Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III says his clearest memory of Cornel West '74 is of the future scholar greeting the dean at the door of Epps' Leverett House residence.

While the undergraduate West was polite, Epps remembers him "rushing past me at the same time, to search through my library for a book that would illuminate what he was thinking about."

The book was by German sociologist Max Weber; West, the man whom DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates Jr. Calls "the Preeminent Afro-American scholar of our generation," was even then no intellectual slouch.

"He was possessed with a thirst for knowledge and had the same intensity in his conversations even then as you find on the lecture podium now," Epps says.

West will bring that formidable intellect back to Harvard in 1995 when he leaves Princeton and joins the faculties of the Afro-American Studies Department and the Divinity School.

But he will also bring something else, students say: a broad-minded attitude and applied approach to scholarship that is now lacking in the Afro-American Studies department.

"Cornel West's activism is important because I had one professor who told me that there is a distinction between activism and intellectual pursuits, and that they are mutually exclusive," says Afro-American Studies concentrator Charlene Morisseau '95.

West, who writes and lectures widely on current issues of public policy, is not simply an Ivory Tower academic, professors and students say.

Alvin L. Bragg '95, the president of the Black Students Association, calls him an "intellectual giant." But West "balances this by taking a practical approach to solving the ills of the black community rather than taking a lofty, high-faluting, Ivory Tower approach," Bragg says.

Professors agree that West succeeds in balancing a commitment to society serious scholarship.

"Cornel West combines the two dimensions of scholarship: pure scholarship and scholarship that is applied to real issue," says Cowles Professor of Sociology Orlando Patterson.

West will not bring just his "real issues" approach to scholarship to Harvard, students say. In a department many see as ideologically closed and limited, West will provide a welcome open-mindedness, students say.

"I think that the Afro-Am. department definitely has an ideological slant," says Monica A. Coleman '95. "Harvarditself has an ideological slant, and it's to theright."

"Corneal West will bring some diversity ofthought," Coleman adds. "He'll be a new additionto their ranks of cultural criticism, a differentviewpoint."

Gates says the ideological unity some see inhis department is nonexistent.

"We maintain no obligation to any particularphilosophy," he says. "This is a department that'svery open to anyone's ideas and there is no linewe've established for professors to toe in theclassroom."