Writing several years ago in The New York Times Book Review, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chairman of the Afro-American studies department at Harvard, observed that “ours was the generation that took over buildings in the late 1960s and demanded the creation of Black and Women’s Studies programs, and now … we have come back to challenge the traditional curriculum.” And, my, how they have succeeded!

We had occasion to recall Professor Gates’s observation recently when the “Education Life” supplement for the November 3 issue of The New York Times ran an article entitled “Can Harvard’s Powerhouse Alter the Course of Black Studies?” The burden of this long and flattering effusion, by the Times reporter Peter Applebome, was that, yes, Professor Gates was doing terrific things at Harvard. Among other things, he had dramatically increased the “profile” ...

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