Quincy Speaks on Affirmative Action at Harvard

Harvard needs to make a concerted effort to recruit minority and women professors if it is to overcome institutional problems which have hampered its affirmative action efforts, a special assistant to President Derek C. Bok said last night.

Because the Harvard administration is highly decentralized, it is often difficult to implement minority and women hiring plans, Ronald Quincy told an audience of about 40 people in Boylston Hall.

Quincy, who directs Harvard's affirmative action office, said that considerable progress has been made in hiring junior faculty. But he said that a "full-court effort" will be needed to make similar improvements in the ranks of senior faculty.

"The available pool is low--there's no denying that," Quincy said. "The task is both to help create the pool and develop the pool."

Harvard's large size allows different faculties to follow their own affirmative action programs, Quincy said. Although this decentralization sometimes aids hiring efforts, the lack of a "campus-wide game plan" more often tends to work against such programs, he said.

Quincy cited statistics that place Harvard near the bottom of a list of eight comparable universities in terms of minority and women faculty hiring.

"I don't agree that the effort is an insurmountable task," Quincy said. "Clearly Harvard does not get its share of outstanding female and minority faculty members."

Over the next 25 years, affirmative action will become a "business necessity," Quincy said. He described current efforts to make minority individuals a part of the American workplace as "vastly insufficient," saying that employers need to be more creative and aggressive in their recruiting.

"The more we talk about it and emphasize the importance of achieving the goals--those are the kinds of things that bring results," he said.

Before coming to Harvard in 1987, Quincy served as a foreign policy advisor at the U.S. State Department. He has also headed Michigan's Civil Rights Department and advised the state's governor.

The speech was sponsored by the Harvard Foundation, a campus group which promotes cross-cultural awareness.