Henry Louis Gates "told his employees that the lack of benefits was not something that he dreamed up, that such is the modus operandi of the software industry, in which growth is fueled by disposable, long-term temps," Hendricks told Salon Books. "Certainly this is at least partly true of Microsoft, from which Mr. [Henry Louis] Gates took his cue."

On one level, the analogy makes sense. With low-paying jobs and few benefits, the young Africana writers were being given their first taste of life in the modern corporation. Some Africana employees believe that Africana had learned the purported "permatemp" style of management from Microsoft. (One-third of Microsoft employees don't receive long-term benefits, even though they work for the company on a long-term basis.) On another level, however, the arrangement also resembled the new model of university labor, which has become notorious for its unabashed exploitation of non-tenure-track scholars, researchers and faculty. A common complaint from the ghetto of adjunct teachers is that they are paid far worse per hour than the janitors that clean their offices; moreover, the janitors often enjoy unions and job stability.

Since Encarta Africana was privately owned, initially some writers did not have Harvard privileges and could not access the university's vaunted libraries. Instead, they had to make due with their limited resources -- the small African-American Studies department library in Barker Center (a 15-minute walk from Vanserg), Macmillan Company's Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (edited by Africana contributor Cornel West) and Lexis-Nexis, which some staffers say was accessed by a password from a Yale student.

With a large deadline looming at the end of August, the staff grew desperate. Writers had to meet the first milestone by August, a numbing 250,000 words that the group had to submit to Microsoft so that Africana would get its first advance. "It was as if they said, don't worry about quality, just get quantity," the senior employee said. According to one observer close to the project, the writing turned out to be lousy. "I was appalled by the quality of material. The entries were woodenly conceived. They had linear chronologies," he said. "These writers were not very experienced. They were at the low end of the freelance chain." When writers turned over their sources, an editor discovered that some entries were barely rephrased versions of the entries from the Macmillan. In the end, Africana had to hire a temporary staff to rewrite the plagiarized sections, all of which were purged and replaced. "There were huge, huge mistakes that never would have eluded Skip [Gates] had he seen them," the senior staffer contended.

When Suzanne Friedberg arrived in September to edit the Africa section of the encyclopedia, she inherited a troubled legacy. "Everything was done in extreme time pressure," she said. Friedberg, now a professor of geography at Dartmouth College, said that the deadlines were daunting. "I'm on the tenure track now at an Ivy League school, and the encyclopedia was harder." Even though some writers were nabbed for plagiarism, they still simmered with discontent. "Some writers stirred up trouble," Friedberg said. "The medical insurance concern -- that was legitimate. But some bad writers just liked to complain."

In a controversial move among core staff members, Africana received permission from Harvard to hire Peter Glenshaw, the assistant director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, the same place where Gates is director. (Glenshaw, who has since left Harvard, did not respond to Salon Books' calls.) While keeping up with his arduous duties with the Du Bois, he had to manage the content and employee relations of the encyclopedia. As a friend or admirer of Gates he may have agreed to the job out of respect for the project, but as Gates' deputy at Du Bois, how much latitude did he actually have? He now had to commute between two jobs.

As the next 250,000-word milestone approached, editors' hours increased, as did those of the writers. Twelve-hour days were the norm, along with weekend shifts. According to Friedberg, there was a huge editorial bottleneck: the work was lined up to be edited, but the pieces needed a great deal of work. Writers were disappointed that they didn't receive feedback, and editors didn't appreciate the quality of writing. Africana had itself a situation that was headed for internal combustion.

On Oct. 3, 1997, writer Hendricks and 11 other staffers sent a memo to Gates, Glenshaw and the rest of the management team suggesting significant editorial and personnel changes for Africana. The memo specifically asked Africana for a clearer mission statement, benefits for writers -- which would include medical and dental coverage -- and an employee-matched retirement plan. As Hendricks explains, "We wanted to hold it to a higher standard." Employees also wanted more specialists, and last of all, suggested that Africana hire more people of color.

Some editors now maintain that had Africana spent $10,000 more on writer's salaries, it could have hired more seasoned candidates and tempted more African-American scholars in the process. Among writers on the core staff, African-American representation never reached more than four out of 17 and none of the core editing staff was black. "We took a look around and said, 'Jesus, we're 90 percent here and we're not comfortable with this,'" said the senior staffer about the paucity of blacks. "I wouldn't buy an encyclopedia about women if it were written by men." It seems that despite Gates' formidable reputation, few blacks applied to work on Africana. Moreover, the editors whom Salon Books spoke with say that they were never given any directive by Gates to pursue African-American applicants. Part of the affirmative-action agenda involves seeking out applicants who have been previously denied opportunity.

Yet making an airtight case of hypocrisy against Gates isn't so easy. How far does an employer have to pursue it? How much time, for instance, should be spent searching for diverse candidates before such searches are deemed inefficient? And if such searches don't yield competitive candidates, how important is it to give an opportunity to a worker who is not qualified, but might rise to the occasion if given a chance? Still, it's remarkable that Gates -- a black luminary -- wasn't simply surrounded by bright, ambitious young African-American scholars who could foresee what their participation on this project might mean to them or their risumi.

Does the fact that Gates was somehow stymied by the problem of affirmative action hiring say more about him, the shortage of highly educated black candidates willing to work for peanuts or the very problems inherent in affirmative action itself? After all, it may be an easy practice to embrace in the abstract, but when you're running a fast company, who has the time for theory?

For meetings, Gates would have the staff convene in Barker Center, a humanities building where the Afro-American Studies Department is based. Indeed, every staffer interviewed for this story contended that they never once saw Gates step foot in the central Africana office in Vanserg itself, despite the fact that Gates' own house is right across the street. Not surprisingly, such aloof management only exacerbated worker resentments. In October, he drew the staff together and gave them an ultimatum: For those who don't like the project, there's the door. Gates also said that plagiarism would not be tolerated. The Oct. 3 petition was rejected out of hand -- and on the delicate issue of hiring more African-Americans, Gates apparently told staffers: "Affirmative action? I'm Mr. Affirmative Action. You think I'm not all for affirmative action? But look, what we hire here are qualified people, people who can do the work. White people can do this work, and black people can do this work."

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