And Afro-Am has consistently had difficulty retaining junior faculty. Should it suprise anyone that promising young professors like David W. Blight, who departed for Amherst College last year, leave the department as soon as they get a promising offer from somewhere else? If you were Carolivia Herron, would you jump at the tenure offers from other schools, or wait for the Harvard offer that will probably never come?

To make matters worse for the department, it finds itself with less-than-cooperative partners when trying to make tenure appointments. Traditionally, most Afro-Am appointments are made in conjunction with either the History or English department, because most scholars want ties with a traditional academic field.

These two stodgy Harvard departments are notorious for their inability to agree on tenured appointments (especially appointments from within) and their unwillingness to incorporate new disciplines into their curricula.

MOST major universities have realized that the best way to build their departments is to bring in young scholars fresh off their dissertations, cultivate them and tenure them.

Although Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence has made tenuring more faculty from within Harvard a primary goal, his efforts have yet to make a dent in the age-old system.

In the short term, the administration must make an extraordinary effort to rebuild Afro-Am. Harvard must not only spend a sizeable amount of money to lure top scholars, it must demonstrate a genuine will to create a top-flight department so that outside faculty will be willing to come.

But in the long run, the only thing that will make Afro-Am a decent department is an overhaul of Harvard's tenure system.

Joseph R. Palmore '91 covered the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for The Crimson in 1989.