The Center Retakes Hold: Racial Reform Starts and Stalls at Harvard in the 1970s

During early 1970s, a deep and public rift developed between moderate and radical faculty members, black students, and the centrist Harvard administrators. Despite black student and faculty activism, this paper will argue that it became clear that the Harvard administration would allow the Afro-American Studies department to proceed forward if it adhered to the new liberal centrist position on racial reform. The narrative of the 1970s implementation of higher education reforms at Harvard relies on a source base of college journals, meeting notes, letters, and speeches.

The intra-racial portrait of the black faculty, moreover, does not reveal an ideological consensus among the group.  Two African American professors, Martin Kilson and Orlando Patterson, shared the centrist position on racial reform that mirrored the stance of the Harvard administration during the 1970s. They embraced the academic endeavors of quality scholarship as defined within the conservative and traditional confines of university life. Ewart Guinier and Derrick Bell were firmly in the cohort of the left-leaning academics who would also supported rigorous standards and a non-traditional educational approach.

The Harvard faculty and administrators faced an epistemological, pedagogical, and bureaucratic question that lay at the heart of 1970’s implementation effort: would it entail revolutionary change and construct a Pan-African body of knowledge, transform Harvard into a place of culturally relevant and community based learning, and alter the role of professors and students in administering the department? Or would it be an Americanist department, with a traditional scholarly approach, and maintain an administration structure that mirrored established departments? 

This paper concludes that as a result of multiple revisions and top-down administrative decisions, the Afro-American Studies department took a moderate and traditional form by the end of the decade. The leftist faculty and students did not retain the radical elements of blacks studies reform at Harvard.