He’s got (yet) another gig: helping launch The Root, an online mag for black Americans. He’s editor-in-chief—and he’s also pitching tools to help blacks investigate their DNA history. Fascinating! Especially since Gates is an investor in AfricanDNA.com, a company he co-founded. (Watch Gates swab his own DNA in this video.)

Here’s Gates’ bio from the press release announcing AfricanDNA.com. Anything missing?

Long interested in genealogical research and DNA testing, Gates is the author of Finding Oprah’s Roots, Finding Your Own (Crown, 2007) and the forthcoming In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past, to be published next spring (Crown, 2008). He is also the host and executive producer of the critically acclaimed 2006 PBS series “African American Lives” and its follow-up, “Oprah’s Roots.” “African American Lives 2″ will be broadcast on PBS in February, 2008 in conjunction with Black History Month. Professor Gates is Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American and African Studies. Gates, an influential cultural critic, has written for Time Magazine, The New Yorker and the New York Times. The recipient of 48 honorary degrees and a 1981 MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. received a National Humanities Medal in 1998, and in 1999 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

To be fair, Gates’ Harvard title is noted early in the release. But it is remarkable that in the entire paragraph above, Harvard is unmentioned, as is any other university at which Gates has taught.

Well, Larry Summers works in a hedge fund, Skip Gates is becoming a business entepreneur. Has it occurred to anyone at Harvard that the university is paying its University Professors extremely well…so that they can go off and make fortunes doing other things besides teaching and research?

There’s a case to be made that this doesn’t matter, that Summers, Gates, et al bring renown to the university. But they are certainly expanding the traditional role of the University Professor and, indeed, the university itself. It is no strange irony that the people who are supposed to represent the pinnacle of Harvard’s scholarship are now pioneers in the corporatization of the university.

Ironically, one University Professor who did significant teaching, Cornel West, is the one most associated with not teaching…..