Slow Change on the Horizon for Minority Hiring

Nearly two years after a surge of student activism prompted an internal review of hiring practices, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) this fall will finally get down to the nuts and bolts of improving its affirmative action efforts.

After months of committee work and faculty review, FAS's cautious new plan to add to its small pool of women and minority scholars is a study in how change comes to a faculty as tradition-laden as Harvard's.

Only 7 percent of senior faculty members are minorities, and 8 percent are women. Currently, 12 percent of junior faculty are minorities, and 28 percent are women.

But the new FAS effort will not change these numbers rapidly, and no sweeping reforms are at hand.

Instead, the plan finally adopted by Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence last spring essentially adds the monitoring of affirmative action efforts to department chairs' already long job descriptions. There will also be a new committee formed to review affirmative action reports that each department will now be required to compile annually.

The one major change expected in the FAS landscape is the appointment of a new associate dean for affirmative action. The administrator will be a tenured professor charged with overseeing the faculty's affirmative action efforts.

Spence said in interviews last spring that he would begin to implement the new affirmative action plan over the summer, but he has yet to announce the appointment of an associate dean. He said last week that he would make an announcement soon.

Will the new dean be an iconoclast, prepared to be a vocal advocate for affirmative action in a faculty often resistant to change? Or will the administrator be a faculty insider, knowledgeable enough to nudge colleagues in the direction of gradual change? No one knows, and Spence is remaining tight-lipped.

The entire review process was precipitated two springs ago when the Minority Students Alliance (MSA) issued a report which charged that FAS was not doing enough to recruit and hire minority scholars.

In response, Spence created a committee to examine the problem, and tapped Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba '53, a man wise in the ways of the Harvard bureaucracy, to chair the panel.

The committee deliberated for months, but its long-awaited report was substantially revised by the Faculty Council, the steering committee of the full faculty chaired by Spence.

The Verba Committee had proposed the creation of a separate administrative framework intended to move departments away from traditional hiring networks when making tenure decisions. The panel had called for a faculty member other than the department chair to serve as a "departmental representative for affirmative action."

But the council brought the affirmative action effort more in line with the current administrative setup of FAS, and its revisions left student activists predicting more frustration in the future about the University's inability to diversify its faculty.

One thing's for sure. The issue of how to increase Harvard's women and minority professors isn't likely to fade until the numbers change dramatically. And that won't be for a long time.