Harvard Will Finance Black Student Efforts To Aid Recruitment

The admissions office has allotted $1000 to send black undergraduates on recruiting missions to seven cities.

The undergraduates will visit Miami, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore to recruit and counsel black high school students. The admissions office grant will finance their expenses; the students will donate their time.

Prentiss B. Taylor '73, leader of the black student group undertaking the project, said these cities are the ones where the admissions office needs the most help in finding qualified black students. Harvard College now has two full-time black admissions officers, and alumni groups have also been active in recruiting black students.

"We have no qualms about recruiting and we don't apologize for any racial characteristics of our recruiting effort," Chase N. Peterson '52, dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, said yesterday. "But there's a distinction between recruiting and admissions. We have no quotas in our admissions policy, either racial or religious, and do not plan to have one in the future."

The $1000 grant is a continuation of Harvard's recruiting efforts for minority groups which began in 1935 when Harvard president James Bryant Connate initiated the Harvard National Scholarship program, set up to attract students from areas that did not generate applicants spontaneously.

Gamble Fund

In the 1950's, Peterson said, Harvard received an anonymous grant to search for and finance undergraduates from disadvantaged groups. The beneficiaries of this program were at first mostly sons of white blue-collar families. Theprogram was nicknamed the "Gamble Fund."

"We all prided ourselves on the eight or so black kids we had in each class and felt the world was as it should be," Peterson said.

Harvard has actively recruited blacks since the mid-'60's, according to Peterson; since 1968 this has been accomplished with the help of black undergraduates. The number of blacks coming to Harvard has risen from 40 in the current senior class to 100 in the class of 1974.

Of this year's program. Taylor stated, "Our object is to find the brother whom the regular admissions process doesn't even begin to touch. The Schools Committees of the Harvard Clubs are lily-white, and many committee members are just plain scared to journey into schools on our side of town. The end product is that so much of our people's genius is left at 18 or 19 nodding on stoops or over-represented in the front lines of Vietnam."

Atmosphere of Distrust

Even energetic and sympathetic white alumni, Taylor said, cannot possibly describe Harvard in a way meaningful to black high school students.

"Certain past injustices in the transition between the recruitment processed the recruitment process and the admissions process" have resulted in an atmosphere of distrust in the Harvard black community toward the admissions office, he added.

Taylor said that while only seven or eight students would be using the admissions office grant to make special trips to certain cities, a group of 25 black students will be working over Christmas vacation in their home towns and later on supplying information and advice to those who choose to apply to Harvard.

"Regeneration." Taylor said yesterday, "is our first obligation."