CAMBRIDGE -- A bustle of activity accompanies Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s entrance into his sprawling corner office. The chairman of Harvard's department of African and African American studies just arrived from New York City, his base since going on sabbatical at the beginning of the school year. He kisses his secretary hello, then pops his head into the waiting room to tell his interviewer that he must check his e-mail before the conversation commences. Twenty minutes after the interview was scheduled to begin, it's time to enter his sunny office.

Gates has earned the right to take his time. In the past 13 years he's guided Harvard's once-ailing black studies department to the top of the heap. The publication of his scholarly work has made him an even bigger force in academia. He's achieved celebrity status, appearing in IBM ads and PBS documentaries, including last month's "America Beyond the Color Line," which explores the divide between poor and well-to-do blacks.

"You see him on TV," says Robert Bruce Slater, managing editor of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. "He does advertisements. He's very well known. You think of a top African-American scholar, you immediately think of him."

The painful defections in 2002 of Gates's friends and colleagues K. Anthony Appiah and Cornel West to Princeton weren't enough to break the department's stride. On this day, Gates confidently exclaims, "We're still number one." When it comes to the issue

of standing, he says, "I'm ruthlessly competitive." The 2002-03 school year was a tumultuous one. The department hired six professors to fill the academic holes left behind by the departures of Appiah and West. Gates also elevated African studies from a certificate program to a full-fledged major. Only after completing these tasks did Gates feel comfortable enough to take his first sabbatical since starting at Harvard in 1991. And, no, this leave has nothing to do with the Appiah/West hubbub.

"It was all part of the plan," says Gates, 53, whose friends call him by his childhood nickname, "Skip." "It was approved two years ago. There were no surprises."

Gates headed to Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where he finished work on "African American Lives." This biography of 600 of the most important African-Americans, which he coedited with fellow Harvard professor Evelyn Higginbotham, will be published next month by Oxford University Press. Back at Princeton, Gates will work on another book, this one about black writers of the 18th century. He'll return to Harvard in the fall.

Building bridges

At readings, such as the one he gave at the Harvard Bookstore one frigid January evening to promote the companion book to his latest documentary, Gates gives off a folksy, chatty vibe. But during the interview he's stiff in his shirtsleeves, either crossing his arms on his chest or clasping his hands on his desk. Ask him about turning African studies into a major and he'll refer you to the archives: "It's been in all the papers. The Times did a story about it." Ask him about the hip ailment he's battled since his teens and he'll say he wrote about it in his 1994 memoir "Colored People." Only toward the end of the interview does he show the Southern charm of his West Virginia roots.

Gates doesn't hesitate to tell you that he sits comfortably to the left of center. "I'm a bridge builder," he says. "You know, you can't be a department chair and not be conciliatory. My whole thrust is to bring people together. . . . It's not my strategy; it's just who I am."

These days he's also a "Northeast corridor type of person." His daughters with wife Sharon Adams reside in New York, where Maggie, 23, works in publishing after graduating from her father's alma mater, Yale; Elizabeth, 21, is a junior at NYU.

"This is home," he says, referring to the department, the school, the city of Cambridge. But the decision to stay was difficult. "You know, I can't tell you," he says, "how deep my affection is for Anthony Appiah and Cornel West."

He met Appiah in 1973 as a Mellon Fellowship student at the University of Cambridge's Clare College in England. There were only three black residents at Clare, says Gates, "so we had to get to know each other. And I admire him. He's the most brilliant, subtle, and princely person I've ever met."

Appiah followed Gates to Yale, Cornell, Duke, and finally Harvard. "It never occurred to me," says Gates, "that we would not spend the rest of our careers together." So it was tough when West and Appiah took positions at Princeton. Gates almost decided to leave with them.

"I went back and forth," Gates says. "I mean, two summers ago I was convinced I was going to Princeton, and then I knew that the right thing to do would be to stay."

After all, there was still work to do at Harvard. The six hires in Gates's department helped alleviate the heavy emphasis on the humanities, and adding academic stars to the roster helps the school recruit the best students. "It's certainly a big advantage," says Slater, "that they can take courses with these well-known scholars."

