How a Student Task Force Championed Affirmative Action

When William G. “Bill” Fletcher ’76 heard about the lawsuit that would eventually topple race-conscious admissions at Harvard, one detail jarred him: The case against the University was being argued in the name of Asian American applicants.

Four decades earlier, an Asian American organizer had been one of Fletcher’s closest partners in building a student task force to defend affirmative action at Harvard. Now, the suit would help end race-conscious admissions nationwide centered on allegations that Harvard discriminated against Asian American applicants.

“It was crushing,” Fletcher said.

Members of Harvard’s Class of 1976 were no strangers to activism. Riding off the campus upheaval of the 1960s, they supported a printers’ strike, protested the Vietnam War, and rallied around a vision for an Afro-American research institute.

They also championed affirmative action in student admissions and faculty hiring — a cause that gained momentum as federal officials repeatedly found Harvard’s plans lacking.

Fletcher’s Task Force on Affirmative Action, a broad-based but short-lived coalition of student activist groups, took center stage in late 1975. Building on the work of existing faculty and student organizations, the task force compiled data, drafted objections, held rallies, and met with federal officials to press Harvard on its hiring and admissions practices.

But by the end of 1976, the group had begun to fade — leaving some organizers regretful when, nearly half a century later, the Supreme Court handed down its 2023 disavowal of affirmative action.

David J. Cortiella ’77, a member of the task force, said the group had failed to build the kind of lasting structure that could carry its work forward.

“By not getting a formal institution, formal office, or something like that, that would actually follow through with what we were trying to accomplish — which was change the power dynamics, ensure that we had equity all across the board, in that we were looking at all underserved communities — that we really weren’t prepared for when the 2023 suit happened,” Cortiella said.

‘A Rallying Cry’

By the time the Class of 1976 arrived on campus, Harvard had already spent years sparring with the federal government — and its own students and faculty — over diversity in admissions and hiring.

University-wide affirmative action plans had been rejected by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare four times by November 1973, when the agency finally approved them.

Meanwhile, pressure was mounting on campus.

Under student scrutiny, Economics professor Henry A. Rosovsky led a committee that, in 1969, went on to recommend a degree-granting Afro-American studies program and an increase in the number of Black graduate students. In 1970, eight Puerto Rican students demanded an increase in Puerto Rican student admissions and helped establish a student recruitment program.

Soon after Harvard submitted a second plan to the government in February 1971, a faculty committee released a report finding that women were severely underrepresented on Harvard’s faculty. Of more than 700 tenured professors in 1968-69, only 11 were women, the committee found.

Michael Walzer, who co-chaired the committee, said its 24 recommendations included proposals on maternity leave, delayed tenure decisions, and day care — what he called “the full set of feminist wishes at that moment in time.”

Theda R. Skocpol, then a graduate student and later a Government and Sociology professor, recalled graduate students and faculty pressing their own departments to explain why so few women were being hired. Her own department, Sociology, had no tenured women professors — a statistic that later helped her argue she was denied tenure because of her sex.

“I can remember holding meetings with the faculty in the department of, in this case, of Sociology, and saying, ‘Where are the women? Are you going to hire some?’” Skocpol said.

In 1974, a Currier House women’s group began circulating a fact sheet and petition arguing that Harvard’s November 1973 affirmative action plan — which aimed to increase the number of tenured women faculty from 14 to 20 by 1976 — did not go far enough.

The petition reached University President Derek C. Bok, according to Natalie L. Wexler ’76, who led the campaign. But Wexler said a meeting with Bok and Rosovsky, then dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, did not bring the students much further.

“I was just totally amazed one day when the phone rang in my room in Currier House, and a woman’s voice said, ‘Derek Bok is on the line for you,’” Wexler said.

Not everyone welcomed the push to diversify Harvard’s admissions and hiring.

In September 1973, Government professor Martin L. Kilson, the first tenured Black professor at Harvard, wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine arguing that existing affirmative action policies reinforced Black separatism — to the detriment of student academics.

That article sent shockwaves across campus. To some students, it echoed a familiar refrain.

“There was an assumption on the part of some students, but also some faculty, that there are students here, particularly Black students, who are mainly here as kind of taking up seats based on affirmative action and the notion that they don’t really ‘meet the standards,’” Mary J. Osirim ’76 said.

But the piece also galvanized student groups.

“That article became a rallying cry for many of the students on campus, and certainly for those of us who were just arriving — so we began to organize ourselves,” George Rivera ’77 said.

‘A Lot of Diplomacy’

Though the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare had approved Harvard’s November 1973 plan, student activists knew federal officials would continue watching the University closely. They wanted to make sure Harvard faced pressure from inside the campus, too.

The Task Force for Affirmative Action emerged from an existing coalition of student groups, the Organization for the Solidarity of Third World Students.

