Word: afro-am
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This hostility to academic exploration has been most visible toward newer departments like Afro-American Studies. This fall, Afro-Am had literally dwindled down to nothing. Under heavy pressure, the administration has finally discovered Afro-Am, pursuing professors across the nation with offers of inflated salaries and other perks. These frantic moves have begun to reap dividends, as luminaries like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Spike Lee have agreed to accept Harvard posts...
...claiming that the Afro-Am department is now completely healed, but it at least seems to have broken out of its self-perpetuating slump. Now we can begin to ask the hard question: What can Harvard do, within its tenure system, to bolster weak departments and maintain its strong ones...
...Both the Afro-Am Department and the Dining Services seemed to have been bogged down in the institutional and structural mire of the status quo. Both have restrictive structures--the tenure system and the repetitive and all-encompassing meal plan--which were effectively prohibiting any sort of substantial change...
...incoming Chair Gates and outgoing Chair Barbara Johnson have made creative use of Harvard's ability to appoint visiting lecturers. The result: a guest stint by Lee that will give the moribund department a dynamic lift and could well inspire other scholars to check out Harvard's Afro-Am--and maybe even to accept tenure here...
...might do all Harvard administrators well to learn from the recent successes in Afro-Am and HDS, to pause and consider how they might apply these lessons of innovation to their own administration. In doing so, they will realize that there is no reason why each Harvard department can't recreate the short-term excitement of Deli Day and reap long-term benefits every...