Michael Dawson, former chairman of political science at the University of Chicago, fulfilled the need for a political science professor. Marla Frederick, a cultural anthropologist, studies the black religious experience. Former MIT professor Evelynn Hammonds focuses on the history of race. Elvis Mitchell, the New York Times film critic, was appointed visiting professor.

Before John Mugane came on board, students had to go to Boston University to take an African language course other than Swahili. Gates says the hiring of Marcyliena Morgan, who transferred her hip-hop archive from UCLA to Harvard, is his way of learning from Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke's missteps.

"When Alain Locke wrote `The New Negro,' " says Gates, "he missed the most important cultural phenomenon emerging out of black America, and that was the birth of jazz. . . . I didn't want to make that mistake."

There are other gaps he's eager to fill in: economics, African anthropology, African sociology, and African literature. "I'm always looking for people to plunder," he says. He's already got his eye on a prospect: "There's an Anglo-African whose work we're starting to look at. We'd like to hire him. We'll see if I can persuade my colleagues that that is a good idea. Then I have to persuade the dean."

A public face

Gates's indirect route to academia began when he was a child. He loved books, but his first instinct, at the age of 3 or 4, was to become a librarian. Later, he considered a medical career.

Back then, writing was what he calls an "avocation," something he loved but never considered as a career. He worked as an editor on his high school newspaper and wrote a guest column for the Yale Daily News. Before starting at Cambridge, he interned at Time magazine's London bureau and returned to the job during vacations.

The Cambridge experience set him on his present career path. He discovered, he says, "what I wanted to do all along was become a person of letters, a scholar."

Gates keeps his profile -- and, by association, the profile of his department -- high by keeping his face public. IBM and Apple asked him almost simultaneously to appear in ads. A fan of the ThinkPad, Gates went with IBM. The print campaign for the laptop was so successful, IBM executives offered him a spot in its television commercial for Linux. But you have to wonder: Why advertising?

"African-American children, particularly in the inner city, are saturated with images of black entertainers and sports figures," he says. "But how many black academics do they see in a commercial?"

This is also the reason he gives for making documentaries such as 1999's "Wonders of the African World" and this year's "Color Line." "With my documentaries," he says, "you're seeing an actual academic on camera doing the interviews, the narration. I write the scripts. That kind of thing is important."

Some have accused "Color Line" of delivering the same old story. A critic at the Charlotte Observer wrote, "Unless most PBS viewers have been living in Saddam Hussein's spider hole, the four part series breaks no new ground: the South still has racism; Chicago has poverty; Hollywood has racism; and Russell Simmons is the man."

The message of "Color Line" is distilled more clearly at Gates's Harvard Bookstore appearance. He charms the audience with self-deprecating tales while telling them that, in order to stop the dramatic division between the classes, blacks need to stay in school, not sell drugs, and not get pregnant as teenagers. He wants African-American social and cultural groups to mimic Jewish Hebrew schools by creating after-school programs for young African-Americans.

Gates was inspired to create his own program after the Rev. Eugene Rivers, a local activist, called Harvard's black studies department "the Cotton Club on the Charles" in a 1992 critique in the Boston Review that explored the abandonment of poor neighborhoods by the black middle class and particularly by the black intellectual community. Gates's initial response was anger. He thought, "For Harvard to have the leading black studies department is a political statement whether anyone here is political or not. . . . But then I realized that he to some extent was right."

In 2000, Gates and Rivers created the Martin Luther King After-School program at River's Ella J. Baker House in Dorchester. The project uses Gates and Appiah's Encarta Africana encyclopedia to teach urban kids African and African-American history. Last month, Gates cut the ribbon at the opening of the after-school program's third site in Baltimore. Negotiations are in progress to open five programs in Cleveland.

"These kids really get turned on when they learn about material that has significance to their own lives," says Annie Byrd, executive director and national coordinator of the program.

These days Gates participates in literacy and AIDS programs, including one that gives underprivileged kids a chance to study with scholars in his department. "It's absolutely amazing," says Rivers, who's known Gates since 1973, "a great irony of history, that Skip, who was always the high-end, chic, Tina Brown kind of guy, ended up being the big progressive in the [black intellectual] crowd."

But for Gates, it's just another way to build bridges.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

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