African Studies department at Harvard ... Note title use

[Patrick, Peter L]

	I find the use of titles here fascinating.
Who gets to be "Prof."? [Gates, Mugane, Hammonds]
Who is "Dr"? [West] Is this generally perceived as lesser
than "Prof"? (Surely West must have been a Prof...)

Harvard's president - surely a PhD? - is "Mr Summers",
except to (Prof) Hammonds who says of her new boss, using LN,
"Summers is on his learning curve"!
(She does however speak of "Cornel" and "Anthony" with FN.)
	And Marcy Morgan, an  Assoc. Prof. and a PhD, is "Ms Morgan".
She also doesn't seem to be a "linguist" according to the NYT
but rather a (mere?) "linguistic anthropologist". Well ok,
they probably don't know whether that makes you a linguist or not!
I wonder whether she doesn't get rated a proper title because of
being a "leading expert on hip-hop"? Is that, in NYT's view,
incompatible with "Dr" or Prof"?
	-peter-

Peter L Patrick
Dept of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
patrickp at essex.ac.uk


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harold F. Schiffman [mailto:haroldfs at ccat.sas.upenn.edu]
> Sent: 17 July 2003 13:50
> To: Ling-Anth Network
> Subject: African Studies department at Harvard to include an African
> language program
>
>
> From the New York Times, July 16, 2003
>
> Rebuilding Harvard's African Studies Dept.
>
> By SARA RIMER
>
>      After a year of turmoil that saw two of its biggest
> stars defect to
> Princeton University, Harvard's celebrated Afro-American studies
> department will be refocused and expanded to include an
> African language
> program and a new major in African studies, the chairman of the
> department, Henry Louis Gates Jr., said yesterday. Professor
> Gates, who at
> one point was so unhappy about the acrimony between his
> department and the
> Harvard president, Lawrence H. Summers, that he too weighed offers to
> leave, said he had appointed five new faculty members, including two
> African scholars, one a critic of African literature and one
> a linguist.
>
> His recruits also include a linguistic anthropologist who is
> one of the
> country's leading experts on hip-hop. Hip-hop had figured in
> the turmoil
> in Professor Gates's department, with Cornel West, one of the stars to
> leave Harvard, complaining that Mr. Summers had, among other
> things, been
> critical of his recording of a hip-hop CD entitled "Sketches of My
> Culture." "Given the reports of the contretemps between
> Cornel West and
> Larry Summers, some people might find this an ironic
> outcome," Professor
> Gates said.
>
> Professor Gates described Mr. Summers as "nothing but
> supportive" of his
> efforts to rebuild the department, including his recruiting
> the hip-hop
> expert Marcyliena Morgan from the University of California at
> Los Angeles.
> Ms. Morgan has already installed her hip-hop archives at
> Harvard. Harvard
> is by no means the first university to merge African and
> African-American
> studies in one department, and to offer a major in African
> studies. But
> for the university to take such a step is a recognition that the
> African-American experience in the United States must be understood in
> relationship to Africa and the diaspora, several scholars
> said yesterday.
>
> "This is where we're going these days in African-American
> studies," said
> John Thornton, an African historian who will join the African-American
> studies department at Boston University this fall. "It's been a trend
> intellectually. In the past 15 years, more and more people
> who are doing
> African-American history are increasingly interested in the African
> equation. On the other side, there are more Africanists who are
> recognizing that there is an American side to what they do."
> A year ago
> Professor Gates was considering jumping to Princeton after
> the departures
> of his close friends and colleagues K. Anthony Appiah, the African
> philosopher, and Dr. West, the black-studies scholar whose
> fiery lectures
> packed Harvard auditoriums.
>
> While Professor Appiah had gone to Princeton for personal reasons, Dr.
> West left after publicly feuding with Mr. Summers over the
> quality of Dr.
> West's scholarship and the university administration's commitment to
> affirmative action. Mr. Summers had declined to comment on
> the feud or Dr.
> West's reports of their conversations about his scholarship and his
> activities outside Harvard. "People were worried about the
> administration's commitment to the department," said
> Professor Gates, a
> scholar of African and African-American literature, referring to those
> faculty members who remained. "Several schools were trying to
> recruit our
> faculty. Many of us weren't sure we could rebuild.  They
> didn't know if we
> could come back without Anthony and Cornel."
>
> Now, a year later, he said, he and his colleagues have rebuilt the
> department. In keeping with the new focus, the department has
> been renamed
> African and African-American studies. "It's not as if any of
> us thinks we
> can replace a Cornel or an Anthony,"  said Evelynn M. Hammonds, a
> prominent scholar of race and the history of science, who is
> joining the
> department from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  "Those are
> huge losses."
>
> But Professor Hammonds said she was not worried about the
> administration's
> commitment to the department. "Summers is on his learning curve," she
> said. Mr. Summers praised Professor Gates's appointments and
> the new focus
> on African studies. "We as a university are now going to be taking on
> African studies in the way we take on Asian studies or Latin American
> studies or have traditionally taken on European studies," he said in a
> telephone interview. "We've also been successful in
> recruiting a number of
> first-rate people in issues ranging from the history of
> science to African
> literature."
>
> The two African scholars Professor Gates has recruited are
> Abiola Irele, a
> critic of African literature in French from Ohio State University, and
> John Mugane, an African linguist from Ohio University.
> Professor Mugane
> will direct the new African language program at Harvard.
> Africa has 2,089
> languages, Professor Mugane said. "Think of them as 2,089
> treasures, 2,089
> priceless pieces of culture," he said. "My challenge is to
> make Harvard
> the best place to learn these African languages."
>
> "It's part of the global challenge," Professor Mugane added.
> "We have to
> be able to talk to each other." With the new appointments,
> the African and
> African-American studies department has 25 faculty members. As an
> associate professor, Ms. Morgan will teach classes on hip-hop and
> linguistics and be the director of the hip-hop archives,
> which includes
> T-shirts, videotapes of the early hip-hop artists practicing
> their art in
> basements in the Bronx and an extensive collection of CD's by
> rappers like
> Tupac Shakur and Public Enemy.
>
> "While I'm not especially a fan of hip-hop perhaps I'm too
> old there can
> be no doubt that it is one of the most important cultural
> phenomenons in
> the second half of the 20th century," said Professor Gates,
> who is 52. "We
> would be remiss if we did not treat it accordingly."
>
>
>
>
>
>