Ending months of speculation about his academic future, Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 will quit Harvard and rejoin the faculty at Princeton University next year, Princeton announced Friday.

West’s departure strikes a blow to Harvard’s Afro-American studies department, which in the past decade was transformed from a department with only one tenured professor—who was white—to a self-proclaimed “dream team” of scholars, widely considered the top black studies program in the nation.

In a statement released Friday, DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. said West played a vital role in that transformation and said his loss would be deeply felt.

“Cornel West’s recruitment to Harvard was crucial in establishing the department’s place of leadership in the field of Afro-American studies,” Gates, chair of the Afro-American studies department, said in his statement.

West, who directed Princeton’s Program in African-American Studies before coming to Harvard in 1994, said Princeton would offer stimulating academic opportunities.

“I am excited to return to the greatest center for humanistic studies in the country,” he said in a statement released Friday afternoon.

West’s decision came as a surprise to black student leaders on campus.

“It’s a bit of a shock right now,” Brandon A. Gayle ’03, president of the Black Students Association, said Friday.

“It’s certainly a big blow to the department,” he said, “but at the same time that department’s chock full of people who do a tremendous amount of good work, and I have no doubt the department will be fine in the long run.”

Gayle said he and other student leaders who gathered 1,200 signatures for a petition urging West to remain at Harvard had not been notified by West or other Faculty members of his decision.

“Anytime you lose someone as vocal as West was, it’s a loss to the academic debate that can go on at a University such as Harvard, and I think it’s a shame,” said Isaac J. Weiler ’02, president of the Black Men’s Forum.

In his statement, West said he looks forward to joining a university that “promotes high quality intellectual conversation mediated with respect.”

Since the fall, after a dispute with University President Lawrence H. Summers, West reportedly said Harvard’s leader had slighted his academic work and told the national media he had been “attacked and insulted.”

According to West’s account, Summers rebuked him for focusing more on outside activities—like recording a spoken-word CD and working on political campaigns—than on his scholarship.

Summers has refused to comment on personal conversations with faculty members. But he said he has made several attempts to mend ties with the University professor.