Academics

The Senate went Republican; the era of the reusable manned spacecraft began; Atlanta feared for the safety of its children. Cambridge saw the departure of its top executive, celebrated its 350th anniversary, and braced itself for drastic budget cuts due to a statewide slash in property taxes. Some of the big stories at Harvard--a proposal to restructure College governance, the establishment of a new concentration in Literature, and even the Harvard-Yale game debacle--seem trivial when compared with the national events of the past year. But rightly or not, the University has a tendency to get wrapped up in itself; and even when it is not caught up in self-examination Harvard often views outside events through a wall of Ivy.

So when the movie actor took the nation's highest office, Harvard spoke in broad sociological and historical term and argued about the meaning of it all. When Columbia glided into a picture-perfect landing after 54 1/2 tense hours, University scientists began to dream of extravagant payloads for future shuttles. And when it became clear that Atlanta's Black children could not leave their homes alone without thinking twice, Harvard sent consultants to the terrorized city and talked of a country gone violent.

The same intensity that characterized the University's perception of national and world events pervaded its reactions to what was happening on campus. Some of the controversies seem particularly parochial and overblown, in retrospect; it is already becoming difficult to understand or even to remember, for example, the intense ire provoked by new restrictions on the placement of posters or the threat of a shuttle-bus driver strike. The developments in the Core Curriculum, difficult as they may have been to achieve, even now seem all but routine; and most people would be hard-pressed to recall the substance of heated Faculty debates.

But even by objective standards there were some "big stories," events that set the University on a different course or at least forced it to reexamine its current direction. Harvard's decision not to trade its patents for shares in a fledgling DNA company signified the University's concern for academic values as well as the need to find alternate ways of transferring laboratory findings to the marketplace. The renewed protestations of Black and other minority students against what they perceived as institutionalized racism forced Harvard to take a look at its inherent and traditional biases. And the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' self-examination revealed a composition sorely lacking in minorities and females, a situation it has vowed to remedy.

Some day these "important" issues will join kiosks and shuttle buses as faded memories; but both the earth-shattering and the inconsequential constituted the just-ending school year. If these pages sometimes do not emphasize the historically significant, then, they do aim to reflect what the University made of "the news": an issue, a controversy, a decision, a moment.

Affirmative action. University-wide a predominant issue during first semester, took up a good part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' time this year. While 1980-81 saw many important changes in departments as well as the continued development of the Core Curriculum, the Faculty's investigation of its dearth of minority and women members received the most attention.

Commissioned last spring following a Black Students Association request for such a study, the Faculty's report on "The Recruitment of Minority and Women Faculty Members" recommended that departments aggressively search out qualified minority candidates for junior and senior Faculty positions. The report also suggested that departments with especially small numbers of women Faculty members put forth a "special effort" to attract "the largest possible number of the strongest women candidates." Four of those departments--Anthropology, English, History, and Psychology and Social Relations--this year granted tenure to women scholars, which will bring the total number of tenured women Faculty members to 16 next fall. As of 1979-80, the Faculty included 21 minority members (6 per cent) and 12 women (3.4 per cent) among its 356 tenured professors.

The report also suggested reserving two visiting professorships each year for minority and women scholars and allowing departments to seek special permission to hire qualified minorities and women for whom they do not have positions available. While some administrators hailed the recommendations as substantial departures from current practices, several Faculty members criticized the report at a February Faculty meeting, saying that it emphasized statistics and seemed to establish a quota system for hiring women and minorities. Despite the protestations, Dean Rosovsky quietly implemented the changes during second semester.

When Faculty members were not discussing hiring, they were busy splitting up, investigating, and creating departments. Early last fall, a special committee reviewing the Biology Department recommended dividing the department in two--organismic and evolutionary (OEB), and cellular and developmental (CDB). In reaching its conclusion, the review panel acknowledged that OEB and CDB already functioned effectively as separate departments, as many Biology professors were saying privately. The split will not become final until the Faculty votes on the proposal, which should happen next fall.

While Biology will undergo mitosis, the Social Studies concentration, which received a vote of confidence this year from the special committee examining it, should begin to expand. Headed by David S. Landes, Goelet Professor of History, who will become Social Studies chairman in the fall, the review panel recommended creating senior and junior professorships to be held jointly in Social Studies and other departments as a way to relieve staffing shortages in the ever-burgeoning concentration.

Social Studies started off as a small, elite major and now has more than 200 concentrators. Similarly, the Literature concentration, which the Faculty established this year, will debut next fall with only about 20 carefully selected students. Chaired by Claudio Guillen, professor of Comparative Literature and of Romance Languages and Literatures and one of the concentration's founders, the literature major will allow students to study both literature from historical and artistic perspectives and literary theory.

In addition to a new concentration, next year's course catalogue will include several new Core Curriculum courses developed this year. The new courses will bring the total offered in the Core to 88, 12 short of the 100-course goal for the Core's full implementation in 1982-82. Some Faculty members working on the Core were concerned last fall that they might have trouble developing enough courses for the new curriculum, but at last month's Faculty meeting, Rosovsky was more optimistic: "Not any one area looks disastrous." WOMEN FACULTY AT HARVARD   1977-78  1978-79  1979-80   Total  Women  Total  Women  Total  Women     No.  %  No.  %  No.  % Tenure  352  13  37  352  11  31  356  12  34 Ladder  221  46  208  280  47  204  222  44  198 Other  76  35  461  88  34  386  91  34  374 Total  649  94  145  670  92  137  669  90  135