The Crimson Misrepresented the Harvard Foundation

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The Crimson articles on racial "diversity" by Ira Stoll and Joanna Weiss and the subsequent editorials regarding the work of the Harvard Foundation for Race Relations beg a response. Because we have a revolving student body that may be misled by the misinformation in the editorials and earlier articles by the Crimson groups, and faculty who may be led to believe that the views expressed in the articles represent the student consensus, we at the Harvard Foundation must set the record straight.

We had hoped that the Crimson group would take advantage of its opportunity to do a fair and balanced report on the attitudes of Harvard's racially diverse student community. Unfortunately, its editorials and articles on race fall short in the areas of accuracy, objectivity and fairness.

First, The Crimson's recent editorials and series of articles on race relations were grossly unfair to the Harvard Foundation and Hilda Hernandez-Gravelle. The Harvard Foundation's 10-year record of improving racial understanding at Harvard and the inclusion of minorities in the life of the University speaks for itself and is available to any student or faculty member who wishes to visit our office in University Hall.

In keeping with our mandate, we have conducted hundreds of programs and projects which serve to further enlighten the Harvard community about aspects of race and race-relations, and which have arguably improved racial understanding on our campus.

These programs range form lecture-visits and student-discussion/meetings with such Foundation guests as United Nations Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, author James Baldwin, Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller, Governor of Puerto Rico Raphael Hernandez-Colon, National Science Foundation Head Walter Massey, Northern Ireland leader John Hume, Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, U.S. Surgeon General Antonia Novello, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, scholar-athlete Arthur Ashe (to name a few), to panel discussions, films and debates on every conceivable aspect of race relations.

During the 1991-92 academic year alone, we have sponsored over 90 student programs and an all-Ivy conference on race relations. We have also conducted minority leadership workshops, inter-ethnic retreats and dinners and each year we present the Harvard Foundation Award to the students of all races whom the deans and house masters and professors have nominated for their Outstanding contribution to Race Relations at Harvard.

We even run a feature article on each of the student recipients of this award in his/her home-town newspaper (and their families and communities have been made to "feel good" and proud of their students.)

The director and students, of the Harvard Foundation have also successfully petitioned the deans of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences [FAS] for several new Ethnic Studies courses in the curriculum (including Puerto Rico in the Twentieth Century, Asian-American Culture and history and Chicano Politics). In an effort to help increase the number of minority faculty of Puerto Rican, Mexican-American, Asian-American, African-American and Native American Indian backgrounds, the students and faculty of the Harvard Foundation have collected the resumes of dozens of professors across the nation, presented them to the Faculty and secured the appointment of numerous minority visiting faculty.

In the 1991 fall semester for example, the Foundation was responsible for the course entitled "Latino Political Behavior," taught in the Government Department by visiting professor Rudolfo de la Garza; "Religious Traditions of the Southwest" (focusing on Native American Indian religion), taught in the Divinity School by visiting professor Inez Talamantez; and "Fiction by American Women of Color," taught in the English Department by visiting professor King Kok Cheung. The foundation has been responsible for numerous other visiting professors over the past years.

Both faculty and students have continually expressed their satisfaction and pleasure with the quality of the Foundation's programs and the success of our efforts to bring our students of different races and cultural backgrounds together in mutual understanding and respect. That is our mission, and we are proud to say that no one dies it better. We are not perfect, but we do our job. And if we make our students of all races "fell good" about race relations at Harvard in the process, then our efforts are successful.

According to former President Derek Bok, "We have been saved much of the hostile racerelations climate reported on other University campuses largely because of the work of the Harvard Foundation.

The Harvard Foundation was established in the spring of 1981 by the president, deans and Faculty of the University for the purpose of improving race relations among Harvard's increasingly diverse student population. Its formation followed widespread expressions of dissatisfaction among mainly Black, Puerto Rican and Native American Indian students about their treatment at Harvard.

Many of these students asked the University for a separate "third world" race center similar to the Hillel center where they could seek refuge form what they deemed "the racism and insensitivity of some of the white other nonminority members of the Harvard community." The alternative and special structure of the Harvard Foundation was recommended by a student/Faculty Committee that had investigated race relations problems and solutions on other Ivy League and Public college campuses.

