The position Harvard offered West several years ago, he says, had fewer bureaucratic duties than the position Gates occupies today. West would not, for example, have served as director of the Du Bois center, saying "I would never take on that kind of administrative task."

Building an Afro-Am program, West says, is hard, especially in an old institution whose students and faculty have traditionally been overwhelmingly white.

"You've got to ensure that your Black voices are integral to the larger conversation in the community," West says.

In Princeton, he says, the Afro-Am department works closely with the English, history and anthropology departments.

"You actively invite and solicit a number of persons from those departments to be a part of your conversations," he says.

Although Harvard is the "great national center of higher education," West says that would still not be enough to lure him to here.

"I need a place where there's a real Black cultural center, and Boston just doesn't have that," he says.

Princeton, which is 45 minutes away from New York City, allows him to shuttle back and forth to the city he loves.

"I don't like to get too far away from New York," West says. "I'm very much a New Yorker."

Boston is four hours from Manhattan--too far for West both physically and spiritually.

In addition, Boston has a historical reputation as a city inhospitable to African-Americans. Two years ago, the Boston Globe did a study on the dearth of Black faces at Fenway Park. And some Black Harvard professors have noted that there are some areas in Boston where Blacks shouldn't go.

West complains that Boston lacks the cultural institutions of a thriving Black community: an active nightclub life, church life and intellectual life.

"It's very difficult to imagine myself living in Boston," West says.

If Harvard were to offer West a position, right now, West says, he would be unlikely to accept. Unless, perhaps, Princeton lost West's good friend and closest colleague.

"If Toni Morrison ever left Princeton, I'm sure I'd definitely reconsider," West says.