Amid Tensions, University Battled Gender, Racial Issues

The lyrics from a Stevie Wonder song blared across Leverett House’s dining hall from a boombox while Aya de Leon ’89 and her friends listened to the words.

“I just never understood,” Wonder sang. “How a man who died for good would not have a day that would be set aside for his recognition. Happy birthday to you.”

It was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday and de Leon had chosen the Wonder song to commemorate the strides the visionary had taken during the Civil Rights movement.

De Leon remembered a senior administrator approaching her friends and brusquely insisting they turn off the music, seemingly oblivious to the occasion.

Only a few hours later, the same administrator rapped on her door and proceeded to apologize profusely for his mistake, while de Leon stood in the doorway, laundry and clutter strewn around her room.

“It was one of those moments where I just felt deeply uncomfortable racially,” de Leon noted, recalling how vulnerable she felt.

The incident speaks to a wider trend on campus during 1988 and 1989. Many minority students felt marginalized by the University while administrators walked on eggshells, tiptoeing around racial issues.

Some student activists felt that the legacy of discrimination at Harvard before the Civil Rights era still loomed large.

But it was not only racial minorities who felt ignored by the University. Many women at Harvard College also felt marginalized. Radcliffe women had once been banned from Lamont Library and, according to the Radcliffe Student Union website, were required to clean the dorms of male students living around Harvard Yard.

Discrimination had taken a slightly more subtle tack by 1989. It was a glass ceiling that now prevented women from acquiring the most prestigious and coveted professorships or reaching the upper echelons of the faculty and administration. During 1988, the University began to make efforts to change the face of an administration still dominated by white men by making several strategic appointments to high profile positions.

Those efforts signaled to some that the University had begun to recognize the role that minorities ought to play at Harvard. Others claimed that the University had not done enough.

Harvard students rallied behind movements demanding change on campus, sparking a wave of dialogue and discussion over the treatment of minorities and women at the College.

OFF THE TENURE TRACK

Three decades had passed since the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated American public schools and prompted sweeping civil rights legislation. The wave of reforms included the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination among other things.

Yet Harvard only employed a few faculty members who were either women or minorities.

By the end of the 1989 school year, The Crimson reported that only 1.8 percent of the 400 senior faculty were Black.

Minorities overall accounted for only 7 percent of the senior faculty. 8 percent of the tenured faculty were women.

The junior faculty displayed a slightly more diverse membership. Just over 12 percent of the junior faculty were minorities, and 27.7 percent were women. Even among undergraduates, no woman had ever served as a chair of the seven-year-old Undergraduate Council.

Some faculty members chose to challenge what they saw as a glass ceiling preventing them from entering the tenure track.

Barbara Bund Jackson ’66, for example, filed a suit alleging that the Harvard Business School had denied her tenure because she was a women. The U.S. Massachusetts District Court ruled against Jackson and she subsequently appealed the decision during September 1989.

According to court documents, HBS professor Gordon Donaldson originally testified that the Business School was hesitant to hire qualified women for prominent leadership positions.

“There’s a reluctance to accept women into certain leadership areas where traditionally they have not had such roles,” Donaldson testified. “I believe that business is one of those.”

The presiding judge eventually handed down an opinion that held that discrimination, while it may exist, was merely a reflection of pervasive stereotypes that the Court could do little to alter.

“Dean Donaldson’s statements, which the plaintiff portrays as evidence of discriminatory intent, are merely a recognition that the general culture’s stereotypes and prejudices undoubtedly influence, albeit indirectly, the composition of the Harvard Business School student body and faculty.”

Jackson, however, objected to the prejudice adopted by Business School administrators and faculty, saying that it made her feel out of place while on the tenure track at HBS.

“It was not comfortable,” she said. “You were very aware that this wasn’t the tradition.”

The lack of women and minorities on the faculty may have dissuaded some qualified scholars from pursuing tenure. Wesley J. Paul ’91, an Asian-American member of the Minority Student Alliance, recalled that phenomenon.

He had a “bright, well-spoken, and highly thought of” teaching assistant who had expressed interest in pursuing tenure, but seemed reluctant because she was an Asian-American woman.

“I think she came to some kind of a realization that, as an Asian-American woman, her likelihood of getting onto the tenure track for Harvard or some other well-known law school was pretty slim,” Paul said.