Its work — driven largely by Fletcher and an an organizer in the Coalition of Asian Americans — began slowly. Students spent much of the 1974-75 academic year compiling data on existing admissions and hiring trends.

The early stages were prolonged partly because student activists were also focused on the embattled DuBois Institute, a major point of controversy that year, according to Fletcher.

But the DuBois Institute organizing, which also involved coalitions of student affinity groups, served as a launching pad as Fletcher worked to bring student leaders into OSTWS and the task force.

“It was basically a lot of diplomacy,” he said. “A lot of it fell on me.”

Finally, in December 1975, representatives for at least a dozen student organizations announced the task force to the broader public, saying they were disappointed by the progress the University had made on its 1973 affirmative action plans.

Among the student groups were OSTWS, the Radcliffe Union of Students, the Chicano Law Students Organization, La Organizacion, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Coalition of Asian Americans. The students argued that the proportion of Black tenured professors had not increased since October 1973 — it had declined.

Organizers also pointed to a spring 1975 report by Walter J. Leonard, Harvard’s affirmative action coordinator, arguing that the University had “moved backward” in several years since 1971.

The timing was complicated. Days after the task force announced its formation, the University released a review showing that Harvard was actually on track to meet most of its hiring goals for 1976, though minority recruitment just falling short.

Still, Leonard acknowledged that the University needed to continue its efforts, and students kept pushing.

In advance of a federal review in early 1976, the task force compiled a 20-page analysis of non-compliance in Harvard’s 1975 affirmative action guidelines and met with three officials from the Office of Civil Rights.

At the time, OCR regional director John G. Bynoe said that the office was not interested in punishing Harvard so much as changing the University’s approach.

“Right now we really want to make sure that hiring managers at Harvard have the right attitude about what changes have to be brought about,” Bynoe told The Crimson in 1976.

The committee quickly turned to boots-on-the-ground tactics. On March 1, 1976, hundreds of students demonstrated en masse at the task force’s urging, and convened again on May 2.

At these demonstrations, the task force’s coalition broadened further — embracing student groups that touted adjacent causes.

Supporters of Sherman L. Holcombe, a dining worker and union steward who was suspended by the University in early 1976, came to the March rally.

And in May, a committee protesting the Afro-American Studies’ department’s decision to deny professor Ephraim Isaac tenure was scheduled to attend. (In the wake of that denial, nearly a dozen faculty wrote a letter to Bok arguing that Isaac’s case was representative of the “confusing welter of political issues that has surrounded the Department of Afro-American Studies since its inception.”)

This kind of fluidity — other student movements attaching themselves to the task force’s demonstrations, then retreating back to their own silos — was characteristic of campus organizing at the time, Fletcher said.

“Everybody would do that,” Fletcher said. “There would be solidarity among different campaigns.”

The Fall of the Task Force

The spring 1976 rallies proved to be the task force’s high-water mark.

The organization began crumbling as core organizers graduated from Harvard. By early 1977, the task force had shifted its focus to broader attacks on affirmative action, but it no longer had the same campus presence it had commanded a year earlier.

Fletcher said the University benefited from the turnover built into student organizing.

“They basically can wait you out,” he said.

Cortiella said the task force never achieved the institutional footing some organizers wanted. He said students hoped to make student involvement in recruitment more formal and to push Harvard to publish annual goals and progress reports on faculty hiring.

“There wasn’t a continuity of leadership, let’s say, to permit it to become much more institutionalized, and then it becomes part of the governance structure of Harvard,” Cortiella said.

But the short-lived movement was nevertheless emblematic of organizing at Harvard in the mid-1970s: coalition-based, data-driven, and less explosive than the campus protests of the late 1960s.

Both Cortiella and Rivera called the effort “sophisticated.” Rather than occupying Massachusetts Hall, as protesters had done in 1969, task force members chose different tactics — though not without internal debate.

Some task force organizers wanted to occupy University buildings, according to Fletcher. He did not think the group had the necessary support.

“There were people that wanted us to take over a building or something like that, but that didn’t happen, and I think we pursued this in the right way,” he said.

While Cortiella lamented the lack of institutional structures left behind by the task force, he said the movement still shaped the way he thought about affirmative action long after he left Harvard. In 1985, when he led Boston’s affirmative action program, he drew on lessons from the undergraduate organizing he had done nearly a decade earlier.

Fletcher said he also saw the task force as unfinished work.

“I felt that the job was incomplete, and I felt bad about that,” he said. “I felt, on the other hand, very proud of the work that we had done and the coalition that we had built.”

Cortiella was even more direct.

“Was it a waste of time?” Cortiella said.

“No, absolutely not,” he added — without skipping a beat.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at amannsm.38. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.