Harvard and Minority Workers

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Sometimes one has to wonder whether Harvard's president Derek Bok is deliberately provocative toward Black and other minority persons within his institution or whether Bok is simply hidebound insensitive toward crucial minority concerns. One of those times was last year during the controversy at the Law School about affirmative action in faculty hiring. Another time is right now regarding the controversial lay-offs among the University's structural trades workers, lay-offs which impact with disparate harshness upon Black workers.

Last year, Bok's primary public contribution to the discussion about students demands foor more Third World (minority) faculty was a classic example of gratuitous wrongheadness. Bok allowed, to a Crimson reporter, that he (Bok) would stay out of the Law School debate unless (get this!) the Law School acquiested to the students' demands. In effect. Bok's counsel was that the Law School faculty should stonewall the student protesters, whether or not the students had a legitimate concern.

Fortunately, the Law School faculty displayed better sense and more intergrity than that. The Law School responded, maybe begrudgingly, to the student body, eighty percent of which called for stepped-up minority hiring. A total of six new Black and Chicano visiting professors were hired for the current school year. A talented Black woman was appointed director of the Law School's financial aid office. Five women, including the first Black woman Law professor at Harvard ever, also got visiting appointments beginning in this academic year. And perhaps most important, a full-time tenure track offer has been extended to and accepted by an additional Black law professor who is expected to join the faculty in September.

Of course, there are still large areas of disagreement between the Law School administration and the Third World Coalition which is leading white as well as minority student advocates of affirmative action and curriculum reform. But the atmosphere at the Law School is freed of much of last year's tension. By loosening up and listening to student concerns (and coincidentally by taking a gutsy public stand against the illegal USA invasion of Grenada), Law School dean James Vorenberg has shown commendable sensitivity to the on-campus and beyond-campus issues that Black and other minority people care deeply about. Such sensitivity has gained more for the institution than stonewalling ever could.

Now enters the structural trades controversy. And rather than learn from the Law School's example, Derek Bok seems to still cling to the non-strategy of stonewalling. A quick review of that situation needs be inserted here to clarify the issue.

Until approximately 15 years ago, the roster of Buildings and Grounds employees at Harvard was about as lily-white as the faculty. Under some internal and external pressure, the University moved to desegregate the Buildings and Grounds workforce. A result of this affirmative action desegregation was that, as of last year, the structural trades workforce had become about 30 percent Black. However, because of the long history of racial exclusivity is Harvard's B&G hiring, only one of these Black structural workers had accumulated over twenty years of seniority. The great majority of Black tradespeople at Harvard are relatively new employees with fifteen years or less on their jobs.

As an alleged cost-efficiency move, the University decided, recently, to contract out the work done heretofore by approximately fifty structural trades employees. Thus these fifty-odd workers faced the crisis of employment termination (lay-offs) as the University contracted an outside firm to replace these workers. A complex agreement was reached between the University and the unions representing the workers, an agreement which reserved the lion's share of termination pay and job placement assistance to (you guessed it) workers with twenty years or more on the job. It is a textbook case of a big white institution and white-dominated unions agreeing to give preference to seniority privileges over hard-won affirmative action protections.

Black workers have approached Black faculty, staff and students throughout the University to rally support for the workers' efforts to get a fairer shake from Harvard. After all, the conflict between seniority and affirmative action is a flashpoint of the struggle for racial justice in the context of fiscal austerity and job cutbacks. If we Third World students were up in arms about job opportunities for relatively privileged legal scholars, then we are righteously even more animated by the stark spectacle of Black workers and their families literally losing their livelihoods.

As the word circulates among minority students, staff and faculty about the raw deal given Black trades employees, the likelihood increases of a new racial crisis at Harvard. And this time, unlike last year at the Law School, the crisis may engage Blacks, other minorities and sympathetic whites throughout the entire University.

President Bok has the power to nip this nascent crisis in the bud. Surely Harvard does not need another racial blackeye. The Black workers and their supporters are still hoping that Bok will read the signs of the times. But thus far Bok seems more inclined to build walls than to read the handwriting on them.

It's a damn and provocative shame. Muhammad I. Kenyatta, HLS '84