Not All Rosy

While putting together a department of high-profile scholars may not itself be problematic, some say that such a department does then threaten to marginalize similar departments at other universities.

"The problem emerges when there is a popular perception that the only interesting things going on in a field are coming from a particular institution that is able to garner a lot of attention in the media," Warren says.

Although Harvard cannot be faulted for accumulating high-profile scholars, agrees Professor Eddy L. Harris of Washington University in St. Louis, there may be harmful side effects.

"My problem with [Harvard's] getting all that attention is that...the general public might think that that's the most important African-American studies department, or that they have a lock on African-American intelligentsia," says Harris, visiting professor of African and African-American studies at Washington.

Given that "Skip Gates has a piece show up in The New Yorker every 15 minutes," Harris says, Americans may believe that all the important work in Afro-American studies transpires in Cambridge.

"There are equally wonderful guys around at my university," he says. "Other voices and other minds bring different points of view, so that people don't think that black America is some big monolith, marching lock and step behind Skip Gates and company."

Collaborative Benefits

But Appiah contends that the media attention given Harvard's Afro-Am. department is not unique to his field.

"Harvard gets lots more coverage than other people in lots of areas," he writes in an e-mail, citing the prevalence with which Harvard's law and medical schools are quoted in the media. "I don't know how to decide what's fair in this context...but it is no doubt out of proportion to our real importance in Afro-American Studies as in other fields."

"Only if you think there's a real dearth of scholarly merit in Afro-American [studies] (so that concentration means there's nobody any good anywhere else--which is a preposterous notion) is this field different from any other," he adds.

Indeed, Gates, who could not be reached for comment, draws personal praise from many colleagues for his work in assembling the Harvard department.

Rampersad calls Gates "a very rare and singular individual."

"It's not clear to me that anybody else could have done what he did," he says. "I think Professor Gates deserves all the credit in the world."

Gates' "dream team" has been profiled in The New York Times and other publications, and has been widely acclaimed for bringing together America's foremost black intellectuals.