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More and more often, humanities professors like Gates can do the same thing. An illustrious academic -- who in the hierarchy of the new university star system has become something akin to royalty -- descends from the ivory tower to share his or her intellectual wealth with the public. But reaching the greatest number of people requires more than brilliance, it requires power. So the academic decides to work with a corporation. This transports the academic into a brave new world, where the old rules of the ivory tower no longer apply. There, intellectual property must be guarded fiercely; workers labor under strict deadlines with their eyes focused on the bottom line. Books must balance at the end of the year; there is no alumni fund to draw from when the project goes over budget. Still, the professor and the project often gain by their affiliation with the university -- there are laboratories, research materials, libraries, offices, computers and staff willing to help out in a jam. More importantly, there is a deep pool of well-educated cheap labor in the form of ambitious young graduate students and untenured academics. In short, though the project may have been driven by idealism, it quickly becomes subject to all the complexities and compromises of a business.

On a logistical level, Africana's 15-month gestation was fraught with complications. Grueling deadlines led to overexertion. Editors contended with bouts of plagiarism. Open revolt broke out among nearly a dozen staffers. All this turmoil eventually led to a crippling worker slowdown in the middle of the project. Most startlingly, a very low representation of African-Americans on the core editorial staff (four of 17 writers at the most) inspired a dozen employees to ask the management team to hire more African-Americans. "There's nothing like a common enemy to unite a lot of young, similarly minded people," one senior staffer told Salon Books, echoing a sentiment shared by several others. What made this project so beset with bitterness?

Perhaps it was the great expectations of Gates the public humanist. Though Gates is only one of four Afropedia partners, he is Africana's front man and biggest personality. Politically, Gates is neither radical nor neo-conservative, but rather a thoughtful, learned voice of black progressive liberalism who has consistently been able to translate his intellectual ideas into books and articles geared toward non-academics. Pundit Adolph Reed Jr. called Gates "the freelance advocate for black centrism," while Time once voted Gates one of the "Twenty-Five Most Influential Americans." An outspoken advocate of affirmative action, the 49-year-old West Virginia-bred Gates also has voiced his concerns about the responsibility of corporations to soften capitalism's rougher edges. "A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get," he told the Progressive last year. "Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am." While the notions of better business practices and affirmative action may mean different things to different people, some Africana employees told Salon Books that when it came to working for Gates the CEO, they encountered a split between Gates' progressive theories and Africana's bottom-line practices.

The idealistic project was beset with birthing pains. As an associate professor at Yale in 1979, Gates proposed the idea to Charles Van Doren, the Encyclopedia Britannica editor who was infamous for the "Quiz Show" controversy in which he and NBC were involved in a fixing scam. Van Doren, who had since climbed his way to the position of vice president of editorial at Encyclopedia Britannica, took an interest in Gates' proposal. Portentously, however, Van Doren told Gates the project would cost $20 million. Though Van Doren remained a consultant for the group, Gates and Appiah soon were looking elsewhere for support. Eventually they would be rejected by publishers at Random House, Simon & Schuster and by new-media companies Voyager and Prodigy. So in 1997 when Microsoft agreed to underwrite the project, the team jumped at the opportunity.

Genetically speaking, Encarta Africana had some formidable DNA. Gates, along with Appiah and Soyinka, linked forces with musician and media entrepreneur Quincy Jones and Time Warner lawyer Martin Payson (the only white person on the board) to start a private company, Afropedia L.L.C. Gates and Appiah would co-edit the content, and Microsoft, which had two Encarta encyclopedias' worth of experience behind it, would integrate the content with the latest audiovisual technology, the costs of which would go on Microsoft's ledger. With Gates of Harvard and Gates of Microsoft leading the way, the project seemed like an inspired marriage of new technology, academia and progressive thinking.

But the $2 million budget was tiny compared to Van Doren's $20 million estimate. It's possible that attempting a project of this size with such modest funding was a mistake from the start. Since the budget has not been made public, it would be difficult to guess. However small the payment, Africana received its advance only after the editors submitted a specified number of words. In other words, the two sides agreed on a book-publishing model in which advances were to be paid back through royalties. In terms of finances, Afropedia didn't have a lot of breathing room. Insiders claim that co-editors Gates and Appiah received $100,000 each off the top, but this is not a particularly lavish fee for heading up such an undertaking.  

Despite the formidable profiles of Gates and Appiah, however, the project was still steeped in uncertainty. For one thing, Microsoft partnership was a new one for all involved. Microsoft had never had a joint venture of this nature. It was ultimately responsible for supervising the project, yet Afropedia had the final say in the content. Meanwhile, the leaders of Afropedia had their own worries. As a collection of academics, they were venturing into unknown corporate waters. "We didn't have a model for this," says Pat Sullivan, Africana's managing editor and an Afro-America studies lecturer. "No one had ever done this before." Encarta may have been called an encyclopedia, but it functioned with the structure of a magazine working on a book-publishing deadline. Unlike most encyclopedias, Encartas are completed at a breakneck pace -- French Encarta and Italian Encarta were both finished in one year.

In order to achieve its staggering goal of 2.25 million words, Africana had three models of encyclopedias on which to base itself: the Samuel Johnson Dictionary model, in which one woebegotten genius writes the whole thing; the Encyclopedia of Islam model, a drawn-out process that involves only experts; or the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences model, which had a core staff that wrote everything. Africana synthesized the latter two: a core crew of writers who would generate 40 percent of the content. Experts would contribute the remaining 60 percent. A few intellectual stars would oversee the whole process.

To lure writers, Africana posted advertisements around Cambridge offering 15 cents a word to temporary writers. The writers who signed up on salary were mostly students between undergraduate and advanced degrees and would receive somewhere between $25,000 and $28,000; editors, some of whom were Harvard fellows or professors, received salaries in the $50,000 range. (For a university town, Cambridge can be costly. One-bedroom apartments generally rent for around $1,000 a month, which would be half a writer's salary, before taxes.) Writers would have benefits packages only if they had a previous arrangement through Harvard as a student. Editors, if they were not already covered by Harvard, did receive benefits packages.

According to Sullivan, who hired many of the writers, management told writers initially that Gates and Appiah would switch off semesters to take their leaves. For most of the first semester, Gates went to Africa, where he was filming a BBC-PBS program, "The Lost Wonders of the African World," portions of which appeared in Africana. Appiah left for the second semester. Africana's core staff gathered each day on 10 Divinity St. at Vanserg, the Harvard building where Afropedia rented space. Harvard refused to say whether the Afropedia project received a special cut-rate rent. A dim building with a makeshift, temporary feel, Vanserg rents to pot-luck tenants such as classes from divinity-school overflow, a piano repair shop, a day-care center and the Harvard-Yenching Institute.

Problems in Vanserg developed within the first two months in the summer of 1997. When some writers discovered that editors were given medical benefits, disenchantment grew. Stephen Hendricks, an Africana writer and a former Microsoft employee, draws a parallel between Gates of Harvard and Gates of Microsoft.

Next page | Did Skip Gates learn his labor practices from Bill Gates?