Cross-Section

From year to year the College's enrollment of Negroes remains way out of proportion to the nation's Colored population. This year there are 16 Negroes out of a total of about 4700 students. Obviously this is one place where the University's policy of maintaining a representative cross-section in the student body falls down.

The Harvard Society for Minority Rights and the Radcliffe Association for the Advancement of Colored People have one answer. They propose to raise funds by means of a jazz concert this Friday and other drives next year to establish a special Negro Scholarship Fund at Harvard. They point out in defense of their drive that the Negro standard of living is appreciably lower than the national average; that Negroes are handicapped by a poor secondary school system, particularly in the South, and that therefore the ordinary scholarship opportunities for Negroes are insufficient.

Their special scholarship fund however, is at best a makeshift solution. If the University again begins to encourage acceptance of restricted funds, there would be no reason why scholarships could not be established for any group that the donor thought was being treated unjustly. Money that could be put to valuable use would again pour into funds for men named Murphy or South Boston Newsboys or residents of Greater Los Angeles. As long as there is no evidence that the University employs discriminatory practices in its admissions or scholarship policy, unrestricted funds and gifts are greatly preferable to bequests for anyone's favorite underdog, even when the group that benefits is as needy a group as the American Negro.

When discrimination is as unintentional and as hard to pin down as it is here, and when it is so largely dependent upon economic and sociological actors, it is not easy to propose a perfect remedy. But a point in which the University has been generally negligent, and which applies particularly to Negroes, is the matter of publicity for the College. If people in the South and West hear more about Harvard, if it is made clear to them that the College's admission and scholarship policies are non-discriminatory, if representatives emphasize this to outlying high schools--including Negro schools--more qualified Negroes will apply, and the remarkable disproportion of Negroes at the College will soon diminish.