Affirmative Action

To the Editors of The Crimson:

May I define the relevant context for my remarks before the Verba Committee, which The Crimson reported on December 9th?

I did not "warn against the application of strict faculty affirmative-action policies." I said that there were two purposes to affirmative action: to eliminate discrimination or to ensure representation. I said that the Committee needed to establish, as a ground, a clear statement of principles. And I said that representation was not the principle to be adopted in seeking faculty.

I said that of course the University had to make every effort to find individuals of talent among minorities and women--pointing to the discrimination by Harvard, in the past, against. Jews. But the principle of representation is based on the idea of constituencies that have to be included, often in rough proportion to their numbers, and that however defensible that might be in the larger policy, it could not be controlling in the selection of a faculty whose purposes are scholarship, research and teaching. I remarked that in many of the statements, documents and petitions I had seen, this distinction has been smudged or elided.

In the subsequent discussion, I responded to Professors Thompson and Sen, stating that no principle can be applied in an absolutist way, and that criteria in some fields might be applied differently, but that is a case matter and needs to be considered with an awareness of the principle being held. Daniel Bell   Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences