Reassessing Bok's Assessment

PRESIDENT BOK flew down to New York last week to speak at a NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund dinner given in honor of John W. Davis. Because Davis has been a pioneer in the modern struggle to give black people equal rights in the educational system, Bok said he wanted his speech to offer an accounting of the way Harvard has tried to mete out justice in its treatment of black. Considering that the Bok administration has never had a very easy time dealing with minorities, a general stocktaking such as the one the NAACP was privy to last week was bound to be interesting, if not very useful.

Bok began his talk with a historical analysis of how Harvard got to where it is, and he showed a slight proclivity for a dialectical interpretation of political development. In the early sixties, universities like Harvard took a simplistic approach to their treatment of minorities, Bok said, but were forced to deal more seriously with race later on in the decade after black students began to discover "the subtle, pervasive flaws in our attitudes toward minority groups." Bok told the NAACP that when these black activists took a close look at Harvard's hiring and academic policies in the sixties they found "a vast capacity for benign neglect, easy rationalizations for inaction and myriad forms of subtle discrimination that infected many levels of administration throughout our complex institutions."

If the "subtle" racism that prevailed here during the Pusey administration provided the dialectical thesis and black activists offered the corresponding antithesis, the Bok administration--true to form--sallied forth with an attempt at synthesis. After Harvard's discriminatory ways had been exposed, Bok told the NAACP, "much of our attention in recent years has been directed to overcoming these problems." And like a proud father, Bok pointed to the "sudden appearance" of affirmative action programs, minority recruiters and the Afro-American Studies Department as proof of Harvard's steadfast determination to deal straight-forwardly with its institutional failings.

Judging from his NAACP speech, Bok would seem to be better aquainted with the theory of dialetics than he is with the facts of the matter. While it is no doubt true that racism--subtle or otherwise--thrived at Harvard during the sixties and while it is also true that many black students identified Harvard's institutional prejudices and tried to rearrange them, the whole analysis begins to break down when you start talking about the Bok administration's efforts to redress the problem. The three programs that Bok mentioned in his talk--affirmative action, minority recruitment and black studies--are clearly not cure-alls for anything and the way they have been handled here has not made them very efficient ways of even beginning to change Harvard's deeply-rooted biases.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION policies, for example, have some potential for making hiring procedures more fair, but at Harvard they have done extraordinarily little to increase the number or improve the position of black scholars. The rationale of Harvard's plan suggests that the University is not bound to hire more black teachers until there is a dramatic rise in the number of black Ph.D.s, and so the only real impact affirmative action has had here has been to suggest the need to boost the numbers of blacks studying for advanced degrees at the graduate schools.

Minority recruitment programs also have a history of being much less than unqualified successes at Harvard. The Harvard admissions office has managed to increase black enrollment this year, but the number of black freshmen in the Harvard Class of 1978 still remains short of the number of blacks who entered two years ago. The Radcliffe admissions office has had even less success with its recruiting programs; last year the number of black freshmen admitted to Radcliffe dropped from previous levels. And at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where Ph.D.s are trained and where recruitment would seem to be most important, the failings have been most obvious. The GSAS finally hired a recruiter this year, but even he says he doubts he will be all that effective.

Despite Bok's professed support for the concept of Afro-American Studies programs, not much needs to be said about the way Harvard has treated its own Afro department. Bok can talk all he wants to the NAACP about efforts aimed at "strengthening the faculty of Afro-American Studies," but the fact remains that despite numerous pledges Harvard has only one tenured professor in the field. The University evidently had an opportunity to add a second last spring, but missed its chance when it failed to give him free and complete access to the research facilities of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute.

The people who heard President Bok speak in New York last week were no doubt impressed with his thoroughly liberal defense of activist programs aimed at equalizing the chances of black people in a white educational system. Even for those who are better acquainted with the institution that he runs Bok's attack on the forces of racial reaction is somewhat comforting. But it is not enough. Around the nation this is an era of retrenchment in race relations, and Harvard is too easily falling into the same pattern. The fact that there are conservative critics is no excuse for Harvard's failure to press forward more quickly in its attempts to raise the position of blacks here. Those who think that powerful institutions like Harvard do not have to make special efforts to make up for past sins cannot serve as bogey men to deflect those institutions from pressing on with fair and effective programs.