Foundation Created To Combat Minority ‘Alienation’

On the afternoon of June 5, 1980, former University president Derek C. Bok’s Commencement address heralded the University’s progress and “continuing effort” in diversifying the campus.

“It is a great step forward to have broadened Harvard’s diversity by enrolling thousands of minority students without compromising academic standards,” Bok asserted—a claim that resonated poorly in the minds of some students.

Just one day earlier, members of the Harvard-Radcliffe Third World Center Organization (TWCO)—composed of students from various ethnic backgrounds—flanked the John Harvard Statue with banners charging that “Harvard’s commitment to diversity is a sham.”

Graduating seniors from TWCO assembled an emergency press conference later in the day, lobbying for a student-run center to serve the needs of minorities and to recruit more minority students and faculty to the University as a solution to Harvard’s “institutional racism,” the Harvard Magazine reported.

Twenty-five years later, the University still has no Third World Center. Instead, the campus today looks to the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, which Director S. Allen Counter calls the “conscience of interracial relations at Harvard.” With staples such as its writers’ series and the annual “Cultural Rhythms” performance and food festival, the Foundation has set the tone for campus dialogue about diversity since its inception.

The organization has brought over 100 distinguished activists, politicians, artists, and academics to campus, and it provides over 130 grants each semester to cultural and ethnic student groups.

Now one of the most active and established campus organizations, the Foundation was initially met with vehement opposition by minority leaders themselves when it was first proposed a quarter of a century ago.

DARING DEMANDS

Earlier in the year, in the spring of 1980, TWCO leaders met with Bok and submitted a detailed proposal for a student-run Third World Center financed by the University. The proposal called for the immediate establishment of a center providing social and academic support for minority students in light of the fact that the Third World student community at Harvard had grown 20-fold in the 15 years leading up to 1980.

In 1975, Bok had shot down a similar TWCO proposal requesting that the University devote $200,000 to create a Third World Cultural Center, citing financial and ideological reasons why Harvard would not fund such a center.

“A Third World Center creates a risk of segregating students by race and to that extent threatens to work against the philosophy underlying student diversity,” Bok wrote in an e-mail.

In the 1980 proposal, however, TWCO upped its demands, adding a budget for renovations, annual operational costs, and a full-time staff paid by the University. But rather than issuing an emphatic “no,” this time Bok appointed a presidential committee to conduct an extensive review of the proposal.

Though some students said that the formation of the committee was a “positive step” for diversity at Harvard, former president of the Black Students Association (BSA) Eugene J. Green ’80 told The Crimson that members of TWCO did not “intend to allow the University to engage in a tremendous amount of bureaucratic shuffling.”

“I always kind of felt like [the committee’s] job was more to placate the students who wanted the center,” says LeRoy W. Collins ’81 who sat on the committee at the time. “I felt that...at least we were getting some kind of acknowledgment and that we should make the most out of it.”

Chaired by Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes, the committee was composed of five other faculty members and administrators as well as five students appointed by Bok. The committee assembled shortly after Commencement, convening six times over the summer of 1980 and continuing to meet in the fall. During their half-year-long deliberation, the committee consulted 13 universities across the nation with cultural centers. It also solicited input from various administrators and campus ethnic group leaders, Gomes says.

The final ten-page report, submitted on New Years Day of 1981, said minority students at Harvard “experience alienation and estrangement from the larger community and are frustrated in their efforts not only to maintain their own identity, but to share the benefits of it with others.”

The “Gomes Report,” as it was dubbed, scrapped the idea of a concrete Third World Center and outlined an alternative organization that has “a certain vagueness”: the Foundation.

Collins, who was also an active member of TWCO, says that “it was pretty obvious we were not going to get a Third World Center....It was a compromised vision at best.”

In the report, the committee detailed the structure of the Harvard Foundation, a centralized organization that should support diversity “for the purpose of gaining understanding, respect, and appreciation for other people, and by that means to improve relations among the races.”

The Foundation was to be “an expression of the University’s commitment to an integrated and pluralistic community,” the report states.

