"I think that a lot of Black faculty members at other universities were making a point to Harvard in refusing to come here," Hall says, "Harvard's past sins caught up with us in our time of need."

Hall, who was one of the three student members of the faculty search, committee for Afro-American Studies, points to a failed attempt to court University of Chicago historian John Hope Franklin as an example of this trend.

"We sent out 'feelers' to [Franklin], but he wasn't interested," Hall says. "He said, very diplomatically, that he had never been offered a position in Harvard's history department, and that was his field."

"The implication was that he saw us as suddenly wanting him not because he was great historian but because he was Black."

Hall says the search committee was slow to invite scholars to Harvard and was extremely apathetic about the department.

"The process was exceedingly, excruciatingly, deliberately slow," Hall says. "And When we would come close to agreement in committee, something would always happen and we would never get close enough to make an offer."

During the same time period that Harvard searched in vain, Yale was able to construct a prominent Afro-American Studies department, Hall says. In fact, three pillars of Harvard's now-renowned Afro-American studies department were colleagues at Yale decades ago: Gates, Professor of Afro-American Studies and of philosophy K. Anthony Appiah and Cornel R. West '74.

West is currently the director of the African-American Studies Program at Princeton. He will assume teaching duties at Harvard in the fall of 1995.

"Yale showed that it could be done," Hall says, "Harvard's approach was just laughable."

According to Hall, Afro-Am search committee members were advised by other faculty members to try a "sociological approach" to hiring Black professors.

"The line of thinking was 'if you must hire a Black, then here's how to do it,"' Hall says. "There was even a hierarchy of quality: first we were told to look for a British-trained African; next a West-Indian, which was presumably the next-best thing to someone British-trained; and as a last resort, we could maybe find an educated American Negro."

"I think that tells you a lot about the mindsets of some of the people who were supposedly working with us," Hall says. "It was so typical."