DORCHESTER--Harvard met the hood in Dorchester last night, to use the words of Rev. Eugene F. Rivers 3d.

Professors, city officials and local teens gathered at Baker House, a settlement house here, to open a new after-school program sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Studies.

The program, the brainchild of Du Bois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates Jr., is designed to teach neighborhood kids about the Internet through content that focuses on black history and culture.

Forty neighborhood middle school and high school students will spend a semester working with Encyclopedia Africana, a program developed by Gates and Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy K. Anthony Appiah.

The program is designed as a pilot for a series of similar ventures that Gates hopes to establish across the country. The goal is no less than to close the "digital divide"--the growing gap between the technological haves and have-nots.

Rivers, the famous Pentecostal Minister who serves as President of Baker House, says that program is extraordinary because it brings a top scholar into the realm of public activism.

"Henry Louis Gates is now moving to a new level of engagement," he said. "He is launching a frontal attack on the digital divide."

At Baker House last night, the young people in the program--some of whom will participate as part of their probation--mingled with the likes of Gates, Appiah, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, and Police Commissioner Paul Evans, over bug juice and catered hors d'oeuvres.