While the initial focus of the Foundation's mandate was race, the director recommended the expansion of its name and programs to include the word, "culture," in an effort to reach out to white students and other non-minorities of color. The Harvard Foundation remains today unique in its structure and programs in that it serves those groups that are identified as racial minorities as well as white students, and no group has to feel excluded or underserved.

And, incidentally, the Harvard Foundation maintains, the only student race-relations office located in the central administration building University Hall (this includes Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth and Brown.)

Seven years after the founding of the Harvard Foundation, and following a series of large demonstrations in Harvard Yard to protest racial harassment in the classroom by white professors, an office for racial harassment complaints was formed. A temporary committee drawn largely from the student protesters, along with some faculty and members of the elected student representatives to the Harvard Foundation was formed in the Office of the Dean of the College to review complaints and responses to instances of racial harassment.

Later, this newly formed committee recommended an Office for Racial Harassment complaints similar in structure to the sexual Harassment office.

The Harvard Foundation (including its director, faculty chairman and students) was instrumental in the creation of the Racial Harassment Office. Hilda Hernandez-Gravelle, M.S.W., a social worker and part-time counselor at the Bureau of Study Council, was brought over to University Hall to head the new Office for Racial Harassment Complaints on a part-time basis.

Perhaps part of the confusion expressed by the Crimson group regarding the two separate offices stems from the fact that Hernandez Gravelle re-named the Racial Harassment Office, The Office of Race Relations and Minority Affairs (similarly the Sexual Harassment Office is officially called the Office of Co-Education). Naturally, the Harvard Foundation and the Racial Harassment offices have somewhat different goals.

The goal of the Faculty-established Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations is to create a racially harmonious atmosphere and reduce racial conflicts to the point where there are few if any racial harassment complaints. The purpose of the College's Racial Harassment Office as originally conceived by the faculty and students is to hear and process racial harassment complaints in a manner similar to the sexual harassment office.

Our investigation indicates that the dissatisfaction with the Harvard Foundation expressed in the Crimson articles is more representative of the Crimson group than the student body, minority and non-minority.

We have talked with the leaders of all of the minority student groups and the leaders of the various white student organizations about their evaluation of the Foundation's effectiveness. These students expressed no dissatisfaction with the work of the Foundation, and enthusiastically endorsed our programs and efforts. A number of students complained to this office that they had given the Crimson group "extensive interviews" and that "none of their pro-Foundation comments were included in the articles because they did not fit with the Crimson's ulterior slant."

Some students who work closely with the Foundation have expressed the view that the Crimson's editorial and articles were not designed to enlighten but rather to discredit the Harvard Foundation for its lack of involvement in the Crimson's racial agenda. For example, students cite the Harvard Foundation's refusal to be dragged into the Crimson group's recent hostilities with a Black City University of New York [CUNY] professor over his political beliefs.

Panelists at a recent Harvard Foundation program entitled Challenges to Race Relations in Today's Ivy League and Public Colleges indicated that Professor Leonard Jeffries and Professor Michael Levin (a Jewish professor also on the CUNY faculty who has written extensively and promoted the belief that "Blacks are innately inferior to Whites" and other equally racist ideas) were invited to debate at Princeton.

Levin's racist teachings (which are the same as those of David Duke) have been defended as free speech. Some of the panelists and students asked "why The Crimson and other Jeffries detractors and given so little attention to or shown interest in Levin's demagogy." And "could the Crimson writers' silence on Levin possibly suggest agreement?"

The dogma of the Crimson group's challenge to the Foundation appears to be "if you are not serving my special interest, then what good are you?" As the Foundation's programs have become more successful, more and more student organizations have sought involvement.

Invariably, some groups will feel that we are not doing enough for them or that some of our programs are in conflict with their interests. For example, The Crimson frequently cites the Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel, a Jewish students organization, as one of the student groups that is dissatisfied with the Foundation's work. Recently, students from Hillel have protested Harvard Foundation support of guest speakers such as MIT professor Noam Chomsky who was called "too political " for the Foundation's mandate (Professor Chomsky was invited to the University by the Society of Arab Students) and popular Black "rap" recording star, "Chuck D."