‘BETRAYAL’

Though the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life voted to endorse the report, TWCO representatives voiced opposition and withdrew support from the Foundation. They argued that it failed to address the problem of minority faculty hiring and minority admissions—issues described in TWCO’s initial proposal.

“While diversity and better race relations are worthwhile goals, we support a center that would primarily provide support services for Third World students,” TWCO member Georgia Hill ’81 told The Crimson at the time.

Then-BSA president Gaye Williams ’83 said some viewed the report as merely a way to appease the students.

“There is a real feeling of betrayal,” Williams said. “The University set up a committee to talk the students out of what they wanted.”

Gomes says that the establishment of a building, which TWCO had pushed for, would have reinforced segregation. “What [TWCO] wanted was a Third World final club. And if the principle of a final club in itself is not a good thing, then it’s certainly not a good thing to extend it in the name of diversity,” Gomes says in last week’s interview.

In the midst of the controversy, Gomes rushed back from his sabbatical in England to defend the Foundation at a March Faculty meeting.

“Some of my colleagues on the Faculty thought this whole thing was a big waste of time...and that we had bought into a cultural ideology that shouldn’t be embraced.” Gomes recalls.

Despite mixed Faculty opinions, Bok forged on with the plans to establish the Foundation.

“I supported and still warmly support the Harvard Foundation as an alternative to a Third World Center,” Bok writes in an e-mail. The Foundation “helps carry out the fundamental philosophy behind diversity...that a diverse student body can provide a richer and more fruitful educational experience for everyone.”

A ROCKY FOUNDATION

In the summer of 1981, a search committee headed by former dean of the College John B. Fox Jr. ’60 appointed Counter, an associate professor of Neuroscience at the Medical School to become the first, and so far only, director of the Foundation.

Working off of the “shoe-string budget”

that the University initially allotted for the Foundation, Counter spent much of his time in his first years as director raising funds to support programming, he told The Crimson back then.

With a budget of less than $10,000 for its first year, the Foundation hosted a commission hearing on wartime relocation and internment of Japanese-American citizens and invited a prominent black physicist to speak, Counter recalls.

The bigger task at hand, however, was establishing the legitimacy of the Foundation on campus.

Collins remembers that many students were "disenchanted" by the new Foundation, saying it was going to be "a big sham."

"We were responding to a situation that was unprecedented," Gomes says, calling the creation of the Foundation a "bit of a gamble."
"If we were rejecting the Third World model, which we clearly were, we had to replace it with something, our sort of unique formula." At the time, Gomes told The Crimson it would take a few years for the contribution of the Foundation to be felt.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Twenty-five years later, the cultural landscape and ideological climate at Harvard has changed—and so has that of the Foundation. According to Gomes, the Foundation is no longer primarily involved in "mainstreaming minority culture" but is a vehicle for supporting various student organizations.

"The initial mandate has been made irrelevant because of the evolution of the Harvard population," Gomes says.

Former Foundation intern Xi Wang ’06 says that the Foundation now plays a dual purpose of providing resources for groups and promoting dialogue on issues of diversity and race.

The Foundation reports directly to the president and the dean of the faculty—a result of the initial commitment at the presidential level to review the proposal made by TWCO.

Ellen T. Yiadom ’06, also a former Foundation intern, says that this arrangement allows the organization to have direct communication with College deans—who attend Foundation staff meetings—and direct access to funding.

In 2002, the Office of University President Lawrence H. Summers doled out $100,000 for a Foundation project to commission portraits of distinguished faculty and administrators of color.

Counter says that many universities—including some of the ones the Gomes committee initially consulted—have sent representatives to study the model of the Foundation.

"The task undertaken by the Foundation...was by no means easy or immediately popular," Bok recounted in a letter to the Foundation at its 20th anniversary. "Without a doubt, the experiment has succeeded beyond anyone’s legitimate explanations."

—Staff writer Ying Wang can be reached at yingwang@fas.harvard.edu.