While University President Nathan M. Pusey ’28 would later celebrate Project Tanganyika for its worldly vision that extended beyond students’ own “private affairs and thoughts,” administrators were initially apprehensive about the new program.

“They really thought it was never going to happen,” Goldmark said, adding that because Project Tanganyika preceded the Peace Corps, administrators were uncomfortable with the unfamiliar idea of international service.

But the program’s participants said they remained indifferent to the administration’s opinions.

“I didn’t care whether faculty supported us because [Project Tanganyika] was PBH,” Worth said.

Before leaving for Tanganyika, Peter de Lissovoy—who would have graduated in 1964, but left Harvard to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an American Civil Rights organization—remembered that a professor said to him, “Okay, see you later. Don’t get lost over there, now.”

“I would say that everybody took it in stride and nobody paid any special attention,” de Lissovoy said.

As their interest in Africa grew, some students found themselves wanting more courses in African Studies than Harvard offered.

Goldmark said that the only course that addressed Africa was one graduate seminar.

“It was not the world’s most profound or exciting course,” he added.

Gerhart said her experience as part of Project Tanganyika compelled her to study Africa in an academic context.

“It was a little frustrating because there were only a handful of courses,” Gerhart said.

Following her undergraduate studies, Gerhart—who would later work in sub-Saharan Africa—pursued a Ph.D. in Public Law and Government at Columbia, which she said had a “much stronger African Studies program.”

Though Goldmark and others involved with Project Tanganyika pushed the Committee on Educational Policy to offer credit for the course in Swahili that the program required, their request was denied.

Pusey supported the CEP’s view that Swahili did not belong among the courses required for the A.B. A February 1962 Crimson article explained Pusey’s position that Harvard should teach “only languages which have a substantial literature or the study of which leads to a doctorate.”

Harvard did not have an independent African Studies department until 1969, when black students marched to demand a student role in establishing an African Studies program and hiring black faculty.