"When I visited Harvard, I was so excited at the thought of working around all of those scholars," Wilson said in explaining his decision to leave Chicago.

Bobo cited similar reasoning for his decision to leave UCLA.

"It really is the combination of people who are converging on Cambridge at the moment," he told The Crimson in January.

According to Appiah, extended collaboration among Harvard's Afro-Am department, professors has enabled a fuller understanding of each other's work.

"I think an inter-disciplinary community of first-rate people from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical positions is extremely exciting and makes all of our work more interesting," he writes.

Many Afro-Am. professors outside of Harvard say the University's concentrated scholarship also helps to raise consciousness about the field.

"The publicity that the Harvard department has received has always been in conjunction with weighty and substantial projects, such as the Norton volume of African-American literature," Rampersad says, referring to a major work recently edited by Gates. "It simply raises the visibility and the prestige of the field and we all benefit from it."

Julius Nyang-oro, chair of the department of African and Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, says Harvard's work has had a positive effect on his department.

"It's a very good idea to have all those big names in one place," Nyang-oro says. "It does expose African-American studies to an audience it might not otherwise be exposed to."

Nyang-oro says Harvard's program may also have a positive "snowballing effect" by attracting graduate students to the field who then become scholars in their own right, and by pressuring other universities to devote more resources to Afro-American studies.

"If Harvard is paying adequately to the high-profile professors, it means we can make a claim to our own department that they cannot continue to hire professors without tenure," he says. "You cannot afford to be left too far behind Harvard."

Cedric J. Robinson, chair of black studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, says Harvard's commitment to the field helps struggling departments nationwide in their fight for survival.

"The fact that Harvard is now considering a doctoral program in the field is useful to us in convincing and persuading our regents that such programs have academic illegitimacy," he says.

Yet even some of Gates' strongest supporters say the work done at Harvard may be less purely academic than at other institutions.

Professor Ralph Austen of the University of Chicago says Harvard's program is unusually good, but only in a certain way.