Response to Report Encourages Prof. Bell

A month after a group of Black faculty and administrators released a report criticizing the University's affirmative action policy, its head said yesterday he was encouraged by the response from the University's academic deans.

Professor of Law Derrick A. Bell, who is co-chair of the Association of Black Faculty and Administrators (BFA), said University officials have shown interest in his recommendations over the last two weeks. The BFA's proposal calls for the University to ensure that 10 percent of its faculty and staff are minorities by 1990.

Bell's comments follow an open letter to the deans two weeks ago in which he criticized administrators' indifference to the BFA's affirmative action report.

"The response has been better than I had been led to believe when I wrote this letter," Bell said. "Since then, in addition to the Law School, Graduate School of Education and Graduate School of Design, the Kennedy School of Government has distributed the report to its faculty and its key people. And I know the School of Public Health has done that, too."

But while Bell said other administrators had also responded, he said some of the charges he made in his letter still applied.

"We thought you shared our deep concern that figures of less than 2 percent Black faculty and professional staff themselves place in question the commitment of all of us at Harvard, black as well as white," Bell wrote in the letter, which was dated November 15.

Last month, Bell and Graduate School of Design Assistant Dean Lawrence Watson, BFA co-chair, issued an allegorical report on affirmative action policy which urged a two-year intensive minority hiring plan.

Ronald Quincy, the University's chief affirmative action official, said yesterday that President Bok and theadministration had met with Bell and Watson twiceabout the issue, and that the newly releasedfive-year affirmative action plans show theUniversity's commitment to diversity.

"The administration has obviously taken theinitiative to respond to the Black Faculty andAdministrators' demands for affirmative action,"said Quincy. "The report helps to keep the issueof affirmative action on the front burner ofUniversity activity."

Bell said that BFA would continue to work tobring more minority staff and professors to theUniversity, through recruiting and pressuring thegraduate schools.

"We need to be sending in names of people whobelong here," Bell said. "We need to be contactingthose people who might be in the ballpark if theyget their package together, while at the same timepushing the schools to do more recruiting.