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Henry Louis Gates Jr. will remain as chair of the Afro-American Studies Department and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. Gates commented, 'I have been deeply touched by the outpouring of support and affection from my colleagues on the faculty, students at Harvard, President Summers, and Dean Kirby.' (Staff photo by Justin Ide)

Henry Louis Gates Jr. to continue at Harvard:

Renowned scholar will continue as chair of Afro-American Studies Department and director of W.E.B. Du Bois Institute

Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard University, and William C. Kirby, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), announced today that W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., will continue as chair of the Afro-American Studies Department and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.

"Harvard University is committed to remaining pre-eminent in Afro-American Studies. I am delighted that Professor Gates will continue his leadership of our Department of Afro-American Studies and of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research," Summers said.

"I look forward to working with Skip and his colleagues and with those who will join the department and the Du Bois Institute in the months and years ahead. The important issues surrounding the African-American experience deserve Harvard's fullest attention. Skip brings unsurpassed commitment, energy, and creativity to these critical questions, and we are very pleased that he will continue his significant work here at Harvard," Summers concluded.

Dean Kirby said, "I am very pleased to announce that Professor Gates will remain at Harvard, and that he will continue to lead us from strength to strength, building an even better department and W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research. His extraordinary scholarship, vision, and commitment have helped to make Harvard's Afro-American Studies department pre-eminent in the nation. His charisma, leadership, and unbounded energy have touched the lives of faculty and students across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and, indeed, the entire University."

"With the unfortunate departure of Anthony Appiah and Cornel West, the department is in a period of transition. Because of my devotion to the department and the Du Bois Institute, I felt it crucial that I remain here and join my colleagues in this exciting process of rebuilding. In the last few months, we have attracted significant talent to the department, including renowned scholar Evelynn M. Hammonds, and we have the opportunity to bring more people here," Gates said.

"I have been deeply touched by the outpouring of support and affection from my colleagues on the faculty, students at Harvard, President Summers, and Dean Kirby," Gates continued. "And, I have no doubt that the administration is committed to maintaining our status as the number one department in our field. Therefore, despite an extremely appealing opportunity to join Professor Appiah and Professor West in building Afro-American studies at Princeton, I have decided to remain on the faculty at Harvard. But, there is no doubt that Princeton has emerged as a major center of Afro-American studies. And, I applaud the leadership and vision of President Tilghman and Provost Gutmann because we need multiple centers of excellence in our field, and Princeton is one of these."

With 40 honorary degrees, Gates is a world-renowned scholar and teacher of African and African-American history and culture. He has authored seven books and written numerous essays and reviews on a broad range of African and African-American issues, including slavery, race, feminism, dialect, and identity. In 1989 he won the American Book Award for "The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism." And, he recently completed his second major documentary, "America Beyond the Color Line," to be aired in 2003.

In 2000, Gates authored, along with Cornel West, the widely acclaimed "The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century." That came on the heels of the authoritative and groundbreaking "Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience," a collaboration with K. Anthony Appiah. It was also published on a CD-ROM as "Encarta Africana" by Microsoft.

Gates, who has been a leading scholar of African-American studies for nearly three decades, began his tenure at Harvard in 1991 after having worked on the faculties of such distinguished universities as Duke, Cornell, and Yale. He is a 1973 summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale, and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. (1979) from Clare College, The University of Cambridge. He burst into the view of many Americans in 1983 when he discovered and published "Our Nig; or Sketches From the Life of a Free Black, In a Two Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There." The slim volume was, at the time, the earliest known novel by an African-American female author. More recently, he authenticated the first novel by a female fugitive slave, "The Bondwoman's Narrative" by Hanna Crafts.

Gates has received dozens of awards and honors, including the National Humanities Award presented by President Bill Clinton in 1998, the MacArthur Prize, and the Jefferson Lectureship. He has been named one of the "25 Most Influential Americans" by Time magazine.

For more information about Afro-American Studies and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, please visit: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~afroam/About_Afro-Am/about_afro-am.html.

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Getting to Average

By HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.

hen black policy types let themselves dream about racial uplift, they dream about getting to average. The fantasy isn't that inequality vanishes; it's that inequality in black America catches up with inequality in white America. And, for the moment, a fantasy is all it is. Since the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the black middle class has increased significantly, yet the percentage of black children living in poverty has hovered between 30 and 40 percent.

"Look at what we could achieve if we got to be average!" Franklin Raines, the C.E.O. of Fannie Mae, told me. "We don't need to take everybody from the ghetto and make them Harvard graduates. We just need to get folks to average, and we'd all look around and say, 'My God, what a fundamental change has happened in this country.' "

How big a change? He's done the math. "If America had racial equality in education and jobs, African-Americans would have two million more high school degrees, two million more college degrees, nearly two million more professional and managerial jobs, and nearly $200 billion more income," he pointed out in a speech. "If America had racial equality in housing, three million more Americans would own their own homes. And if America had racial equality in wealth, African-Americans would have $760 billion more in equity value, $200 billion more in the stock market, $120 billion more in their retirement funds and $80 billion more in the bank." Total: Over $1 trillion.

Recently, I asked a few experts on poverty in black America about how we might get to average. I heard a lot of deep breaths. When they picture black America, they see Buffalo - a boarded-up central city and a few lakefront mansions. The glory days for the black working class were from 1940 to 1970, when manufacturing boomed and factory jobs were plentiful. But when the manufacturing sector became eclipsed by the service economy, black workers ended up - well, stuck in a demographic Buffalo.

My colleague William Julius Wilson, the sociologist, thinks better manpower policies would help. Once black workers moved to where the jobs were; they need to do it again. Instead of trying to turn ghettos into boomtowns, then, we ought to provide workers with relocation assistance, and create "transitional public sector jobs" for those who haven't yet found a private-sector gig. Oh, and - since we're dreaming - fixing the schools would be nice, including "school-to-work transition programs," to place high school grads in the job market.

Raines, as you might expect, considers homeownership to be crucial to wealth generation. "The average person develops more wealth in their home than they do in the stock market. Next to a job, it's the most important thing in a family's lives." Blacks, he notes, are considerably less likely to own their own homes than whites.

How to afford one, though? "The whole new service economy is fundamentally based on communications, the Internet, electronics," he told me. "That infrastructure is going to need people who can manage it, and those jobs are going to move from very high tech to being service jobs, just the way it happened at the telephone company. You used to have to be a scientist to operate a phone, and then it became a blue-collar job."

But maybe, as the economist Glenn Loury suggests, we need to aim lower. "There doesn't seem to be an end in sight to the vast, disproportionate overrepresentation of African-Americans in prison or jails," he told me. "It's our deepest problem." Job training for willing prisoners would be a good start.

Loury considers welfare reform a success: "We ask a lot more of mothers, and they have given us a lot more, and they and we are both better off for our having asked." When it comes to education, though, he advocates "equal expenditures per kid, no matter where they live." In fact, he'd spend more money on inferior school districts, at least over the short run, to bring them up to standard.

Would any of these initiatives really make much of a difference in an age of offshoring? As everyone I spoke to agreed, we're unlikely to find out. There just isn't the political will, in either party. The White House has relegated its costly experiments in social engineering to Iraq. And so the 60's generation now seems to be presiding over the permanent entrenchment of a vast black underclass.

Has average really become too much to ask for?

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a guest columnist through September. Thomas L. Friedman is on book leave.

E-mail: hlgates@nytimes.com

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