The department's academic focus is "cultural studies," a broadly defined academic approach which explores the role of ethnicity and ethnic identity in shaping such categories of identification as gender and economic status and in determining the characteristics of a group or a society, according to Appiah.

The effect of European and African cultures in forming uniquely African-American forms of expression in language or music fits within this approach, as well as a comparative examination of African-American cultures in various settings versus African societies or other American subcultures.

But Molefi Kete Asante, who chairs the Temple University Department of African American Studies, and Karenga both say the lack of Afrocentrist scholars at Harvard or other schools in the Ivy League does not reflect the national scholarship in Afro-American studies.

"Many times in the Ivy League [Afro-American Studies professors] talk to each other. All of them are outside the margins in this particular field," Asante says.

And both question the validity of the Harvard department's system of multidisciplinary joint appointments.

"What Harvard has done is to get some very important people, significant thinkers. They just happen to not be in Black Studies," says Asante.

Asante and Karenga question the academic approach of the department on intellectual grounds.

"I think that Appiah and Gates...both do European studies of African people," Asante says, with Harvard's scholars seeing African people as "objects, as marginal."

"I don't know of one single person who would identify as an Afrocentrist" [in the Harvard Afro-American Studies department]," Harper says.

"This perspective is not the ruling paradigm here," according to Matory.

At its most extreme, Patterson says, Afrocentrism can verge into a nationalistic and exclusive ideology.

"To insist that you only see things from a Black point of view, that's chauvinistic verging on racist," he says. "I feel very strongly this is part of a substitute for genuine critical scholarship, replete with ideology."

Appiah too, while offering Afrocentrist perspectives in his Afro-American Studies tutorial, says Afrocentrism in the "New York Times, sensationalistic sense, is a body of work for which I don't have a great deal of respect."

And other professors say it can degenerate into an uncritical "cheerleading" for all things African.

But both Patterson and Appiah say it would be unfair to dismiss all Afrocentric scholarship as unfair or illegitimate.