No Preference Given Negroes, Ford States

Dean Ford said Wednesday that the University makes no special effort to appoint Negroes to professorships, because Harvard Departments use the same standards for all promotions of scholars to tenure positions.

"I cannot imagine a Department pausing for even a minute over racial considerations in its attempt to fill a professorship or associate professorship." Ford said in answer to a press conference question.

"Scholarship is the only criterion for tenure appointments," Ford said, "and the University would not be doing anyone a favor by taking a Negro if he is not qualified, merely because he is a Negro."

The issue of Negro faculty members arose two weeks ago when a New York Times survey of 17 major universities reported that six, including Harvard, have no Negroes with tenure, and the rest have only one or two Negro professors.

Ralph Bunches was offered and briefly accepted a professorship in the Government Department several years ago, but resigned when he went to the United Nations. A former associate professor at the Medical School was also a Negro.

Ford said that the Negro community is beginning to produce an academic elite, but stressed that "today we are building the base of the pyramid."

He predicted that in the next 25 years there might well be a rapid rise of Negroes to important. "If in 25 years we have no Negro professors and you ask us why, we would have a right to be embarrassed," he said.

Ford pointed out that within every ethnic group a certain amount of time is needed for the group to produce scholars who can meet the standards of academic competition. "Such achievement is not possible in the first generation," Ford said, noting that people of Chinese extraction are just beginning to attain professorships at many American universities.