The Debate Goes On

In March 1973, President Bok defended the University's seven-year-old affirmative action policy in an opinion piece published in The Crimson: "The University has a moral obligation to provide equal opportunity to women, minority persons and all other groups who work or seek work at Harvard. Our sorry record in past years suggests that we must take special efforts to fulfill this obligation."

Last February in an open letter on issues of race, Bok reaffirmed the University's commitment to affirmative action and although the content of his argument remained essentially the same, the tone and temper of his remarks had changed. After a lengthy discussion of the small pool of qualified minority applicants. Bok concluded that "we face a difficult task in trying to realize the advantages of adding talented scholars to our faculties without breaking faith with our overiding commitment to the highest attainable standards of learning and scholarship." Instead of calling for "special efforts" he wrote "we must do our best to maintain a vigorous program of affirmative action."

Although Bok's statements, presented in the open letter, represent only personal opinion and not official University doctrine, his remarks reflect to some degree the status of affirmative action at Harvard. Composed with care and tinged with caution. Bok's statements cover no new ground and, in fact, seem almost designed to avoid open confrontation with critics on either side of the affirmative action issue. Perhaps even more important, the opinion presented in his open letter--devoid of the enthusiasm of his earlier statements--has been conditioned by eight years during which the University has repeatedly fallen far short of its affirmative action goals.

In the 15 years since the University first instituted an affirmative action policy, Harvard has become one of the focal points of a nationwide debate about the legitimacy and implications of affirmative action. While few scholars have openly opposed the policy, the definitional disagreements have run rampant, and have severely hindered its operation.

On one side of the issue, faculty members including Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53, professor of Government, and Nathan Glazer, professor of Education and Social Structure, contend that affirmative action implies absolute color and sex blindness.

"I don't think [race of sex] should be important at all," Marsfield says, adding. "I don't think we should have as a goal to have more women or Blacks on the faculty. Any attempt to introduce some other factor, even if it's minimal quots will suddenly take us into trouble."

Glazer, author of the widely cited Affirmative Discrimination, agrees. "The Instrument of national social policy designed ostensibly to prevent discrimination inevitably went beyond that to positive efforts on behalf of those presumptively discriminated against," he writes in Ethnicity, which he co-ediyed with Sen. Daniel P. Moynthan (D-N.Y), a former Government professor.

Both Mansfield and Glazer equate minority and women- hitting targets of any kind with quotas and argue that by instituting these the federal governemnt is employing a form of reverse discrimination.

On the other side of the issue, people like Walter J. Leonard, formerly a special assistant to the president and the University's affirmative action officer, have led the fight for stricter enforcement of the quota system, particularly in the wake of the Bakke and DeFunis Supreme Court rulings.

University administrators have for the most part steered a middle route. Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University, said in 1976 that he views affirmative action as a temporary necessity. "We tried a color-blind approach for many years and it didn't work. Affirmative action says that it did not work, and that we must go through a period of being conscious of race." Steiner, who worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission before coming to Harvard, added.

Despite the general view in the administration that some sort of consideration of race and gender should be factored into the hiring equation, just what this "consciousness" should be has until recently remained equivocal. This vagueness has contributed to the University's consistently poor performance in the area of affirmative action.

In 1970, an executive order. Title IV, was issued requiring that all institutions receiving more than $50,000 in federal contract money negotiate an affirmative action plan with the Office of Civil Rights which would include timetables for the hiring of minorities and women.

Harvard--threatened with the loss of $60 million in federal contracts from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW)--complied, submitting the first in a long series of affirmative action plans. The plan was rejected and a letter from the HEW regional office charged Harvard with discrimination on the basis of sex. At that time only six of the University's 738 tenured faculty members were women.

Over the next three years. Harvard prepared three more affirmative action plans, each of which was subsequently rejected because it failed to conform to federal hiring plan guidelines. In 1974, the University finally negotiated a plan which proved acceptable to the federal government and began to strive for affirmative action targets. Its success has been limited at best.

Despite annual submissions of an affirmative action plan and repeated avowals of the University's commitment to hiring women and minorities on the part of Harvard administrators, Harvard's 1980-81 affirmative action plan reveals that the University still lags far behind the hiring targets negotiated with the federal government.

According to the report, 18 departments are still underutilizing women in tenured positions and nine in non-tenured positions. Two departments have too few minority professors and five have too few minorities in ladder positions. Moreover, the same dearth of women and minorities exists--though to a slightly lesser degree--at administrative, professional and support staff levels throughout the University.

"Some of these targets we know we aren't ever going to meet," Nancy P. Randolph, special assistant to the president and the University's affirmative action officer says, adding that non- competitive salaries and a lack of intensive recruiting are factors in Harvard's poor performance level.

Both Bok and Randolph contend that the federal regulations requiring annually negotiated targets require cumbersome procedures unnecessary to a sound affirmative action policy.

"In particular, universities have had to elaborate statistical expositions of dubious value and fill out innumerable forms and reports, often at the cost of time that could have been better spent in trying to achieve concrete results. These administrative excesses should be eliminated," Bok writes in his open letter.

Randolph also expresses this sentiment, saying, "I think Harvard, like any university, would like to be able to do what it wants to do the way it wants to do it." She adds that position towards affirmative action might even be helpful to Harvard, and advocates "intelligent self-monitoring."

But she says the biggest problem is the decentralization of University hiring procedures. Each department, library and lab within Harvard makes its own hiring decisions--from the professorial to the clerical level. The affirmative action office can tabulate statistics and tell faculties where their employee-levels are falling short of affirmative action goals, but other than discussion and consciousness-raising the office can do nothing to affect hiring procedures.

"You have hundreds of people each hiring one somebody or two somebodies. Many of them are somewhat myopic--they're only concerned with what's happening in their own area." Randolph says, adding, "under such circumstances it's difficult to make people consciously aware of the fact that it's their responsibility to hire minorities."

It is because of this decentralization that the University's failure to define clearly its affirmative action posture has had the greates impact. Lacking a University-wide policy to which they may turn, individual employers and search committees are free to apply the definition to which they subscribe.

Perhaps the best attempt made to outline clearly the administration's policy towards affirmative action came in Bok's open letter on race. Faced with increasing controversy about Harvard's position on the issue of affirmative action. Bok listed what he saw as the three basic precepts of affirmative action. First, he suggested, every institution should carefully monitor its performance in hiring members of minority groups. Second, in all job searches, efforts should be made to identify candidates from these groups by advertising and making special inquiries. Finally, in hiring decisions the individual selected should be that person who is thought best qualified to perform the job, "subject only to the proviso that minority candidates should be chosen if their qualifications are equal to those of the other leading contenders."

Although Bok's letter makes an attempt to define a coherent affirmative action policy, it remains an opinion and not binding-policy. Furthermore, it leaves execution in the hands of the individual employers, and given the University's poor showing to date, it is uncertain whether that performance will improve.

"We can write the right letters to the right people, but the tough job is changing people's attitudes," Randolph says, adding "We're not there yet. We've just gotten far more sophisticated in our discrimination."