her to start teaching at Harvard in the spring of 1990.

Yet even if McKay accepts the post, students and some faculty members say the department's curriculum will still not be able to meet the needs of the growing number of undergraduates who want to take courses in the field.

"We could double the number of courses in Afro-Am these days and still have the students to fill them," says Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies and History David W. Blight, who will leave Harvard this fall for a tenure-track position at Amherst.

And some student activists have taken up the cause of strengthening the Afro-Am Department, recalling the spirit of its founding 20 years ago at the insistence of Black students.

"I think the administration is very concerned with image and perception right now," says former president of the Black Students Association (BSA) Robert L. Henry '90, "and I think that they are fully aware that students around the country are able to raise the level of awareness at Harvard and in the nation on these issues."

In fact, BSA members met with Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence several times this year to press their demands for a stronger Afro-Am department, Henry says.

The students' demands are straightforward: Hire more professors for the department and increase the number of course offerings.

But even such apparently simple requests are difficult for the Afro-Am Department to meet. Because of the protracted tenure process in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the difficulty of luring already-established scholars to Cambridge, the department has not made a senior-level appointment since Sollors in 1980.

And even if McKay, whose appointment would be a joint one with English and American Literature, accepted the offer, she would become only the department's third tenured member.

The department, meanwhile, will be left with only two junior members next year when Blight leaves. One of those, Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies and Sociology Roderick J. Harrison '70-'71, was denied promotion to the associate level and will depart after next year.

"The Afro-American Studies Department is more of a skeleton than anything else," says Henry, an English and American Literature concentrator who says he has not taken any Afro-Am courses. "The Afro-American Studies Department has fewer faculty members now that when it was first created. It has fewer course offerings than it did 20 years ago."

Aside from tutorials, the department offered seven courses during the past year--an improvement, albeit a small one, from the three it offered the previous year.

But DuBois Professor of History and Afro-American Studies Nathan I. Huggins, one of the two senior members in the department and its former chair, says Afro-Am suffers more from an image problem--fed by negative press and BSA politics--than from structural flaws.