BLACK RECRUITING

To the Editors of The Crimson

I have refrained until this time from writing in response to your recent series of article on the decline in the number of minority applicants for the Harvard College Class of 1979. These articles at first appeared designed to raise the broad issues and to examine the range of possible explanations for this decline. Generally the articles were good, and my own ideas and views were adequately if not completely represented by quoted or paraphrased material.

The editorial in the March 18 issue is another matter, however, and I feel compelled to disagree strongly with its conclusions. It is incomprehensible to me that a responsible paper could write a series of articles raising complex issues and commenting rather extensively on the many difficult problems involved in attracting minority students to Harvard and then reach the simplistic and inadequate conclusions stated in your editorial.

To blame the decline in minority applications on alumni hostility or even alumni ineffectiveness as the Crimson editorial appears to do is simply not true. Even more serious, however, this attempt to find an easy scapegoat for the decline in minority interest in Harvard does a real disservice to our continuing efforts to identify the problems of recruiting and to redress them.

We must do a better job than we have of reaching out to qualified prospective minority applicants and convincing them that Harvard is interested in them and appropriate for their educational goals. This will require even more alumni effort than we have generated up to now--efforts which are perhaps more intensively directed and which incorporate more recent graduates from minority backgrounds. Alumni efforts alone, however, will never be effective unless there is a con-current effort from Cambridge. The admissions staff must become more effective in organizing alumni efforts and providing information and leads for reaching new schools and candidates. Students and faculty must also help both as auxiliaries to the recruiting efforts and more particularly by improving the image which Harvard projects to minority students across the country. Clearly we will never appeal to more minority students unless we can convince them that Harvard is academically and financially viable for them and that it provides a positive environment for their education. Much of the news coverage of the University in the past year, including that by The Crimson, has emphasized the problems of minorities here without devoting any attention to the positive elements which do exist. Such a one-sided position makes it very difficult to encourage students to consider making Harvard one of their choices. No one would suggest that the media ignore the real problems which exist at Harvard, but it does seem reasonable to ask for equal emphasis on some of the advantages which a minority student can find here. Such balance would help recruiting efforst immeasurably.

In closing, let me urge that we not waste more precious time and energies in recriminations about who is at "fault" for the decline in minority applications. ultimately the responsibility must be mine as Dean of Admissions. The more important matter at hand is to work together--students, faculty, administration, and alumni--to improve Harvard's image among minorities and to reach out and contact the many promising students who for one reason or another have chosen not to apply here. The job will not be easy and it will require sustained, cooperative efforts by all of us over a period of many months, perhaps even years. L. Fred Jewett   Dean of Admissions