Rosovsky's Report

ON THE NIGHT before this Fall's Yale game--in which only one black player suited up for Harvard--the Ad Hoc Committee of Black Students issued an anxious statement. The Rosovsky Committee, which Dean Ford had appointed last April to look into the role of Afro-American studies here, was winding up its investigations, and reports that had filtered out of the committee were not encouraging.

In its statement, the Ad Hoc Committee once more presented the case for the creation of a whole new department at Harvard--a department of Afro-American studies. The statement avoided any allusion to Rosovsky, but the intent was clear: disturbed by rumors that Rosovsky committee was going to recommend some compromise--like an expansion of course offerings--the black students wanted to make a final plea for a unified Afro-American department.

The misunderstanding of the Rosovsky committee's purpose was an old one. When Ford named the members in April, he merely charged them with "investigating the place" of Afro-American studies in the Harvard curriculum. But members of the newly-formed Ad Hoc Committee said then that they had an informal agreement with Ford that the committee was going to lay the groundwork for an Afro-American department.

When the Rosovsky report finally appeared last week, the speculation ended abruptly. The report recommended a degree-granting program in Afro-American studies. But the proposed new department turned out to be one of the least radical suggestions the committee made. In its wide-ranging attack on problems of black student life at Harvard, the report amazed many observers who had expected only minimal concessions to strong black demands.

THE REPORT'S most potent lines come in its first section, on "The Quality of Black Student Life at Harvard." Escaping the traditional stodgy prose of most committee-produced works, the report makes some surprisingly frank attacks on some of the problems Harvard creates for its black students.

The report's discussion of why improved treatment of Afro-American studies is so important to black students is well reasoned, but it covers little new ground. Using the traditional "negative-judgment" argument, the report says:

The absence of course offerings in many areas of Afro-American culture is emphatically a matter of more than academic or pedagogical concern to black students. Indeed, it seems likely that the absence of such offerings is the single most potent source of the black students' discontent at Harvard. The lack of such courses can strike the black students as a negative judgment by Harvard on the importance of these areas of knowledge and research and, by inference, on the importance of the black people themselves.

But the report offers some new evidence to white Harvard when it tries to explain the blacks' search for "relevance" in Afro-American courses

Many students . . . express the need to legitimize, inwardly as well as publicly, their presence at Harvard while other blacks remain in the ghetto, confronting its problems, bearing its burdens. Herein lies one of the major sources of the demand for courses "relevant" to the black experience. What the black student wants is an opportunity to study the black experience and to employ the intellectual resources of Harvard in seeking solution to the problems of the black community . . . Such educational opportunities would help the black student justify his separation from the larger black community--and would attest that the separation was by no means radical or permanent.

Working on the theory that Harvard blacks suffer from dual alienation--from whites at Harvard and from the black community at home--the report suggests two non-educational reforms: a review of the "morality" of Harvard's involvement in the community, and an effort to improve black social life here.

The proposals for community involvement come in sharp contrast to the innocuous pose of portions of the Wilson report. The dubious social morality of some of the companies Harvard has invested in--including the notorious Mississippi Power and Light--has long been a sore spot for both blacks and whites here. In combination with "discriminatory hiring and real estate policies," the report says that these investment practices make black students feel that "Harvard is uninterested in the 'morality' of its operations." The report's recommendation that Harvard use its fiscal might "to create an environment in which racial justice prevails at all levels" and to "stimulate black economic development" will probably find as much backing from whites as from blacks.

The committee's second non-educational proposal--augmenting the black social environment with a center like Hillel House--may initially seem ridiculous to whites who have become jaded to Hillel House or the Newman Center. But the committee presents a convincing case for the creation of a separate black cultural center. Harvard's sanguine policy of integrating black students into the white environment--like integrating Nebraskans into the Eastern environment--may often be counter-productive:

The House system in particular works spendidly in terms of the traditional Harvard goal of "integrating" students from a variety of backgrounds. But the black students feel that the system, by its very nature, works a perhaps too thorough fragmentation of the black student community . . . (The center) is not intended . . . to separate black students or their interests entirely from the life of the College. Quite the contrary, the students urge such a center as among the steps to be taken to make the black student feel more involved and less isolated in this community.

MANY OF THE committee's recommendations--especially those for the social center--need only Faculty approval for quick implementation. But other proposals face immediate practical problems. The hardest task will be finding the ten professors in Afro-American studies that the report requests. All of the country's major colleges are involved in a fierce drafting rivalry for the same ten men Harvard wants. The supply is so drastically limited that even with an inundative recruiting campaign, Harvard will have a hard time finding its ten professors.

The search for the black professors will also raise a moral dilemna for Harvard. Since most of the nation's Afro-American specialists are now teaching at small black colleges in the South, any success that Harvard has in attracting black professors will come at the expense of a debilitating brain drain from the Southern colleges. The attrition may be fatal for colleges like Miles and Tougaloo; and for many Southern blacks, those colleges are the only educational openings available.

If Harvard is to offset the immediate damage it will deal to the Southern colleges, it will have to help break the cycle that has caused the shortage of Afro-American specialists. That is exactly the goal of the committee's fourth proposal--intensive recruiting of black graduate students and granting of graduate degrees in Afro-American studies. In addition to this long-term benefit, the report says that more black graduates will help "normalize" race relations at Harvard by providing a stock of black advisors and tutors.

The trickiest problem the committee faced was deciding how much voice students would have in choosing the new professors. Violent riots at other colleges brought the issue to national attention, and the protest over Soc Sci 5 provided an example closer to home. The solution Rosovsky found was a quiet hedge: the committee that is to search for the new professors will be half student and half faculty. The tacit understanding seems to be that students won't be saddled with any professors they find unbearable. Considering the inevitable objections that any overt policy of "student control" would spawn, the report's minor equivocation seems justified. JAMES M. FALLOWS