Substance Over Symbol

A PLATOON of notable University administrators showed up briefly at the start of Saturday's pre-Yale game rally organized by Third World student groups to protest racism at the University. Of course, any administrative recognition of the deep seriousness of the problem is welcome. But given the background of Harvard's inaction on race-related issues; given the multiplication of racial incidents on other campuses, including recent convulsions at Williams College; and given the spread of racist violence in cities across America, many students rightly look askance at this merely symbolic act of support. Deans Epps, Fox, and Moses, President Horner, and general counsel Daniel Steiner '54 all should be devoting their energies to showing Third World and other minority groups that they are genuinely welcome here. Deans should accompany their symbolic acts with substantive ones.

Both administrators and students should take the rally before the Yale game--where about 300 students gathered in the Eliot-Kirkland-Winthrop triangle and then marched to the stadium--as a sign of how serious the fears of Black and other minority students have become, fears no longer only of discrimination but of overt racism and racist violence. In the past month, Lydia P. Jackson '82, president of the Black Students Association (BSA), has been the object of both a rape threat and a death threat. The BSA offices were broken into and racist slogans scrawled on the organization's calendar.

Whether or not such incidents are isolated or indicate the presence of organized racist activity on campus, and whether they presage actual violence or not, their psychological effect on Black students is clear and harmful. Individual students should do all they can to express their horror, from attending rallies like Saturday's to communicating their support individually to Third World and minority students.

University officials cannot be held responsible for the occurrence of racist incidents; they are undoubtedly as horrified as anyone. But they can and should do more to counteract the damaging fears such incidents provoke. If the University were more enthusiastic, more cooperative, and more speedy in its development of a Third World Center; if President Bok and other leaders denounced the Klitgaard report, which insensitively cast doubt on Black students' academic abilities; if College administrators moved faster to implement the recommendations of last year's race relations report; and if Harvard's leaders made it clear that student pressure isn't the only way to budge them to take steps for the welfare of Harvard's minority students--that they can and will act on the basis of their own belief that such students deserve to be here--then may be when administrators attend rallies like Saturday's, they could feel at one with the student demonstrators.