Word: afro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...where we can't get people to listen to us unless they acknowledge our existence," Gladsjo says. "For that reason, GLAD is oriented toward awareness, rather than toward winning political concessions." Colantuono also sees the parallels between the gay rights struggle and the earliest moments in the awakening of Afro-American conciousness in this country. "It took Blacks a long time to realize that racism is not justified; that they were not biologically inferior, and gays are just reaching that point," he says...
...administrative politics and academics are like oil and vinegar. They don't mix well, but one usually accompanies the other. Huggins's main task involves finding qualified faculty to teach courses in the department. He and Eileen Southern. Professor of Afro-American Studies and Music, are its only fulltime, tenured professors. Huggins says his current search efforts will result in Dean Rosovsky's offering tenured positions in the department to two scholars early this fall. If the trend of the past decade continues, however, it is doubtful that the two offers will result in appointments to the Harvard faculty. Huggins...
Leaving a secure academic position at Columbia University to come to Harvard last spring was no scholarly retreat for Nathan I. Huggins. W.E.B. DuBois Professor of History and Afro-American studies. His acceptance of Dean Rosovsky's offer last year put him at the helm of a department that has seen more administrative politics in its 12-year life than any other. Members of the Harvard community and scholars around the nation have viewed the Faculty's hasty decision to create an Afro-American studies department in 1969 as a concession to the Black militancy accompanying that year's spring...
Today, Huggins makes no bones about the political significance of his decision to come to Harvard and to become chairman of the department. He says he accepted Rosovsky's offer as part of a greater effort to bolster the legitimacy of Afro-American studies as an academic field: "The failure of the program at Harvard would have consequences to the field of study itself that would be harmful. A lot of scholars in the country look to Harvard. If we could make Afro-American studies work here very well, it could have important positive results for the field...
...Making Afro-American studies work well will require more than efforts to reconcile the political differences among students, faculty and the administration, which have consumed a substantial amount of energy during the past decade. Huggins's greatest challenge will be developing a highquality academic program for concentrators within the department, not an easy task for a department that has consistently plagued the Faculty, and its students, with doubts about its worthiness. Orlando Patterson, professor of Sociology and a former member of the executive committee overseeing the department, said as recently as the fall of 1979 about Afro-American studies, "Students...