Domino Effect

When Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr. announced that he would be leaving Duke University to head Harvard's Afro-Am Department, students there joked that he was "skipping town." At the time, Stanley E. Fish, the chair of Duke's English Department--in which Gates held a joint appointment--took the matter in stride. But it looks like "skipping town syndrome" might be contagious after all.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that Fish will step down as chair of the department, mere weeks after Gates's announcement. They quoted from an article in Academic Questions, by University of Central Arkansas professor Phillip B. Anderson:

In an oral postscript to his article, [Anderson] wondered whether the department--which, he said, Mr. Fish had built artificially by recruiting recognized, high-priced scholars--could sustain itself. "The direction of the department was Mr. Fish's direction," he said. "It's basically a department of hired guns." The recent announcement that the scholar Henry Louis Gates would leave the department for a better offer, he suggested, may be a sign of things to come.

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