Former Harvard hip-hop professor Marcyliena Morgan has been offered tenure by the department of African-American studies, according to today’s Crimson. Derek Bok has approved the tenure nomination.

This is a bombshell.

In what was actually one of the gutsier moves of his tenure, Larry Summers denied Morgan tenure in 2004, after which she and her husband, Lawrence Bobo, headed to Stanford.

Here’s what I understand about that incident.

Many people on the faculty did not believe that Morgan deserved tenure. Her scholarship was underwhelming, they said. (One book, basically.) I also heard several reports that she was a lousy teacher. But Skip Gates wanted to keep Bobo at Harvard, and this was one way to do it. Moreover, ever since the Cornel West incident, Gates knew that Summers could ill afford to provoke more ire from the black community. Give us this one, he urged Summers.

Summers knew all this, of course, and knew that he would take heat for saying no. But he could not bring himself to offer tenure to someone about whom there was such disagreement. (A hip-hop archive? Worthy, yes. Reason for tenure? Eh…)

(Morgan has also started such an archive at Stanford.)

And so Summers tried to find some other way to keep Morgan (and therefore Bobo) at Harvard. But the two had an offer from Stanford. “I feel the call home to California,” Bobo told the Crimson. Stanford made Morgan an “associate professor of communication.” Which tells you something right there. On the other hand, it was a tenured position.

Now, here’s where the story takes a twist.

As I report in the forthcoming issue of 02138, Summers told people that he rejected Morgan’s tenure nomination in part on the advice of Drew Faust. When Faust heard that Summers was invoking her name in the matter, she was not pleased, believing that she had never said any such thing.

So she quickly moved to correct the record. Nonetheless, the incident caused frosty relations between her and the Af-Am department for some time, until Gates and she smoothed things over.

Now there is another moment of racial sensitivity at Harvard: the “Quad Incident.” And boom, back comes Morgan’s tenure nomination, brilliantly timed to land near the end of Bok’s tenure.

So far as I can tell, Morgan has not published anything major since she left Harvard. In the spring of this year, she taught “Hip-Hop and Don’t Stop: Introduction to Modern Speech Communities,” a course focusing on women in hip-hop.

Her tenure case would appear to be no different, on the merits, than the last time around.

Moreover, it is extremely rare for a professor to be twice proposed for tenure at Harvard, and to be granted tenure after once being rejected. (If anyone knows of a precedent, I’d be curious to hear it.)

What’s changed then? Well, no Summers, of course. And how likely is it that Derek Bok, who doesn’t handle confrontation well, and is extremely sensitive about his reputation, will reject the tenure nomination of a black woman just as he’s on his way out the door?

That’s the last thing he wants just as he’s wrapping up his interim presidency: a controversy over the rejection of an African-American scholar…even as the Harvard police are asking black students to show their IDs.

Bok may also be taking one for the team here, dealing with this tenure case so that Drew Faust doesn’t have to face such a hot button issue right out of the gate.

Meanwhile, someone is smart enough to get this news out on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, when it’s less likely to attract attention.

African- and African-American Studies is a legitimate, important field that deserves to be taken seriously. But such incidents only lend credence to the suggestion that it is a hotbed of racial politicking in which black scholars mau-mau the flak catchers...and win.