Student Activism Targets Minority Hiring

Meanwhile, in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), administrators formed a committee to deal with debate over the University's minority recruitment policy.

Harvard's dialogue on the issue reached a high point in April when a group of minority students released a scathing indictment of the University's minority hiring program.

The Minority Students Alliance (MSA), an undergraduate umbrella group of minority students blasted the FAS in the report for its "complacency" in the recruitment and hiring of minority professors. The group demanded that Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence name a faculty committee to study the issue, and that he announce a course of action by next fall.

Last month, Spence met with President Bok and the students to discuss his response and apparently agreed to their demands. In May, he named nine senior faculty members to a committee that is expected to produce its report on minority faculty by Thanksgiving. Spence said the Faculty Council, FAS's executive steering committee, will then consider the committee's recommendations.

Minorities currently comprise only 6.8 percent of Harvard's senior faculty and 11.7 percent of associate and assistant professors. Those figures are comparable to other major research universities, but they include Asians and foreign nationals, a counting strategy which the student report criticized as inflating the actual numbers of minority faculty.

According to University affirmative action figures, Blacks make up 1.7 percent of tenured faculty, and 8.9 percent of junior-level professors. Hispanics comprise about 1 percent of both junior and senior faculty.

Administrators from President Bok to FAS's Equal Employment Opportunity Officer have recognized Harvard's serious shortage of minority professors, but they contend that the pool of available job applicants is the primary reason for the problem.

"The fact is that the proportion of minority students that have sought Ph.D. degrees is small and has declined in the last seven to 10 years," Bok said. "We can't make substantial progress until these basic problems have been addressed."

"The only thing we can do is to try to break through that by encouraging students to think about these careers more seriously," Bok said.

But the MSA report and several minority professors say that the University must abandon its mentality of "passive recruitment." They say that the low overall numbers of minorities in academia exacerbate the difficulty Harvard faces, but they argue that the primary responsibility lies with insufficient efforts to reverse this trend on the part of the University.

"Confusion and complacency dominate Harvard's minority faculty recruitment. From deans to department chairmen to the general faculty, few understand how to effectively achieve better representation, even fewer make a reasonably active effort to address the issue, and no one has a University-wide, systemic program necessary to successfully do so," the report says.

After concluding that individual departments have foundered because of an overly decentralized and confused minority recruitment policy, the report says, "The Harvard community is not only ignorant about where it stands, it is content to remain sitting down."

Spence has refused to respond directly to the MSA report's criticisms, saying that the faculty committee should explore the options before he takes a position on how to increase the number of Harvard's minority faculty.

But on one point all Harvard administrators agree: there will be no quotas at the University, no numerical goals for raising the representation of minorities on the faculty. Affirmative action quotas in FAS are "not the way the University functions and not the way it will function," Bok said in an interview.

Spence said he wants the faculty committee to focus on three areas--a review of past policy and performance, a response to the MSA report, and a set of recommendations for changing existing policy. "By mid-semester they should have a brief but pointed report," said Spence.

Members of the committee said they were open to a variety of approaches to the minority faculty dilemma, but agreed with administrators that quotas are not a practicable solution. Pforszimer University Professor Sidney Verba, the chairman of the committee, said his group would consult with faculty, department chairmen and student groups before making any policy prescriptions.

Verba said he interprets the committee's mandate broadly. "We're looking at Harvard's procedures for affirmative action and we're considering a variety of ways in which Harvard might be more active."

Dennis R. Thompson, the head of the University-wide program on ethics and a member of the committee, stressed that the faculty has a responsibility to increase the representation of minorities because it is "a question of justice." But he added that the faculty must also ensure existing standards of teaching excellence are preserved in the process.

Others seemed to agree with the MSA report's conclusion that the University's minority recruitment policy is too decentralized.

Thomas Professor of Government Martin L. Kilson reserved judgment on the faculty committee, but said that FAS's composition will not change until President Bok takes the initiative on the issue. "There isn't enough central leadership given to these issues," Kilson said. "What you have at places like Duke and Stanford is quite the opposite--the center holds in these matters."

Despite the efforts of individual administrators and department chairmen, significant numbers of minorities will not be hired at Harvard until Bok and Spence combine forces and take the initiative, Kilson said. "We don't have a president who is putting a big-push imprimatur behind these matters," he said.

But Spence said that presidential initiative alone would not solve Harvard's minority faculty problem.

"Involvement of the faculty in trying to achieve realistic goals is an equally important part of making progress--we need both." Spence said.

"I think the President has a longstanding commitment to this," he added.