Reason always means what someone else has got to say.
Elizabeth Gaskell ask dr. The Black World Today was quite unexpected. While Gates, a widely known cultural critic and author and editor of numerous works dealing with African American literature including the 1989 American Book Award-winner The Signifying Monkey, has been highly successful in attracting superstars into his department and launching a host of innovative, not to mention lucrative, research projects and other print and multimedia efforts like the Encarta Africana encyclopedia, he has failed to gain the trust and respect of legions of Black academics who see him as a grandstanding, peripatetic dynamo who finds it impossible to acknowledge anything useful occurring in Black studies outside the boundary lines of his beloved Harvard. In seemed to many that he was shamelessly attempting to ingratiate himself to powerful forces outside the Black community. In follow-up articles in the Amsterdam News Gates was accused of being a hired gun, of being out of touch with the masses, and of having mortgaged his soul to reach Harvard.