Henry Louis Gates Jr. was eating an almond yesterday afternoon, feeling triumphant. “I’m the happiest man in the American academy,” he said into his telephone with a chuckle, “’cause Bobo and Morgan are coming back home.”

Mr. Gates, the former longtime head of Harvard University’s department of African and African-American studies, was basking in the news that Lawrence D. Bobo and Marcyliena Morgan, two professors who left the department during Lawrence H. Summers’s tenure as president of the university, had decided to return.

The two professors, who are married, accepted jobs at Stanford in 2005 after Mr. Summers rejected a unanimous recommendation from the department to grant Ms. Morgan tenure. Their departures were part of a five-professor exodus, including Cornel West, from the program under Mr. Summers.

“The dream-team diaspora is coming home,” said Mr. Gates on Thursday. “This transforms the flow of momentum.”

That transformation, however, does not include any immediate prospects of Mr. West’s return. Mr. West, who went to Princeton after clashing with Mr. Summers, was approached by Harvard in the fall about returning. But he was reluctant to leave, in part because Princeton had just committed to expanding its African-American-studies program.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, chair of Harvard’s department, said that the decisive factor in the married professors’ return was Harvard’s decision to grant Ms. Morgan tenure. Ms. Morgan studies hip-hop culture, and Mr. Bobo is a sociologist of race. —John Gravois