BLACK ENROLLMENT

To the Editors of The Crimson:

A Crimson article on March 1 reported that the Committee Against Racism found the GSAS admissions policy "racist," but the article omitted some important facts which led us to that conclusion.

The article reported correctly that the percentage of black students enrolled in the first-year class had declined from less than 5 per cent in 1970 to less than 2 per cent in 1973. However, the article failed to note that, while one-fifth of all applicants to GSAS were admitted in 1973, only one-twelfth of the black applicants were admitted. The discrepancy in admissions ratios was similar in 1972.

Peter McKinney, administrative dean of GSAS, explained on Feb. 15 that, in 1972, the late Joseph Strickland recruited over 200 black applicants, but that most of them were "unqualified." Nina Hillgarth, an admissions officer for GSAS, was more straight-forward about the class admitted in 1973. She told us on Feb. 27 that the applications from black students were "absolutely rotten."

We find these remarks shocking and indefensible. It is inconceivable that so many applications could be appreciably inferior to those of white students, even by standard admissions criteria. Even so, those criteria themselves ignore the facts that (contrary to popular myth) racist college professors often unjustifiably give low grades and poor recommendations to black students, and that GRE tests are culturally biased against blacks.

Both David Evans, a Harvard College admissions officer, and Dean McKinney told us that black students often do not apply to Harvard because they perceive it as a racist institution, committed to protecting "scholars" like Herrnstein and Moynihan while systematically discriminating against black students. That the officials responsible for GSAS admissions choose to mask their own biases by slandering minority applicants leads us to conclude that the perceptions of those black students are correct.

Therefore, we believe that the decline in minority admissions can be reversed only by applying concerted pressure on the administration to change its policies while at the same time attacking the theory and ideology which justify those policies. The Committee Against Racism aims to unite faculty and graduate students in pursuit of those goals. Emily J. McIntire   Robert O. Mathews