A goodbye to Walter J. Leonard

When two dozen black students broke into and occupied Mass Hall in April 1972 to protest the corporation's decision not to sell Harvard's shares of stock in the Gulf Oil Corporation, Walter J. Leonard, special assistant to President Bok, found himself in an especially sensitive situation.

"Under that kind of circumstance, it was particularly difficult for Leonard," Archibald Cox `34, Williston Professor of Law and a close friend of Leonard's, said yesterday. "His judgment and his moral strength were of enormous value. I was there--he was a person to rely on, to lean on. He managed to help both the president and to deal with the black students.

"I remember this," Cox added, "because those affairs were very tense and difficult. You remember the people who were strong and helpful. Walter Leonard was particularly so."

Leonard, who will end his eight-year tenure at Harvard next June, when he will leave to assume the presidency of Fisk University, has often played the middle man in Harvard politics, carefully balancing his friendship with Bok against his criticism of University policy and attitudes toward minorities and women.

Before assuming his current Mass Hall post in 1971, Leonard served as special assistant to Bok, who was then dean of the Law School. It was there that Leonard affected tremendous advances in the numbers of and attitudes toward minority students and women, setting a new tone for other institutions in the country and other parts of the University.

An administrator at the Law School who worked with Leonard there, said yesterday that Leonard was responsible for a very large increase in the number of minority applicants to the school in the 1969-71 period, having done a superior job of recruitment. "Both in intensity, coverage, manner and style, he brought in applicants," he said.

Additionally, Leonard spent tremendous amounts of time with students, in counseling and discussions of their aims and goals. "In a period when black students here felt in a strange environment, he managed to give them the feeling that they belong here, that they had entitlements. It was not easy to do," the administrator said.

Overall, his impact at the Law School and on black education in general may be measured "mainly in terms of intangibles," a member of the Law School faculty said yesterday. "The morale of the whole school was deeply affected by his manner and his progress."

Hiring and recruiting plans advanced dramatically under his influence--"He gave them content, the critical thing is the doing and he did it," an administrator said.

Once at the University level, Leonard was no longer in the position to carry out his ideas directly. But he retained one weapon, the friendship and respect of President Bok. That friendship enabled him to exercise a power far greater than his defined duties.

In addition to shoring up the infant affirmative action plan, Leonard pushed it beyond where other Ivy League schools long abandoned it. In 1973 he forced Harvard departments and faculties to prepare a hiring breakdown, and although the process took two years to carry out, Harvard's action prompted other major institutions to follow suit.

He has also openly scored the University, both as a whole and its various parts, for its lackadaisical attitude toward affirmative action guidelines, and has pitted himself against University Hall in his criticism of its policies and actions.

"Oftentimes, Leonard would speak out so forthrightly that the president would respond by qualifying it," one UHall administrator said yesterday. "But he was in no way objecting to it."

When Leonard leaves for Fisk, Harvard will lose its staunchest supporter of affirmative action--a man who has spent his years here working with the goal of increasing the number of women and minorities at all levels of the University. His successor will have a difficult time picking up; in the past year, Bok has taken a step away from active support of Leonard, refusing to take a stand against Dean Rosovsky in certain actions when Leonard called for it. But Leonard's outspoken attitude has enabled him to resist even passive attacks of this sort.

Recalling another side of Leonard, Cox said, "His persuasiveness, his ability to exemplify the highest kind of standards and intellectual and moral qualities, are things which I put down that enable this man to be effective with both his professional colleagues and his students."