Room at the Top?

HARVARD's affirmative action plan, a massive document that takes up five looseleaf binders, presumably conveys, like any book about Harvard would, a general impression of what the University is like. But the real Harvard would be something of a shock to someone who had come here expecting to experience the affirmative-action version, full of deans eager to hire more women and minority group members, elaborate, ultrademocratic salary scales, and not a hint of ingrownness or elitism. It's a pleasant world, this affirmative-action Harvard, but the plan as a description of the University doesn't ring very true.

One of the things that is not supposed to happen here since HEW accepted Harvard's plan is a practice called direct hiring, by which someone hires a person for a non-teaching position--anything from a secretarial post to a deanship--without first listing the opening with the Personnel Office. The idea is that people looking for a job can then know about the opening and apply for it, and that Personnel can, in the words of the affirmative action plan, "identify minority persons and women with the requisite skills for the position in question." If you believe the affirmative action plan, "the policy of direct hiring by the various faculties and administrative units has been discontinued."

Needless to say, that is not always the case. It's hard to spot all instances of direct hiring; to do so the University would have to keep tabs on every secretarial and clerical appointment, a massive job. But the more important non-teaching appointments attract public scrutiny anyway, so direct hiring violations in the appointment of deans and directors are easy to keep track of.

Walter J. Leonard, special assistant to President Bok and the man in charge of affirmative action at Harvard, noticed a few violations of the direct hiring rule in June and wrote an angry memo to the Council of Deans about it. Although he didn't directly name names, Leonard did not mince many words: "There may be some people who are still insensitive and unaware of equal employment and affirmative requirements relating to college and university hiring. Where we find such naivete--maybe it should be forgiven. But since we know the person doing the hiring has not existed in such a Thoreau-like world, maybe that person's salary should go to pay for the person to whom she or he made a job promise contradictory to Harvard's rules."

Leonard wouldn't say so specifically, but his memo was apparently prompted in part by the appointments last month of two new deans, both white males who were hired directly in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Dean Rosovsky insisted that the appointment of one of the men, Francis M. Pipkin, the new associate dean of the Faculty for Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, was not in violation of the affirmative-action plan because while Pipkin's deanship is primarily administrative, he remains a professor of Physics as well and his new job is teaching-related and therefore exempt from the direct hiring ban.

It's certainly easy to see Rosovsky's point--he had specific qualifications in mind for the person who would fill Pipkin's job, qualifications he must have sincerely believed would make for the best possible dean. He wanted a tenured faculty member for the post, one who knew about Harvard and one in the natural sciences; under such severely limited circumstances, it would have been pointless for him to list the post with Personnel, since he would have had to turn down any non-Harvard candidates who applied.

That kind of conception of what a Harvard dean should be is, in itself, overly narrow, but even more important, the appointment appears also to have been in clear violation of the affirmative action plan. Under its rules for administrative corporation appointees--which would seem to include Pipkin or any other Faculty dean--the plan states that "all administrative Corporation appointment vacancies be listed officially with the Personnel Office before a commitment is made to employ someone."

THE WAY deans are appointed shows how difficult it will be for Harvard to embrace the spirit of affirmative action fully, because the whole process works in a way that precludes the possibility of real equal opportunity. The process is by no means intentionally racist or sexist, but it unavoidably ends up making it extraordinarily hard for women or minorities or non-Harvard people to become deans here.

Whether or not they mean it, hardly anyone at Harvard these days will admit that he really likes being a dean. Deans bill themselves instead as primarily scholars who are taking on for a few years a duty they don't find especially pleasant as a service to the university they love. Openly campaigning or even applying for a deanship would be unthinkably bad form, a complete violation of the ambience of Harvard deanships. The proper way to take on a deanship here is through being wooed a bit by friends and taking the post with a sense of honor and sacrifice.

Imagine the whole process taking place at the affirmative-action Harvard--Francis Pipkin strolling down to the Personnel Office to see what's doing, noticing there's an opening for a new dean and deciding to send in his resume. Affirmative action represents an enormous change in the underlying assumptions upon which Harvard operates; it involves a shift from Harvard as a closed-off oasis for scholars to an open and socially-integrated community.

The change is, of course, necessary. Rosovsky's two most important appointees so far--Pipkin and Burton S. Dreben '49 as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences--were both in the Society of Fellows, an elite group of distinguished elder scholars and promising younger ones, with him in the mid-fifties. They are both scholars concerned about the University, and both are potentially good deans--but still, choosing deans from the pool of former junior fellows won't bring equal opportunity to Harvard, and while junior fellows make for a pool of potential deans of unusual convenience and high-quality, that by no means implies that more qualified people couldn't be found outside Harvard's current upper echelons.

THE FACULTY of Arts and Sciences reportedly gave Leonard a lot of trouble when he was trying to produce an affirmative-action plan the Department of Health, Education and Welfare would accept, and the resistance of the individual departments to affirmative action was probably the most important single reason for the HEW's only outright rejection of the plan. It's easy to understand why--the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, of all the faculties at Harvard, is most concerned with pure scholarship, and that seems to entail a shutting out of everything else in the world. Just as the Faculty could play an integral part in the planning of the Indochina War and then outlaw disruptions by students protesting that partly Harvard-made war, the Faculty seems to feel as if it can remain separate from the society it is part of and helps create. No one at Harvard would say equal employment is bad, but it is important for everyone in the University to realize that Harvard is not a thing apart, but constantly shapes and is shaped by American society as a whole. The University must cast off its old assumptions and false separateness, and make more than a paper commitment to positive change.