The Crimson group, however, failed to point out that the frequently quoted student leader of Hillel is on the student advisory board of the Harvard Foundation. Further, it should be pointed out that from its very inception, the Harvard Foundation has reached out to Hillel students, initially to be told that its members were white and not a minority group. Subsequently, members of Hillel have been elected to the student board of the Harvard Foundation and receive a portion of the Harvard Foundation's annual grant budget for Hillel's programs.

While most of our white, Black, Hispanic and Asian students are getting along admirably, our most intractable racial conflict has been between Jewish and Black students. This is also the case at many other colleges and universities. The most frequent conflict (at Harvard and other schools) centers on the charge by Jewish Students that "Black students invite speakers to the University whom Jews find distasteful" and allegedly "anti-Jewish."

The Black students on the other hand complain that the Jewish students try to "abridge [their] freedom of choice in Speakers," "manipulate them" and "try to direct [their] agenda.

We have held meetings, discussions, dinners, film exhibits and numerous other programs in our efforts to improve understanding between Black and Jewish students. Crimson writers active in Hillel have written extensively on this subject and have complained about the Harvard Foundation's support of some of the Black Students Association's programs.

We have continued our efforts to resolve the conflicts between these two groups and to involve Hillel students in the race relations programs of the Harvard Foundation.

However, some of the racial and cultural concerns raised by the Hillel students go far beyond the scope and mandate of the Harvard Foundation. For example, at a recent "Open Discussion on Race Relations" sponsored at Winthrop House by the Student Advisory Committee to get to the core of some of the racial conflicts between African Americans and Jews in our community, a student leader of Hillel complained that "Harvard's celebration of Christian holidays such as Christmas is as offensive to Jews as is racism to Blacks."

The student went on to compare the American celebration of Christmas with racism and anti-Semitism, stating that "America is not a Christian Country." Unfortunately, these concerns did not promote further discussion of race relations among the students in attendance.

Changing America's and Harvard's celebration of traditional Christian calendar events is beyond the mission and interest of the Harvard Foundation for race Relations. We seek more dialogue and understanding among Jewish and Black students about the issues of conflict that we are capable of addressing.

In this academic year, homosexual student groups have approached the Foundation indicating that the "demographics of the University have changed over the last ten years and that just as Asian Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans and Native Americans are considered cultural minorities, so too should bisexual, gay and lesbian students be deemed a separate culture and given a place on the Harvard Foundation's Board."

Our response is that since the formation of the Foundation we have welcomed the participation of all students without regard to their race, color, national origin, religion, physical status or sexual orientation. However, the Harvard Foundation was established by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as a race-relations program. Any modification of its mandate to officially include other identifiable interest groups must be made by the FAS. Moreover, the Foundation does not have the power or charge to declare any groups a separate culture.

It is of some interest that the Crimson group would choose to do a feature article on diversity and not cover its own status with regard to staff members of different racial, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Former FAS Dean Henry Rosovsky has said that The Crimson's record of minority appointments and diversity on its staff was poorer than that of Harvard University.

It saddens us that our office receives more racial unfairness complaints about the Crimson group than any other aspect of Harvard. It did not go unnoticed by the University administration, faculty and students that during a recent speech in sanders Theatre by controversial CUNY professor Leonard Jeffries, the loudest and most sustained applause from the more than 700 minority students present came when professor Jeffries questioned the integrity of The Crimson.

It is also significant that the only part of Harvard University to have been successfully sued in the courts for racial harassment is The Crimson.

The Harvard Foundation and many others in this community hope that the Crimson group will join us in our efforts to improve race relations among the students at Harvard in these racially tense times.

We hope that the Crimson group and other student publications will at the very least refrain from the kind of irresponsible and exploitative journalism that presents misinformation and exacerbates racial and ethnic differences.

Finally, most racial conflicts are based on ignorance, arrogance and victimization. We must all seek to rise above these failings to bring about tolerance, understanding and racial sensitivity among our fellow men and women in the Harvard community and the world at large. S. Allen Counter   Director of the Harvard Foundation   Natosha O. Reid '93   Co-chair of the Harvard Foundation Student   Advisory Committee