Minority Faculty

To the Editors of the Crimson:

While the release of a specific five-year plan for the increased hiring of minority faculty at Harvard may be unprecedented, the substance of this new proposal is all too typical. Issued by the University's chief affirmative action official, Ronald Quincy, this report represents a continuation of Harvard's deceptive and regressive policies. In the face of both student pressure from the MSA (Minority Students Alliance) and after administrative pressure from the Association of Black Faculty and Administrators, the University's intransigence can only be viewed as an attempt to exclude minorities from its faculties.

According to official University statistics, 6.2 percent of Harvard's tenured faculty are minorities. However, as the report of the MSA clearly documented last spring, the deceptive figure represents the conflation of minorities and foreign scholars, who comprise at least half of those counted as "minorities" in these inflated statistics. Yet Harvard's affirmative action goals for the next five years call for the hiring of only eleven more tenured minority profesors and an additional thirty-three tenure-tracked professors. The rest of the University's affirmative action initiatives will be directed toward attracting temporary and visiting scholars, unable to make a lasting contribution to Harvard life for minority students, and "staff" and "administration" members, janitors and assistants to assistant administrators whose token presence will satisfy the University's goals without addressing the problems raised by minority students and faculty members across the campus.

The University's affirmative action report also claims that on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, no recruitment of minority faculty members is needed because their presence at all levels already exceeds the figures for the availability of minority scholars. How the administration can make such a blatantly deceptive claim despite strong student outcry for increased minority representation on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is a mystery, especially given its history of ineffective and discriminatory hiring practices. This seemingly incongruous claim represents another example of the University's manipulation or disregard of evidence in the service of its politics of exclusion.

Students concerned with the glaring inequality and injustice demonstrated by the dearth of minority faculty and administrators at Harvard must call the University to a truthful reckoning of its policies. Lest we be blinded by its deceptive statistics or silenced by its inadequate proposals, we must clearly communicate to the administration our commitment to a politics of inclusion that will enrich the University environment for all students. And we must demand that the administration make a similar commitment to effectively recruit minority scholars. Otherwise the deception that has excluded minorities from faculty and administration positions at Harvard will continue beneath the veneer of affirmative action. A. Stephen Barr '89   William J. Seymour Society