"I would say the faculty of Afro-American studies is completely devoted to the training of students of the undergraduate level, as we have been for years," he said.

The debate over whether Harvard's department is, in Kutzinski's words, too "flashy" has been stirring for years now.

Gates, who arrived at Harvard in 1991, quickly lured big-name academics like K. Anthony Appiah, Cornel R. West '74 and William Julius Wilson to Cambridge.

Gates's own projects--Encyclopedia Africana and a series of television documentaries, have been labeled as self-promoting or trendy by scholars within the field of Afro-American studies.

Just last Friday, a group representing the Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People stormed into the Barker Center to protest Gates's PBS series, "Wonders of the African World," calling it Eurocentric.

Robert Stepto, the acting head of the Afro-American studies program at Yale, in an interview with Yale Daily News, called Gates a "saboteur and even a provocateur." Stepto said Gates is still angry that he was once denied tenure at Yale and is trying to diminish the reputation of the Yale program.

"[The rumors] simply go back to the fact that things didn't work out at Yale for [Gates]," Stepto told the Yale newspaper.

Gates strongly denied the charge that he looks down on Yale's program.