Seminar Planned for Minority Freshmen

A Harvard-affiliated group that works to encourage achievement among minority students will offer a workshop for freshmen this weekend in a broad-ranging effort to improve their academic experience.

Minority students performance may suffer because they sense that less is expected of them members of the group known as the Efficacy Committee said yesterday. The two day workshop is designed to counter those negative influences by strengthening ties within the minority community and offering strategies to succeed at Harvard, they added.

Led by Jeffrey P. Howard `69, a social psychologist and unsalaried consultant to the dean of the College, the committee has been sponsoring the workshop and similar activities for the past three years.

Although the committee members are not paid, they receive operating expenses from the College and consult regularly with Harvard administrators throughout the year.

The seminar targeted primarily, at Black and Hispanic students drew about 50 freshmen last year.

S. Allen Counter director of the Harvard Foundation, said that the workshop has been highly effective and well-received. While minority students are fully qualified academically, factors like the lack of minority professors on campus can discourage them and affect their performance, Counter added.

Motivation

Seminar organizers noted that minority students' motivation may suffer from the ongoing debate concerning the performance of minorities on standardized tests and other measures of academic ability.

None are oblivious to the questions being raised about affirmative action and whether they have the academic capability to perform in this environment. Ray Hammond '71 a committee member, said this week. "We make the basic assumption that those here [at Harvard] are fully qualified."

Howard who also conducted workshops between 1974 and 1977 said that he and other alumni committee members volunteer time to the program partly because they feel their special needs as minority students at Harvard were neglected during their college years.

"The seminar is the kind of orientation we would have liked to have when we came in," Howard said. He explained that he chose to hold the program at midyear so that the participants could better appreciate the group's advice, having gone through exams and received their first college grades.

The seminar also comes at a time when Harvard has reduced the numbers of University-sponsored events for minority freshmen.

Earlier this year, the Freshman Dean's Office stopped funding minority events it had traditionally sponsored during freshman week, arguing that events targeted exclusively at minorities were "separatist." The policy change drew criticism from some minority leaders on campus who said that the events provide freshmen with a needed sense of community within the University.