The Man With the Fishing Poles

SOME PEOPLE HAVE lofty positions handed to them as part of their birthright. Others have to push aside barriers to be successful, keeping stiff upper lips through discouraging moments and elbowing their way through the tiniest openings. Unfortunately both of these types usually reach their promised lands at the expense of their humanity.

David L. Evans is associate director of Harvard College admissions, assistant dean of freshmen, and academic tutor of Dudley House. He is black, and was born in Wabash, Ark., in the midst of the Depression and Jim Crow. His father, a sharecropper, died when David was 10 years old. His mother, a domestic, died when he was 16. Evans is successful because he has pushed, elbowed, and kept a stiff upper lip--but he has retained his humanity. Against all dictates of probability, he has been concerned enough to turn around and help others to push aside their own barricades.

While he was working full time as an electrical engineer for IBM in Huntsville, Ala., Evans used his spare time to start what is now regarded as a landmark program in college recruiting. Often seeking tips in bars, pool halls and churches, Evans combed Huntsville's black community in pursuit of talented, but in some cases non-college bound, high school students. Where it was necessary, Evans began by convincing the student that college was accessible and worthwhile. Evans then helped them prepare for entrance examinations. Meanwhile, using his own money, he called and wrote to schools all around the country telling them about his effort. In little more than two years, from late 1967 until 1970, Evans succeeded in getting dozens of Huntsville high school students into colleges like Harvard, Amherst, University of Chicago, UCLA, and Tennessee State University.

Evans and his Huntsville project soon received the attention of the national press. Newsweek, in an article reporting the project, described his achievement this way: "A poor farm boy by birth, an engineer by profession and a passionate apostle of black self-help by virtue of his own experience, Evans has accomplished the remarkable feat by searching the back country of the Deep South for dirt-poor but talented black high-school students who were unaware that institutions like Harvard, Dartmouth and Amherst are urgently seeking youngsters precisely like them."

OBSERVING EVANS' ENERGETIC modus operandi at Harvard makes it easier to understand how he was able to single-handedly coordinate the Huntsville effort. His day is split between the Admissions Office in the morning and the Freshman Dean's Office in the afternoon. For Evans, like most other admissions officers, fall term means time to go out and beat the bushes for new recruits. Though he is limited by job demands of the Freshman Dean's Office, Evans still handles some recruiting chores in the area he knows best--the Southeast.

Maybe Evans tempo is paced by nervousness--he is a worrier, never content for long periods. He perceives himself as a member of an oppressed group rather than as an individual success story, and that has a lot to do with his propensity to turn around and help others. "I tried all of this talk about things getting better. We are in bad shape. Do you know that 2.8 per cent of the doctors, 1.9 per cent of the lawyers, and 0.6 per cent of the engineers in this country are black? That's why it's so important for those of us who are here to stay and do well."

When Evans comes into the Freshman Union at mealtime, trays and chairs are feverishly pushed aside to make room for him. When he gets to the table he announces that the cannot stay long, "I'm hurrying to get to a lecture that is being given by a prominent Egyptian scholar on the genetic inferiority of Jews." Everyone laughs and then he sits down and unravels a series of stories and jokes, some with very pointed morals, most dripping with the folklore of Evans' southern, rural, black background.

DAVID EVANS and his wife Mercedes live in a proctor's apartment in Grays Hall. On the nights that he has a chance to relax, he sometimes begins unwinding with an after-dinner pool game at the Union. Once back at his apartment he might mull over some material that he has collected on Surinam during a summer excursion with his close friend Alan Counter, assistant professor of Biology. Evans and Counter will soon be making an appearance on national television to discuss their trip. Maybe it is because he is a southerner, maybe it is because Evans has lived such a long life in 34 years, but no matter what he is talking about, he always takes the time for a philosophical interjection. "If you give a man a fish, he can eat it for a day. But if you give him a fishing pole you can teach him how to eat for a lifetime."

While David Evans has been largely dedicated to securing lifetime meals to others, there have been some crucial incidents in his life that account for the existence of Evan's own fishing pole. When you are born the son of a sharecropper, when you are one of seven children, when both parents are dead by the time you are 16, there is not much of a chance for you to survive alone. However, David Evans and all of his brothers and sisters are thriving. Each has attended college and some have gone on through graduate school. As Evans puts it, "We came from down there and we made it. I guess the only thing we had different was that whenever one got a break he turned around and helped the others along."

After graduating in 1962 from Tennessee State University in electrical engineering, Evans worked for two years with Boeing and then decided to go to graduate school. He was admitted to Princeton in 1964, but he did not receive any scholarship aid and the money he earned was going home to help support younger brothers and sisters. Evans decided to turn to some sympathetic patron to raise the money he needed.

"I went to the library twice a day and read through "Who's Who," looking for people who might have a friendly attitude toward someone like myself. I had a three-and-a-half-page letter, a sort of autobiographical thing, saying that if they helped me get into Princeton I would come back to the South and help others do the same." Of 71 letters he wrote Evans got back 71 responses, and when it was time to start school in the fall he had all the money he needed.

AT HARVARD, EVANS continues to live by the fishing pole theory. In 1971 he started a referral program for students turned down by Harvard who showed enough promise to be candidates for other schools. "The referral program is for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who, in many cases, are not informed about the criteria for admission to a place like Harvard. Many times students mistake large colleges' interviewing procedures and willingness to waive application fees as an early sign that they will be admitted. So they don't bother to apply to any back-up schools and after the rejections come they're left with nowhere to go. When we identify such a case, the student is asked if it would be all right for us to forward his name to another school. So far 92 students have asked that we do so and all 92 have gotten admitted somewhere."

While the referral program is Evans's official extracurricular activity, his service to numerous black students at Harvard as unofficial advisor is probably the most important. As one undergraduate put it, "I cannot imagine Harvard without him." Evans is fully aware of the role he plays in Harvard's black community and speaks of the necessity of having more black faculty and administrators to share the load. "It's difficult; one person can do just so much. We lost nine black faculty and admistrators last year, and though some were replaced the numbers still moved in a negative direction. The biggest problem that black students have at Harvard is finding role models. I bet if a black student did not take an Afro Studies course or Social Sciences 132, he could go through here without ever knowing a black professor. Try reversing that. Can you imagine white students unable to meet white professors?"

The four years Evans has spent at Harvard have been part of an official leave of absence from IBM. The leave expires this June, and Evans has to make a decision either to stay at Harvard or to go back to IBM. Losing David Evans would be a severe blow, not only to his unofficial advisees but to all of Harvard. Chase N. Peterson '52, former director of admissions, who has know Evans since the Huntsville days when Evans started contacting Peterson about some of his students, sums up Evans's importance to the university in this way. "David Evans has made a contribution to Harvard that no one has been able to make. He's been able to hold onto two things--his soul and his intellect--when most people have only been able to hold on to one."