A Serious Question Of Commitment

The Faculty Committee on African and Afro-American Studies issued its report on Jan. 20, 1969, after nearly eight months of study and deliberation.

One section of the report discussed the quality of black students' lives at Harvard, and in that section the committee decided that circumstances at Harvard were such that black students here needed a cultural center along the lines of Hillel or the Newman Center. The report urged the University to "use (its) good offices in securing and financing a building and providing continued support to the activities of such a social and cultural center."

After five years of a generally prosperous and successful existence, the Harvard-Radcliffe Afro-American Cultural Center will most likely have to close or severely curtail its operations because it lacks necessary financial support.

The probable closing of the center raises serious questions about the commitment Harvard made to it when the Faculty approved the Rosovsky Committee report in 1969. Both the University's Development Office and Dean Rosovsky provided the center with the names of at least eight potential donors this winter, but the question of how great an effort the University made on the center's behalf remains.

Dean Rosovsky said this week that he regretted the center's projected closing, but denied that the University had neglected its original pledge of fund-raising assistance. Rosovsky also suggested that the report his committee in 1969 made may no longer be directly relevant, because the original document has been reworked and amended in the intervening years.

Rosovsky's denial of University neglect was challenged yesterday by Imani Kazana, who said the University "could have done a whole lot more in following up on its commitments." Kazana also said that Harvard's priorities have "clearly shifted" away from the needs of the cultural center in the past five years.

The center is now liquidating its assets to meet operating costs until June. In February, the center's board of trustees decided that the $10,000 raised through their own sources was insufficient to meet the minimal $30,000 budget needs. None of the eight potential sources of funds proposed to the center by the Development Office and Rosovsky provided it with any further money.

Kazana said yesterday that the cultural center, unlike Hillel House, does not have a pool of alumni to depend on for contributions. "Harvard has only had something like 500 black graduates, most of them recent, and few of whom have made their millions yet," she said. "It's obvious we need help from other places if we are to survive."