The Faculty Council voted yesterday to approve a new Ph.D program in African-American Studies.

The 18-member body's approval paves the way for a full Faculty vote on the program in February, with the first students potentially matriculating in the fall of 2001.

"This is just wonderful news," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies and DuBois professor of the humanities.

The program will invite four to five students to Cambridge for a course of study lasting five to six years. Candidates for the degree will take classes in the Department of Afro-American Studies and in other departments such as history, economics and music.

The Department of Afro-American Studies has been without a Ph.D program since its creation in 1969. Similar interdisciplinary Ph.D programs to the one newly-created at Harvard exist at Yale and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The Harvard Afro-American Studies department has gained national prominence over the last decade since Gates assumed the chair in 1991 and assembled a "dream team" of the field's most well-reputed scholars. If approved, the ability to grant Ph.D's would mark another long-sought victory for the department.

"We have always planned that when we had the faculty in place and the undergraduate program settled we would move towards a graduate program," said K. Anthony Appiah, professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy. "We've had a fair amount of demand."

Appiah explained that as the number of programs in African-American studies has grown across the nation, a gap has been left in qualified teachers to fill their faculties.