"We all agreed with the tone of the RosovskyReport," Ford says. "But you couldn't just snapyour fingers and bring a department into being."

"It was not a very good way for a program to beborn, in that kind of a shotgun atmosphere," Fordsays. "And the history of the African-AmericanStudies department has borne out; it didn't reallyget track as a department until a few years ago."

Even Rosovsky committee member Martin L.Kilson, who in 1969 became Harvard's first Blacktenured professor, says he was opposed to thedepartmentalization of Afro-Am.

"The University already had experience withinterdisciplinary programs," says ThomsonProfessor of Government Kilson. "The proposedsubject matter would have inevitably had to bemediated through several different curriculums."

Although the Faculty granted committee-statusto the fledgling Afro-Am program, students feltthat calling the program a "committee on degrees"rather than a department was indicative of a lackof University support.

The questioned the administration's commitmentto the project and accused the University ofunderestimating the intellectual value ofAfro-American studies.

"The only reason they didn't want to call it adepartment was because they didn't want it to betoo autonomous or to really be considered alegitimate academic enterprise," Hall says.

Hall speculates that, in initial negotiationswith the University in 1968, AAAAS members "mightnot have gotten anything substantial if we hadpersisted in using the word 'department' at thatpoint."

"The d-word raised such a red flag for Mr.Rosovsky that it wasn't worth it," Hall says. "Theprogram was described in functional and behavioralterms instead--and in those terms it had all thepowers and prerogatives of existing departments."

Students simply wanted public recognition ofthe department's status at Harvard, Hall says."Our insistence in April of 1969 on the change oflabel did not constitute an addition of functions.Rather, they were embedded in what the Rosovskycommittee had already proposed."

Contrary to what many Black students thought,however, the "program's nomenclature meant nodisrespect," Kilson says.

"We took for granted, even, that people wouldsee this as something with a specific rationalebehind it," Kilson adds. "It just seemednatural--it's not as if it were a new curricularinvention created solely to oppress Blacks."

Some former students say they did not think thedemands too ambitious--they may have been radical,but they were presented in the context of thetimes.

"People didn't talk in terms of change then,"says former AAAAS President Leslie F. Griffin Jr.'70. "People talked in terms of revolution, andthey really meant it."

Griffin says the proposal for a committee wasseen as too gradual and too incremental. "We wererearranging the balance of power, based on ournotion that to struggle was noble."