Group to Aid Negroes Gain Faculty Jobs

Thomas E. Pettigrew, associate professor of Social Psychology, has been working for about a year on a committee to interest southern Negro college faculty and students in coming to northern universities.

One result of Pettigrew's work for the Committee on Equal Opportunity in Education of the American Psychological Association could be an eventual increase in the number of Negro faculty members at northern universities.

According to an article in yesterday's Boston, Globe, Boston-area schools currently have an extremely small number of Negro teachers. The Globe reported that Boston University has the greatest number of Negroes--15 in a full-time faculty of over 800. Harvard has only one tenured Negro faculty member: Harold Amos, Associate Professor of Bacteriology and Immunology at the Medical School.

Pettigrew pointed out yesterday that members of the Harvard administration have "strained themselves to go out and get Negroes for the faculty." But before a Negro reaches the level of the Harvard faculty, there are so many places where discrimination could have cut him down already, he explained.

Because of poor guidance, Negroes often do not know how to apply to college or graduate school--Harvard receives a large number of late Negro applications--and do not know that they could very likely get full scholarships at northern schools.

Faculty members of Negro universities must teach five or six courses a term, Pettigrew observed, and have no time to publish, and thereby advance in their profession.

The committee for which Pettigrew works plans to try "all various ways of intervention" to break this cycle. Next summer, it hopes to send integrated teams of psychologists to southern Negro schools to explain to the students how to get into a northern university. It also hopes to bring faculty members of the southern Negro schools north during their sabbaticals, to give them time to write and to think.