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Over the past five years Harvard University has lost a number of prominent black scholars to other universities. These include Cornel West, K. Anthony Appiah, Michael Dawson, Wallace Best, and Caroline Hoxby. Now, prominent anthropologist J. Lorand Matory is leaving Harvard for Duke. Matory cites Harvard's weak commitment to the racial diversity of its faculty. The scholar's high academic standing has never been questioned but his leadership in efforts to topple Harvard president Lawrence Summers, as well as his strong criticism of Israel, has made him an unacceptable figure to some constituencies on the Harvard campus.
T his past September, anthropology professor J. Lorand Matory, a leading scholar on the African diaspora, announced that he will be leaving Harvard to chair Duke University's African-American studies department.
The announcement came as a surprise in view of his praise of Harvard and its president, Drew Gilpin Faust. At a meeting of the Association of Black Faculty, Administrators, and Fellows of Harvard University in September, Matory, who chairs the organization, praised the efforts of President Faust to add more women and minorities to the Harvard faculty. At the meeting, Matory, a highly regarded scholar and a widely published professor of anthropology and of African and African-American studies, said:
"Sister president, you keep on standing up for the people who have been pushed down. I sure want this president to keep on doing what she's doing."
J. Lorand Matory grew up in Washington, D.C. His father was a surgeon and professor at Howard University. His mother was a clinical psycho!- ogist. Matory entered Harvard College at the age of 16 and graduated magna cum laude. He earned a master's and Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He has been on the Harvard faculty since 1991 and won tenure in 1998.
Matory is leaving Harvard at the end of the current academic year. "Duke made it very clear they wanted me," Matory told JBHE. "But Harvard's dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Michael D. Smith, did not do so." Matory said that Harvard did not make a reasonable counteroffer to Duke's invitation to Matory to join its faculty.
Matory told JBHE that "the pull factors drawing me to Duke are enormous. Duke has shown its commitment...