GSAS Report Indicates Blacks Get Ph.D.s Earlier

An unreleased report shows that black students at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences take more graded courses per year and receive their Ph.D. degrees more quickly than their white peers.

Phillip T. Gay, the report's author and the minority recruiter for the GSAS, said yesterday that one reason for the "striking inconsistency" between the amount of time the two groups require to obtain their degrees is that "black students on the whole feel a greater sense of alienation from the Harvard environment than white students."

Gay also said that black students take more graded courses and less ungraded tutorials per year than whites because there is a lack of close contact between blacks and their professors.

The report uses a sample population consisting of 200 people--100 black and 100 white--admitted to the GSAS from 1968 to 1973.

The report shows that in those years, the percentage of blacks who completed their Ph.D. degrees (9 per cent) is nearly twice that of whites (5 per cent).

Gay said that statistics showing that for all years white students had consistently higher grade point averages (3.70) than black students (3.45) is a result of blacks taking and completing greater numbers of courses per year than their white counterparts.

The report says that one of its purposes is to "aid GSAS administrators in forming decisions regarding admissions policies and the recruitment of black students."

"Hopefully this report will put to rest a lot of myths and preconceptions various people here have about black candidates," Gay said yesterday. "I for one get sick to my stomach when I hear people say, "It's going to take an act of God to help them [black students] get through.'"

Gay, who is a sixth year graduate student, was appointed by the GSAS last spring to organize a systematic program for the recruitment of minority candidates for admission to the graduate school.

His report also shows that blacks and whites withdraw from the GSAS at about the same rate, although a slightly higher percentage of blacks are "not registered" students--students who may or may not have formally withdrawn--than whites.

Gay termed the difference in per- centages of non-registered black and white students "insignificant."

The report states that although some students who withdraw from the GSAS are failures only in the administrative sense, others leave the GSAS "unwillingly with feelings of frustration and disappointment in the quality of the personal and academic experiences at Harvard."

"As institutional failures," Gay wrote in the report, "many of the students would have benefited from efforts on the part of members of their departmental faculty and members of the GSAS administrative staff to improve the overall quality of graduate student life at Harvard."

Peter S. McKinney, administrative dean of the GSAS, said yesterday that since he has not yet studied the report in full, he could not comment on its substance