Minorities

To the Editors of the Crimson:

On the morning of September 28, five representatives from the Minority Students' Alliance (MSA), a coalition of the five undergraduate minority student groups on campus, met with the members of the newly formed Committee on Affirmative Action of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. At this meeting, we presented our understanding of the nature of the Committee and its work, discussed our views on the issue of minority faculty recruitment at Harvard, and detailed specific recommendations that we believe the Committee should consider.

At a meeting we had with Dean Spence and President Bok at the end of the spring term, they made known their agreement with the basic ideas of the report and their decision to follow our suggestion and form a Senior Faculty Committee to study this issue. The Committee would come up with specific recommendations which would then be considered by the Faculty in full.

At the start of the present school year, we found out that a committee was formed to study both the issues of minority and women faculty recruitment. During the meeting, we expressed our surprise at this, since it differed from our conversations with Dean Spence and our understanding of the exact nature of the committee. Although we feel that the issue of women in faculty recruitment is as important as the issue of minorities, we believe that both could be better addressed by separate bodies or committees. The joining of these important and difficult issues would only dilute the impact of the committee's work and recommenations. We are also concerned by the name (Committee on Affirmative Action) since Affirmative Action is not, strictly speaking the issue--it is possible to legally follow Affirmative Action guidelines and still have a level of aggressiveness which is too low to be effective.

From our conversation with the committee's members, we understand that they will issue a report to the Faculty before Thanks-giving recess. This report will include specific recommendations, not only general statements. We understand that the Committee will take into consideration the recommendations in our report and the ones included in a report written by a similar Faculty Committee at the University of California at Berkeley. We hope that Harvard's report will follow the same lines.

Thus, we believe that the Faculty should insitute a centralized review process which will identify the departments that are lacking in aggressiveness and take some direct action to improve the situation on those departments. Any plan to improve the Faculty's recruitment efforts which is only based on incentives will have, from our experience, less than satisfactory results. We therefore feel that one of the recommendations of the report should be to implement these actions.

The committee members said that because of their schedule, it would be very hard for them to meet with us formally again before the report comes out. We understand this, although we are still willing to meet with them at any time. However they will hold open sessions with members of the Harvard community to ask for their input. We expect to attend these hearings to further present our views.

In any case, we feel that there must be constant communication between the committee and MSA. We would expect the members of the committee not to hesitate to contact us in writing if they feel that they would like to further understand our position in any of the issues. Similarly, we will keep in contact with individual members so as to keep all channels open.

From our first meeting, we received the impression that the committee is willing to work towards solving this problem in a way that will benefit all of the University. We are heartened by this promising attitude, but we will wait for the committee's report in order to study it before responding to it. If we find their recommendations to be satisfactory, then we will press for prompt action by the faculty. We are optimistic, but also cautious. Wendell C. Ocasio   Minority Student Alliance