GSAS Changes Fellowships Policy

In response to charges of "institutional racism" from Thomas F. Pettigrew, professor of Social Relations, the GSAS has restructured the financing of its 15 Black Prize Fellowships in order to restore the incentive for departments to recruit black graduate students.

In a surprise move the Committee on Fellowships of the GSAS met yesterday and unanimously approved funding changes similar to those proposed by Pettigrew as alternatives to the Committee's original plan of March 1.

"The point of this new plan is to tax all the departments, to make them all responsible for the goal of bringing black students to Harvard," J. Petersen Elder, dean of the GSAS, said after yesterday's meeting.

Under the revised plan the funds necessary for the 15 first-year Fellowships-$78,000-will be deducted from the GSAS general scholarship pool of approximately $900,000 before the pool is allocated among the various departments.

All Chip In

Thus each department-whether or not it recruits black students-will be subsidizing the first-year Fellowships. Also, those departments which have commitments to the 12 Fellows entering their second year in 1971-72 will receive proportionately larger allocations.

Under the Committee's original plan, each department would have been responsible for allocating its flat share of the total scholarship pool among its regular graduate students as well as its first and second-year Black Fellows.

Pettigrew had charged that this plan would discriminate against the departments with the most commitment to black students, and would present an unfair choice between funding ordinary students and Black Fellows-whose grant of $5200 a year is the highest of its kind in the University.

"This system of taxing all the departments, even those which through no fault of their own have few black applicants, is a true incentive to recruitment, in the original spirit of the Black Prize Fellowships, because it doesn't come out of each department's limited funds," Pettigrew said yesterday.

Half-and-Half

Pettigrew had proposed as a compromise that half of the cost of all the Fellowships be covered by general funds, and half by the individual departments.

The Committee, on the other hand, voted to fund first-year Fellows through the general pool, and second-year Fellows through individual departmental allocations. The net result may be the same, as the first-year program will probably cost about the same amount as the second-year program.

The Committee also began discussion of plans for a massive search for "new money" for the Black Prize Fellowships, as recommended by the Rosovsky Report, which first proposed the program to the Faculty in the spring of 1969.

Reginald H. Phelps '30, associate dean of the GSAS, said yesterday, "We're all agreed that the only way to assure the Black Prize Fellowships in perpetuity is to raise perhaps five or six million dollars, and finance them from the income. Variable funds are going to get tighter and tighter."