The student members were given the power to vote on tenure and term appointments.

Economics Professor Henry Rosovsky, who would later become dean of the Faculty, notes the student activism was the deciding factor in the creation of the department.

“I do not see how the Faculty vote of April 22 can be interpreted as anything else but action in the face of threats,” he wrote in an essay shortly after the vote.

‘Ivory Tower Discipline?’

Roughly 400 colleges and universities nationwide offer African-American studies, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. Many of these departments were also formed out of student protest in the late 1960s.

Of those schools that have African-American study programs, about 140 offer bachelors degrees.

But Harvard is one of only about a half-dozen American institutions that can boast a full-blown department granting doctorates in African-American studies. Temple University, Yale University, New York University and the University of California, Berkeley are others.

DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. places Harvard’s Afro-American studies department—which he chairs—at the pinnacle of the field today.

Citing the quality of work and the number of citations in scholarly journals, Gates argues that Harvard has the best collection of African-American studies scholars in the world.

But not everyone in the field would agree that these measures best represent a top-notch African-American studies program.

Despite the prominence of Harvard’s Afro-American studies department, some say its emphasis on the interdisciplinary approach, rather than the Afrocentric one, takes away from its legitimacy as a true model for the academy.

“African-American studies never saw itself as being an ivory tower discipline—it was going to be real,” says Monroe H. Little Jr., director of the Afro-American Studies Program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

Some students in Harvard’s Afro-American studies department say they would like to see Harvard’s department take a more activist stance.

“You have to have someone who is an activist—it makes the Af-Am department look legitimate, especially for black communities,” says Afro-American studies concentrator Harrel Conner ’02. “I don’t think you can write about it from a pedestal...In order to be a scholar on a topic you have to live the life, because it changes.”

Several leading scholars in the field say that in order to gain legitimacy within the academy, Harvard has sacrificed a certain degree of its activism.