THE BLACK BRAIN TRUST

TO ITS LEGION OF ADMIRERS, THE Afro-American studies department that Henry Louis Gates Jr. is assembling at Harvard is the most glittering display of black brainpower since W.E.B. Du Bois studied alone at the university a century ago. To its detractors in the black-studies movement, it is simply a collection of high-profile academic hustlers driven more by a lust for fame and big lecture fees than by any deep commitment to the field. Either way, the house that Gates is building in Cambridge has emerged as the most visible sign that black studies has been reborn as a vibrant academic discipline after a long period of disarray. Says Gerald Early, director of the Afro-American studies program at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri: "Harvard's efforts give these scholars a prestige that redounds on African-American studies in general."

That is especially true now that Gates has snagged one of the country's most influential sociologists--the University of Chicago's William Julius Wilson, who will be a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and in Harvard's department of Afro-American studies. That means "Afro-Am," heretofore best known for Gates' esoteric literary theories and Cornel West's philosophical fulminations on race, will be a strong voice in public debates over poverty and racial tension. During Wilson's 24 years at Chicago, his research on how worldwide economic changes combined with the residual effects of discrimination to produce the black underclass has shaped the view of most experts in the field. Now, at 60, he believes he can combat what he considers a disastrous rightward swing in national urban policy better from Harvard than from Chicago, where, he says, "I was feeling a little isolated in the past several years here because of my interest in public policy."

The hoopla at Harvard over Wilson's well-publicized defection--and the corresponding gloom at Chicago--is a hallmark of how far black studies has come since its inception during the late 1960s. Back then, even die-hard proponents of the field concede, these programs were more a sop to the angry black students who had just begun to show up in large numbers on white campuses than a serious endeavor--the higher educational equivalent of building swimming pools in the inner city to take the heat out of long, hot summers. Poorly funded and often staffed by barely qualified teachers, they got little or no respect from other faculty members.

As a result, black studies fell into a long decline on many campuses, which was made worse by the buffoonery and outright nonsense of some of the field's best-known advocates. At City College, part of the City University of New York, for example, former black-studies chairman Leonard Jeffries became notorious for his blunderbuss attacks on Jews and his ludicrous theory classifying blacks as "sun people" and whites as "ice people." Other so-called Afrocentric scholars maintained that the ancient civilization of Egypt invented airplanes and electricity thousands of years ago. Small wonder black studies sometimes became a laughingstock.