On the Department of African and African American Studies’ website, there are four small photos featuring professors in the department. Three of the photos change every second, like a flipbook, so that a visitor to the site will get to see pictures of all of the department’s faculty members.

The fourth photo, situated in the center of the website, does not change.

That photo features Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Af Am’s chair since 1991, and a department mainstay even as other high-profile professors—including Cornel R. West ’74, K. Anthony Appiah, Lawrence D. Bobo, and Michael C. Dawson—have come and gone.

Soon Gates’ picture, too, will likely change.

At the end of the next academic year, Gates will step down as chair and hand over the reins of a department that, for the past 15 years, has been uniquely his. When he arrived, Harvard Af Am had only one senior professor and a handful of students, but under Gates’ leadership the department rose to the pinnacle of its field during the late 1990s.

But since the department’s heyday, Af Am has stumbled upon troubled times.

Former Fletcher University Professor West’s departure for Princeton in 2002 after a bitter public dispute with University President Lawrence H. Summers heralded the end of the Af Am “dream team.” That same year, Appiah, the former Carswell professor of African American studies, also went to Princeton, citing personal reasons.

This year, the department lost another three faculty members—Dawson, Bobo, and Bobo’s wife Marcyliena Morgan. And now another professor, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, who is an assistant professor of the history of art and architecture and of African and African American studies, says she may leave as well. Shaw, who does not have tenure at Harvard, will be a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania next year, and she says she hopes to receive a tenure offer there.

Students, too, have been leaving the Af Am department. The number of students enrolled in Af Am courses has plunged from 1,056 in the 2001-2002 academic year to just 332 this year.

And the shakeups have had reverberations beyond Johnston Gate. The department, though still considered by many the best in the country, has lost much of the prestige in which it once basked.

But Gates says the department is looking to rebuild. Two years after the Committee on African Studies merged with the African American Studies department, he says he is on the verge of making three tenured appointments in Af Am, as well as five in African studies in a push to make that program the best in the country.

With the loss of several top professors, dwindling class enrollments, a diminished reputation, and Gates’ decision to step down as chair, the Af Am department’s honeymoon is over. Whether or not the planned new hires and the as-yet-unnamed new chair can return the department to its former prominence remains to be seen.

A YEAR OF TURMOIL

Unlike the departures of West and Appiah—who say they left for personal reasons—this year’s exodus of professors can be primarily attributed to tenure decisions.

The losses began last summer, when Summers denied tenure to Morgan, a former associate professor of African and African American studies, even though the Af Am department voted unanimously to give her tenure.