PATRONAGE RECONSIDERED

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The editorial "Patronage" (March 19) makes complicated issues too simple. To illustrate: a college president whom I know well and about whose zeal on behalf of minorities I have no doubt, started a new educational enterprise by going out actively to recruit women and blacks for major administrative positions. This was before the days of Affirmative Action. In due course, thanks perhaps in part to Affirmative Action operating in other institutions, he lost these recruits and now must proceed to find replacement. But, given the nature of the vacancies, he is convinced that the outcome, in the absence of "patronage," will be the recruitment of white males because they will turn out to be, in each instance, the "best man" among a flock of applicants. He fears that a choice of someone less plainly qualified, in a pool where there is active fishing for minority candidates, might subject him to litigation.

In the active recruitment I engage in for the staff of the General Education course I direct, I look for fruitful balance of qualities that will be useful for the staff's self-education--and my own--as well as for that of undergraduates. Twice I have recruited Jesuits for the staff, in both cases highly gifted teachers and scholars, and one consideration was my wish to rebut the now somewhat attenuated anti-Catholic prejudices in this particular New England university. Correspondingly, I actively recruited women to teach in the course, as much for the benefit of the Harvard as the Radcliffe undergraduates, and this too might be defined as "patronage." A search for the best person, in other words, in the terms defined by The Crimson editorial, often turns up a man, and has usually done so in the past at Harvard as elsewhere.

What I am suggesting is that, with wide variation among departments and institutions, the abstract principles of the editorial, like other virtuous declarations, may be self-defeating.

Finally, a group of colleagues who must work closely together must have a certain amount of mutual trust. At the senior faculty level, Harvard protects itself against the obvious dangers of cronyism by the ad hoc committee system; and Affirmative Action procedures often do widen the pool and diminish the potency of the old boy network. But there are costs in the policy of recruiting on an individualistic basis without regard to catalytic quality; and the moral and intellectual quality of a university must be seen as living in precarious tension among competing values. David Riesman'31