When women moved into Harvard Yard 25 years ago, the black Radcliffe students only saw one black female face among the ranks of the tenured Faculty: Eileen Southern in the Department of Music.

Today, black women returning to the Yard after the winter break only see one black female face among the ranks of the tenured Faculty: Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, professor of Afro-American studies.

In the 360-odd year history of Harvard College the history of black female full professors boils down to these two: Southern and Higginbotham.

"I know we can do better," Higginbotham says.

"We are all acutely aware of the urgent need to have more women generally, and more African-American women specifically, on the Harvard faculty," says W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr.

Even if the non-tenured Faculty are included, 1997 figures on the number of black professors, male and female, show Harvard rounding at the bottom of the Ivy League with Princeton, meaning that it has lower figures than all but four of the U.S. News and World Reports' top 25 universities, including every Ivy institution except Princeton.

The paucity of black professors, and black female professors in particular, has become a rallying cry of student organizations, including the large and influential Black Students Association (BSA).

"It is indefensible that there is only one tenured black female professor," says Dionne A. Fraser '99, the vice president of the BSA. "Considering that Harvard prides itself on diversity within the student body, it should also set as a goal diversity within the Faculty."

Fraser, who is an economics concentrator living in Currier House, says she feels the lack of black women faculty in her department.

"I don't feel like I'm a part of this curriculum at all. I don't think that there's a place for me in economics," Fraser says, noting that she doesn't think the University is doing all it could to attract more minorities to the ranks of the senior Faculty.

"If Harvard really wanted black professors, they would be here," she adds.

Where Are They?

There could be three black, female, tenured professors in the Faculty currently, if all of those Harvard offered tenure to accepted: namely, Gina C. Dent, now teaching in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and Nellie Y. McKay, who teaches African-American Literature at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Both Dent and McKay made it through the labyrinthine tenure process, from the departmental to the Faculty level, finally receiving the nod of the University's president himself--before turning down the offer.

McKay, who is also the former chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at Wisconsin, says she was offered the position of Chair of the Afro-American Studies Department in the 1988-89 school year.

She ultimately declined Harvard's offer because she felt that her leadership of the department would have continued in the same vein as her potential predecessors, and what Afro-American studies really needed was a new direction.