When Thomson Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield suggested at a forum last week that Harvard's Afro-American Studies department ought not exist, it may have seemed like a radical idea to the students present.

But, in fact, such opposition to an Afro-Am program dates back to the department's creation 20 years ago. The subsequent years have seen a constant struggle between those who have supported and those who have opposed--either actively or by casual neglect--the institutional legitimacy that a strong department lends the study of Afro-American issues.

A look back at the origins of the Afro-American Studies department reveals that it was born out of protest and activism, and that there are numerous parallels between the department's nearly-continuous troubles and its controversial roots. Whether by intention or by coincidence, recent protests urging increased faculty hiring echo the activist struggles of the 1960s.

Although some of the radical tervor of student involvement has diminished since the 1960s, many say the current difficulty of filling the ranks of the Afro-American Studies department is largely a legacy of the University's inability to define clearly the program's role in the initial stages of its development.

"My sense of [the Afro-American Studies concentration at Harvard] is that it has never been as good, in terms of the size of its faculty or joint appointments, as departments at other schools," says Robert L. Hall '69, now an associate professor of history at Northeastern University. Hall was an active member of the various student groups at Harvard that pushed for the formation of a department dedicated to Afro-American Studies.

The core of the problem, Hall says, "goes back to the neglect of the subject matter in the existing course offerings of 1965 and earlier, and the general atmosphere at the University that didn't find anything amiss about such neglect."

The original concept of Afro-American Studies was rooted in the racial activism of the 1960s. The Association of African and Afro-American Students (AAAAS) was founded at Harvard in 1963, an organization dedicated to expanding the number of courses exploring the Black experience in America. By the fall of 1967, as the AAAAS became more activist-oriented, its primary objective became the establishment of an Afro-American Studies Department.

The University was at first deaf toward the demands of the organization, with some faculty members questioning the "Societal worth" and the legitimacy of a concentration born out of political activism. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 brought the first positive response from the administration, with the formation of a nine-member Faculty committee, chaired by Henry Rosovsky, who was then only a member of the economics department.

After eight months of exhaustive research, the committee recommended the "development of undergraduate and graduate degree programs in Afro-American studies." Interestingly, the recommendations of the Rosovsky Committee were purposefully ambiguous about whether the administration intended to establish a department or an interdisciplinary studies program to facilitate concentrators.

In April of 1969, the Standing Faculty Committee presented its plan to create Afro-American Studies modeled after the Social Studies program, an interdisciplinary field in which students do most of their work in an allied field such as government or history. The only courses in Afro-American studies were to be tutorials. But the Faculty Committee later decided to reorganize the department so that concentrators would have to double-concentrate in order to study Afro-Am.

Many Blacks on campus were incensed by the Faculty Committee's decision, and interpreted it as fundamentally undermining the spirit of the Rosovsky Committee's Report. "The 'Joint majors provision' cut into the autonomy of the field," Hall says. "All the students asked for [and the University denied] was a free-standing major along the lines of Social Studies."

The result of the administration's waffling on the nature of the concentration was a period of activism that Henry Rosovsky describes in his recent book, The University: An Owners Manual. According to Rosovsky, the Faculty, "as a result of intense student pressure, building occupations and open threats" abandoned the recommendations of the Rosovsky Committee. Instead, the administration conceded to the radical demands of the AAAAS, opting for a department, the design of which came from the AAAAS rather than the Rosovsky Committee.

These concessions gave Black students and Black student organizations unprecedented power in developing and overseeing the Afro-American Studies program: six students--three chosen by AAAAS and three by and from concentrators--were voting members of the Faculty committee which supervised the initial stages of the program's development. The Faculty thereby surrendered privileges formerly restricted to tenured professors, including voting power concerning curriculum requirements, term appointments and even tenure.

The unprecedented extent of student power with respect to hiring and tenure review prompted Rosovsky to call the incident an "academic Munich." Rosovsky promptly resigned as chair of the Standing Committee on Afro-American studies.