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Liberationist Mentality. The department is directed by Dr. Ewart Guinier, 59, who has degrees from City College of New York, Columbia University and New York University, and came to Harvard after planning ghetto programs at Columbia's Urban Center. Though Guinier agrees that community action must be part of Harvard's approach to Afro-American studies, initial progress in that direction has obviously not satisfied militant black students; last fall they took matters into their own hands by thrice occupying University Hall to protest the institution's allegedly racist employment policies.
Black students argue that the goal of Harvard's Afro-American studies should be to build up the black liberationist mentality and teach specific skills that can aid the cause. "The only reason a black majors in Afro-American studies," says Mark Smith, one of six students on the university's 13-member standing committee, "is because he feels it will best enable him to work for his people when he gets out of college." Smith's stark rhetorical question: "Does Harvard, which we regard as part of the oppressor, have the ability to teach black people how to destroy it? I doubt it."
So do many other Harvard blacks, who have begun to wonder whether any program, no matter how "action-oriented," can build a liberationist mentality in black students who are living in what they regard as a hostile white environment. Some of them are considering transferring to all-black colleges. The five Harvard whites majoring in black studies also feel unwanted. "The blacks think that we're spying on them or something," says Sophomore Jim Collins, who gives good marks to most of his courses but adds that his experience in the introductory "colloquium" has been grim because it was so disorganized. "I might as well have read a few books on the side and not have taken the course," he says.
New Outlook. "The major pitfall of black studies programs as they exist across the country today," says Dr. Nathan Hare, who organized San Francisco State College's program, "is the absence of a revolutionary perspective." The department at San Francisco State has one, though College President Samuel I. Hayakawa failed to renew Hare's contract at the end of last year after a feud.
The department emphasizes Malcolm X more than Margaret Mead, and studies are coordinated with work in the community. A class in black geography, for example, is surveying San Francisco to find out where black people live and what their housing conditions are like; the students hope to publish their findings at the end of the semester. A class on black involvement in scientific development is checking into community health needs and attitudes toward available health care. Students in black journalism are following the treatment of news by the local media and writing stories for Black Fire, a Black Panther-style campus newspaper.