Forging Faculty Consensus

"There used to be a line in the army--never volunteer, it stinks," says Sidney Verba '53. "No, I didn't volunteer for this. He called me and asked me to do this."

Verba, 56, may not have volunteered, but Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence has kept calling.

Verba, the director of the Harvard University Library since 1984, was tapped by Spence to head up an investigation into the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' (FAS)affirmative action record that could prove to be one of the thorniest challenges of his career.

With its report expected in the next few weeks, Verba's committee on women and minorities in the faculty has generated more than its share of controversy since commissioned last spring by Spence. And the challenge now, observers say, is whether Verba can make the conclusions of his report stick.

Colleagues say that if anyone has the bureaucratic clout and political skill to follow through on recommendations it is Verba, a former Government Department chair and associate dean for undergraduate education.

"He's everybody's ideal of a committee chairman. He might not like that, but that's the truth," says Geyser University Professor Henry Rosovsky, who was dean of the faculty during Verba's tenure as associate dean.

"He has a way of moving discussions along without appearing to impose his views--mainly because he's willing to do the work rather than just opine," says Professor of Romance and Comparative Literature Barbara E. Johnson, who serves on the affirmative action committee with Verba.

In fact, those skills as a builder of consensus may have gotten Verba the job in the first place.

When the Minority Students Alliance (MSA) released a report last spring charging Harvard with "confusion" and "complacency" in its recruitment of minority faculty, they also said that Harvard had effectively buried an earlier report on affirmative action, the Whitla report of 1980.

Headed by Dean K. Whitla, director of the office for instructional research and evaluation, the 1980 committee called for special programs to assist potential minority scholars and for a more aggressive recruiting effort by individual departments.

The recommendations of the 1980 committee were never implemented, and many department chairs interviewed by MSA last spring did not even remember the report.

"I've never tried to follow up to try to find out how it was put into effect," Whitla says. "Those aren't my kinds of responsibilities--mine was to do the study."

But Verba seems to have a different perspective on his task as a committee head.

He insists that his committee is determined not to allow its recommendations to be forgotten, and he says the body has made provisions for "structures and institutions" to ensure that 1980 will not be replayed.

"I assume that our report, like the Whitla report, will wind up on a shelf fairly shortly and that no one is going to remember it," Verba says. "That doesn't bother me as long as we have left behind something that carries on the intention of the report."

And although the Verba report has yet to be released, many say that the government professor's experience with the ins and outs of the Harvard bureaucracy will help once the report's conclusions are debated before the full Faculty later this spring.

As director of Harvard's library system, Verba is responsible for maintaining and improving the world's largest private collection of books. And with space running out in Widener and the cost of books rising rapidly, that is no easy task.

But Verba says he approaches the library job in the same way that he looks upon committee work. "Like many big issues at Harvard--particularly issues that involve the faculty and education...most decisions are made by some process of discussion and cooperation and consensus-building," he says.

And in addition to the list of offices on his resume, some say that Verba's scholarly interests also made him a natural choice for Spence when the dean was forming the affirmative action committee.

"As a citizen, I've always been concerned with equality, with issues of social fairness," Verba says. "I think almost all of the books I've written which are of political science research deal with issues of equality."

Verba has written extensively on social, political and economic equality. Equality in America: The View from the Top, which Verba co-authored in 1985, analyzes how the inequalities inevitably arising from capitalism can be reconciled with the equality which must be the root of democracy.

In a passage on the United States which could forbode the challenge ahead for Verba and his committee at Harvard, Verba wrote, "for a nation so taken with equality, there is a striking degree of contention over the goal. Americans can agree on equality only by disagreeing on what it means."

But while the faculty is sure to disagree about the recommendations that Verba and his fellow committee members make, it is likely that Verba will maintain his high-profile status in FAS.

As Verba says, "The trouble with this University is if they give you a miserable and thankless job, the only reward they ever give you is a more miserable and thankless job."