Three years after Harvard lured him away, a pre-eminent scholar of African-American political behavior has decided to return to the University of Chicago, university officials confirmed Tuesday.

Michael Dawson, a native of Chicago's South Side who held a dual appointment at Harvard as professor of government and African and African-American studies, will return to the U. of C. in the fall as a distinguished professor of political science.

Dawson, 53, is considered one of the pre-eminent scholars in the U.S. on African-American political behavior and its relationship to urban poverty and other cultural issues.

"I look forward to working with my colleagues in political science, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, and elsewhere in the university," said Dawson, whose great-uncle was Democratic Party loyalist U.S. Rep. William L. Dawson. "Chicago is a great place to do research, and in the last decade, the university has made enormous progress in building African-American studies specifically and racial studies more generally."

The U. of C. also said that Dawson's wife, Alice Furumoto-Dawson, will join the university's Center for Interdisciplinary Health Disparities Research as a researcher. The center studies early-onset breast cancer among African-American women.

Establishing a powerhouse faculty in African-American studies has emerged as one of the most competitive arenas in academia. Thus, Dawson's recruitment represents a major coup for the University of Chicago, which had lost several top black scholars to Harvard, including Dawson and William Julius Wilson.

Dawson's departure from Cambridge, Mass., signals another blow to Harvard's African-American studies program, which has reeled under friction between Harvard President Lawrence Summers and several of its top African-American scholars. Noted scholars K. Anthony Appiah and Cornel West left Harvard for Princeton. West departed after a public flap with Summers.

In a statement, William Kirby, dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, skirted the impact of Dawson's departure, saying he was "saddened to lose a scholar" of Dawson's stature.

"He is an eminent political scientist, and he has played an important role in two Harvard departments," Kirby said.

University of Chicago Provost Richard Saller said he "could not be more pleased" with Dawson's return.

"He was a big contributor, and we lamented his decision to leave for Harvard," Saller said. "As dean and provost, I have my eye on faculty who I think are real Chicago types, who thrive on the give and take, and I always thought Michael was one of those."

Scholars and administrators say the recruiting wars involving top black scholars stem, in part, from the relative infancy of their field of study, as well as the short supply of top academics.

Stanley Fish, former dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a veteran of recruitment campaigns, said when a new field emerges that has some kind of racial or ethnic identity, the people making the first important contributions to that field are likely to come from the same population being studied.

"So you have this market situation in which we all compete for their excellent service," Fish said.

Dawson, a graduate of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, is the founding director of the U. of C.'s Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. Dawson also has engaged in pioneering research on the racial divide in the United States.

In an interview, Dawson said he left the U. of C. in 2002, in part, to work with West, Appiah and sociologist Lawrence Bobo, who recently departed Harvard for Stanford. "It wasn't the same place I went to," Dawson said of Harvard. "By the time I got there, West and Appiah were already gone."

Dawson said his decision to leave wasn't directly related to the controversial administration of Harvard's president.

"But certainly the departure of a number of faculty I thought I would be working with is directly related to conflicts with the administration or decisions made by the administration over the past three years," Dawson said.

While at Harvard, Dawson said he had stayed in touch with colleagues at the U. of C.

Dawson said university officials had recently "made it clear that if I wanted to return, they would be amenable to that."