MARGINALIZED AT HARVARD

Faculty members were not the only group to voice concerns about discrimination. Many minority students also felt that Harvard had not fully distanced itself from the discrimination that ran rampant before the Civil Rights movement.

When de Leon entered Harvard College as a freshman, she was unprepared for the sheltered upbringing of many of her peers.

She sometimes felt that she and other minority students were at Harvard to provide superficial diversity to the student body.

“In a lot of ways, we got the impression that we were there... to be a part of the diversity experience for the white students, that we were there as some kind of prop or set dressing, and that our needs weren’t the most important thing,” de Leon says.

Students at other colleges had demanded and received cultural houses that offered a space for minority students to gather and support one another.

Harvard, however, had yet to provide such a space, according to de Leon, who felt that the University did not appreciate the needs of the African American community.

Paul also felt that the the Asian American community was at the time misunderstood both on campus and across the nation.

“I do think there was a perception that Asian Americans don’t need any help, that they’re going to be fine, that they are generally fairly studious,” Paul says.

Jackson also noticed a subtle, if unconscious, disparaging attitude toward female students at the Business School.

“It seems to me that I was having lunch with one of the senior administrators, like a consigliere to the dean or something like that,” she says.

Jackson remembers hearing a senior administrator telling her over lunch that the school did not want to admit more women because it wanted to train the “leaders of the future.”

For de Leon, the exclusionary atmosphere was heightened by the limited course offerings at the College. De Leon remembers that when she first arrived at Harvard in 1984, the College offered only two courses about Africa and no courses on African languages.

According to de Leon, her high school offered a wider range of courses than Harvard.

“It was shocking to me that my public high school had better offerings in African languages than Harvard,” she says.

According to de Leon, Harvard focused instead on the culture and history of Western Europe—a disparity that made some students think that the University prioritized studying the West over ethnic studies. Thus, for minority students, even the course catalogue cemented the idea that Harvard paid too little attention to racial issues.

PLANTING THE SEEDS

Students rallied behind campus groups that demanded greater recognition for women and minorities from the administration.

Final clubs were the focal point of feminist discussion at the time. One group, Stop Withholding Access Today, embarked on a crusade to upend the male dominated clubs.

SWAT had been founded after Lisa J. Schkolnick ’88 sued the Fly Club for its male-only admissions policy, which she claimed violated Massachusetts prohibitions on discrimination by sex. The case continued into 1989.

Other feminist groups rallied for reevaluating campus security protocols after a woman was raped in her office.

Minority organizations—including the Minority Student Alliance, the Black Student Alliance, and the Third World Student Alliance—also sought greater representation on campus.

Paul remembers the Minority Student Alliance sitting down with various deans and administrators to have an open dialogue about increasing number of minority faculty members.

The group also focused on recruiting and mentoring younger members.

“I think it was a hope from our organization that we could plant the seeds for future generations of people who were involved in the minority community would sort of carry the flag forward,” Paul said.

Perhaps due to pressure from student groups, the University began to make changes to its policies regarding minorities.

In 1988, Harvard launched a review of Asian-American admittance rates.

The effort, sparked by a federal investigation that alleged discrimination against Asian American applicants, examined the disparity between white and Asian admissions rates, which over the past 10 years had averaged 17.0 percent and 13.3 percent respectively.

Student activists also began to call on Harvard to divest from South Africa, which was still operating under the apartheid system.

Their efforts prompted the Board of Overseers to elect Desmond Tutu, an Anglican bishop who led the anti-apartheid movement, in 1989, demonstrating its opposition to the apartheid regime.

Although University administrators claimed that would not succumb to student calls to divest, Harvard announced in April that its investments in South Africa fell from 230.9 million to 163.8 million during the last six months of 1988.

Additionally, Harvard appointed its first woman, Judith R. Hope, to the Board of the Harvard Corporation.

De Leon now says that her activism on campus has influenced her trajectory after Harvard.

She was a member of yhe Zealots in Protest, yhe Black Student Alliance, and the Third World Student Alliance. Although those groups failed to inspire sweeping changes to University policy, she still believes her work protesting the entrenched injustices at Harvard helped shape who she became.

“The people who were most affected by that campaign were those of us who engaged in it,” de Leon says. “I think about it in terms of the making of activists.”

—Staff writer Meg P. Bernhard can be reached at meg.bernhard@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @Meg_Bernhard.