Less than a year after joining the faculty at Duke University, one of the best-known scholars in black studies has been recruited away by Harvard University.
Henry Louis (Skip) Gates, Jr., joined Duke as a professor of English and literature last fall after a long effort to woo him away from Cornell University.
In July he will become director of Harvard’s WEB DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research. He will serve as chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard and hold a joint appointment as professor of English and of Afro-American Studies.
Harvard, Duke, and Cornell are among the major universities that have engaged in an intense and highly public bidding war to hire Mr. Gates over the past few years. He is among a small number of “superstar” scholars who can command high salaries and special benefits.
An assistant to Mr. Gates said he had been traveling and was unavailable for comment.
Duke sought Mr. Gates for several years before successfully recruiting him. Duke officials said they were disappointed but not bitter about Mr. Gates’s decision to move to Harvard.
“When you get someone at the scholarly level of Gates, every year there is an offer,” said John F. Burness, Duke’s senior vice-president for public affairs.
Some on the Duke campus seemed fed up with the recruiting game. An editorial in the student newspaper last week said the university should end its efforts to retain Mr. Gates and let him leave.
The editorial, headlined “Skipping Away Again,” said Mr. Gates had “done almost nothing” for the university. Calling the scholar an “invaluable” resource for any institution, the editorial nonetheless said Mr. Gates had shown little commitment to Duke.
“Harvard, if Gates ends up there, should beware: its new star is apt to skip town as quickly as he gets there,” the editorial said.
Stanley Fish, chairman of the English department at Duke, was closely involved in recruiting Mr. Gates from Cornell and called his departure “a very grievous loss.” Mr. Gates, he said, had been expected to play a central role in the establishment of a strong black-studies program at Duke.
Two factors may have tipped the scale toward Harvard, Mr. Fish said. First, Harvard’s Afro-American Studies Department is already in place, while Duke’s program is in the planning stages. Mr. Fish also said Harvard’s visibility might have attracted Mr. Gates.
K. Anthony Appiah, a professor of philosophy and literature at Duke who has worked closely with Mr. Gates, suggested that the opportunities at Harvard were “irresistible.” The Harvard department has many unoccupied faculty positions, and the DuBois institute is well funded, he said. Mr. Appiah left Cornell with Mr. Gates, but said he had not received an offer from Harvard.
Mr. Gates, who graduated in 1973 from Yale University and earned his graduate degrees at Clare College of Cambridge University, is the author of several books, including The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism.
Henry Rosovsky, acting dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, called the hiring of Mr. Gates a “very significant step forward” in Harvard’s plan to boost the prestige of Afro-American studies there.
Harvard’s announcement came after three other high-profile minority scholars had rejected tenure offers last year to join its Afro-American Studies Department. Few details were available about Harvard’s offer, and Mr. Rosovsky declined to comment further on it.
In Duke’s most recent attempts to persuade Mr. Gates to stay, salary was not an issue, Mr. Fish said. Negotiations involved faculty positions and other matters for black studies, he added. According to some accounts, Mr. Gates was earning as much as $95,000.
Duke provided Mr. Gates’s wife, Sharon Adams, who is a potter, with a teaching post as a lecturer in the university’s Institute of the Arts. After the couple leaves Duke, Mr. Appiah said, Ms. Adams has decided to work full time at her pottery and will not be teaching.
