When Henry Louis Gates Jr. became chair of the Afro-American studies department in 1991, he made luring the renowned University of Chicago professor William Julius Wilson to Cambridge one of his priorities.

Shortly after Gates became chair, he flew to Chicago for lunch with Wilson. Over the next five years, each time Gates saw Wilson, he would ask Wilson when he planned to trade Hyde Park for Harvard Square.

Finally, in 1995, in a discussion of race and politics in the living room of Vice President Al Gore '69, Wilson told Gates that he might be ready to move. Gates quickly invited Wilson and Harvard's entire Afro-Am. department to a dinner party at his home.

Less than one year later, Wilson's appointment as Malcolm Wiener professor of social policy at the Kennedy School of Government was announced.

Wilson is the most recent addition to Harvard's star collection of scholars in Afro-American studies. Joining him are Professor of Philosophy K. Anthony Appiah; Professor of the Philosophy of Religion Cornel West '74, snagged from Princeton in 1995; the recently imported Lawrence D. Bobo, formerly of the University of California at Los Angeles and Visiting Lecturer on Afro-American Studies Jamaica Kincaid.

But for all the credit Gates has received for bringing his team together, few have openly questioned if this concentration of black academia has a downside. Has Harvard been greedy in depleting Afro-Am. departments nationwide? And is the field of Afro-American studies worse off for it?

Scholarly Depletion

Harvard's gain is another university's loss, and numerous African-American studies departments have been losing of late. Yet scholars at the schools left behind say they are not angry at Harvard for snatching their biggest names.

Arnold Rampersad, who stepped into West's shoes as director of Princeton's African-American Studies committee, says an institution cannot be blamed for trying to attract top faculty.

West was treasured at Princeton, Rampersad says, personally teaching more than half of African-American studies students.

"It was a big loss and you never quite get over a loss like that," he says. "But it's not an appropriate occasion for anger."

At the University of Chicago, meanwhile, which lost Wilson to Harvard this year, Co-Chair of the Committee on African and African-American Studies Kenneth Warren is similarly resigned.

"I don't think that Harvard or any of the individuals who are a part of that institution can be faulted for trying to build the strongest department," Warren says.

Gates' persistent luring of Wilson, Warren says, is accepted practice in American academia.

"I don't think there's anything unique about Afro-Am that it should be excepted from the kind of give-and-take" of other disciplines, he says. "There was nothing at all unusual or questionable about [Wilson's] decision."