On Minority Admissions

To the Editors of the Crimson:

Peter Melnick's piece, "Minority Recruitment at Harvard: Still A Ways To Go," (1/23/78) leads one to certain inevitable conclusions about minority recruitment at Harvard.

Minority recruitment, the article states, was instituted by Harvard as simply another means to achieve educational diversity. Harvard did not take the position that it has a social or educational obligation to equal opportunity education or to minority recruitment. Harvard's amicus curiae brief for the Bakke case, for example, makes no plea for commitment to minority education.

As Melnick points out, Harvard's slipshod minority recruitment program is indicative of its slipshod commitment. The institutional framework of minority recruitment at Harvard is characterized by its unprofessionalism. It is obvious from Melnick's piece that student recruitment, a major thrust of recruitment at Harvard, is undercut; that professional recruitment is not a formal institutional objective; and that disorganization and incoherence pervade the minority recruitment effort in such a way that, in the future, these may serve as excuses to cut off all funds and cancel all obligations. As Enrique Moreno correctly observes, student recruitment will have to justify itself year after year, and when it is rendered totally ineffective by the administration, that will signal a move for cancellation of funds and abortment of the program.

In an even-handed fashion, Melnick points out that the students don't represent the height of professionalism--for the primary reason that they are not professionals. The use of students as a major component of the recruitment directive--students without training, students without real office support, students without compensation, and students without adequate operating funds--looks in fact like an attempt by the admissions office to discredit and cripple minority recruitment.

It seems Harvard's policy of diversity masks its educational obligation, for the concept of diversity is only as neutral as it is fashionable to be neutral. As Bob Young points out, people are seeing blacks under every bed. Today, minorities are not only unfashionable, apparently they are politically expendable as well. --Louis E. Benjamin '78