The Rosovsky Report

IT WOULD HAVE taken naive men to imagine that Harvard--having set up a committee to look into the role of Afro-American studies here--could somehow escape the national trend towards more respectable treatment of the long-neglected Afro-American field. The men who sat on the Rosovsky committee were not naive. The examples of Brandeis and San Francisco State were as clear to them as to anyone. And even though that kind of violence may never have seemed a plausible threat here, the committee members must have been aware of the subtler pressure they faced in determining Harvard's position. It is easy to forget Harvard's proverbial position as leader of the nation's educational circles. But in contrast to the light publicity given Yale's and Cornell's trailblazing efforts last year, innundative press coverage has followed the Rosovsky report.

It is encouraging to see how far the committee went in its proposals. The plan Rosovsky offers is no mere sop designed to co-opt student protest. Instead of merely suggesting minimal expansion in course offerings, the committee proposes a farreaching program aimed at remedying Harvard's academic deficits and at repairing some of the grotesque problems of black student life here. The plan will not solve all the problems, but it will make a start. The Faculty should approve it next week.

THERE IS, however, one glaring omission in the report's otherwise-tight scheme. The crucial question of student participation in staff selection for the new department has been scrupulously evaded in the report itself, and Dean Ford apparently hopes to guide the report through the Faculty without saying anything too specific about how much voice black students will have in choosing--or rejecting--potential appointees. Informal agreements for "student consultations" have reportedly been arranged, but Ford owes it to the Faculty and to the students to make his position clear here. He should either present a convincing case for excluding students from the selection proceedings, or else he should openly say how much power they will have. Soc Sci 5's traumas this Fall have shown the importance of having students help select professors for Afro-American courses.

The report makes some of its most important proposals in the section on University-Community relations. With sharper focus than the Wilson Committee, the report urges the University to reconsider the "morality" of its hiring, real estate, and investment policies. That reconsideration is over-due. While trying to mend its internal racial problems, Harvard should also see what its investment and hiring policies can do to help racial equality outside its walls.