Only The First Step

THE GOMES COMMITTEE REPORT, released last week, recommended the establishment of a "foundation" to improve race relations at Harvard. It signifies an important departure, constituting the first official acknowledgement that minority students here have legitimate needs unmet by existing institutions.

The report also represents a sort of anomaly. Given the glacial speed with which most such University committees move, the briskness of the Gomes group's endeavor and the firmness of its proposals seem relatively remarkable. Formed last spring by President Bok amid clamor for a campus Third World center, the committee's report shows that meaningful student protest can provide can impetus for change.

But the final battle for an acceptable racial climate at Harvard is far from having been fought and far from having been won. The Gomes Committee--consisting of six Faculty members and three students--has produced a proposal which remains general, with many specifics still to be hammered out. When the report is debated by the full Faculty later this spring, there is bound to be opposition on the grounds that the creation of such a foundation would foster further separatism among the races. And no matter what structural and financial commitments the University makes, meaningful improvement in race relations requires above all a change in attitude among majority members of the community.

The committee's final paper anticipated this argument, and emphasized the vital necessity for majority students to participate in any foundation. But in addressing the supposed danger of separatism, the Gomes Committee made an unstated assumption: it valued the Harvard community's common good over the particular, pressing needs of Third World students at a predominantly white institution, implying a trade-off between the private and public interest.

The report says, "It is clear to this Committee that there is significant opposition to anything at Harvard that suggests a concession to racial separatism," adding, "...the perception of separatism persists, and...the perception almost always assures the reality." The rest of the report is an attempt to outline a general proposal in the face of these "perceptions" and as such does not get to the root of the problem. But a Harvard where the equally important goals of a racially diverse community and a community of races with individualistic cultures existing harmoniously together would have been a more noble goal.

The Gomes Committee's report submerges this issue, ducking it at best. Their proposal, which calls for allocation of office space and a large meeting room for Third World organizations as well as University funds to put the foundation on solid footing, is clearly a compromise rather than an effort to reach for a broader harmony.

So while the proposal does, as one student member of the committee suggests, constitute the "next step in the evolution of dealing with minority students' problems," it is far from the final step. The same student warns that the report could be turned into something very different from what the committee proposed; thus the need for close monitoring becomes even greater with the departure of Committee Chairman Rev. Peter J. Gomes on a sabbatical.

Third World students for the time being are expressing cautious optimism publicly, but privately some admit that they face a dilemma. They view the proposal as a concession and with respect to Harvard's rhetoric-filled but action-barren history they are right. But they also realize that any criticism of the report may undermine their own interests.

The governance portion of the report, for example, largely ignores the role of campus Third World organizations in running the foundation. In the funding portion of the report, moreover, undergraduate minority organizations are told they will have to pay for their own programs and activities. Although the committee advocates that the University pay for an administrator to help raise funds for the foundation (who would face substantial competition from the $250 million capital fund drive), it does not assume financial responsibility for the heart of minority culture on campus, the undertakings of Third World student organizations.

These organizations have always been strapped for funds, and minorities have a tiny pool of wealthy alumni to draw on for support, given the exclusion of Third World students for the first 330 years of Harvard's existence. Furthermore, the report does not deal directly with a key element of students' initial proposal for a Third World center: minority admissions. If Third World students are conspicuously "separatist," as some "perceive," it is only because Harvard admits a consciusly small number of minorities. The Gomes report skirts the issue of minority admissions, so vital to increasing cooperation, understanding and consciousness. In this regard, we stop just short of labeling the report a sham. While it recognizes that legitimate, unmet needs exist, it refuses to be accountable for meeting those needs.

We too face a dilemma. While we urge that the report's recommendations be supported in full and backed to the letter, we hope it is not taken to be the ultimate solution. The Gomes Committee is to be commended for tackling a perplexing, multi-dimensional problem. But although the committee has been dissolved, its work in the greatest sense is not yet finished.