Not Just an Academic Question

TWO MYTHS COMMONLY surround the image of an undergraduate education at Harvard. One is that the most meaningful college experiences are to be found outside the classroom. The other is that anything is possible, provided you take the initiative.

In fact, it's hard to imagine why anyone would seek further academic diversion. Breathing the rarefied air of scholarly excellence as we do, discontent appears ungrateful, even unseemly. And yet, Veritas as a singular, ivy-shrouded aim can be stifling. While Harvard may boast the finest display of academic resources, it overlooks the possibility that undergraduates might want more than visiting privileges to the world's greatest museum of collected Knowledge, that under the traditional theme of "diversity within excellence," students might want to feel that they belong?

While the administration shields itself against student demands for increased hiring of minority faculty and administrators with the perennial claim "we're doing the best we can," at least two recent incidents point out that those efforts are not enough.

At last month's meetings of the Third World Students' Alliance with Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence and Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57, minority student representatives voiced their concerns over the continuing lack of minority presence both in the faculty and in the administration. With the recent round of musical chairs in the administration, minority student groups are watching closely to see how the College goes about filling two currently vacant administrative posts: dean of admissions and director of the Bureau of Study Counsel.

During the meeting with Dean Spence, students raised the fact that the committee organized in August to find a successor for then-admissions dean Jewett fails to include a single minority faculty member--an oversight which Spence acknowledged. One of the seven search committee members is Professor of Government James Q. Wilson, whose latest book, Crime and Human Nature, has met with heated criticisms labeling it "racist" for its rejection of affirmative action policy.

Given the growing attention the issue of minority admissions is receiving nationally among Black, Asian-American, and Hispanic student groups, the opening for a new admissions dean at Harvard is a crucial opportunity. While the College should give priority to candidates committed to the principles of affirmative action, it also faces a chance to make good on its avowed commitment to the increased promotion of effective minority leadership.

Minority students must avoid both naive "racist" polemics that only aggravate the ghettoized status of minority issues and moreover complacent basking in the benefits of the status quo. Institutionalization jades students into an assimilating mentality which no longer thinks of minority involvement in academia as a political question.

The lesson that remains for minority students who benefit today from the dramatic upheavals of the late 60s which first gave them voice in such prestigious institutions as Harvard, is that complacency is an even greater threat than that the administration's inaction.

During the five years following the first student protests, Harvard tenured four Black faculty members--in the last 10 years, it has added only two. Furthermore, 15 years after its violent birth, the Afro-American Studies Department continues as an impoverished ghetto, lacking crucial resources and faculty. Its current anemia is less the product of feeble inception than malnourished neglect.

ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES, meanwhile, continue to be ignored as a legitimate area of scholarly research. In light of the administration's recurring claim that there aren't sufficient materials and scholars in Asian-American studies to set up a program, the impact of the resignation last spring of two Asian-American scholars comes as a crucial loss to the academic community.

Disappointment and surprise followed the departure of Dr. Jean Wu, who was the associate director at the Bureau of Study Counsel from 1975 until last spring, when she left to become associate dean of the college at Brown University. Ed School Professor Kiyo Morimoto at that time had already announced his retirement from his position as director of the Bureau.

The departures of Morimoto and Wu leave the University without a single visible Asian administrator. Furthermore, their loss is critical for another reason: Harvard now has virtually no scholars pursuing Asian-American studies.

If the philosophy behind the Bureau of Study Counsel is to support students in exploring "the relevance of their educational endeavors to their own development," then the highly popular Dunster House seminar that Morimoto co-taught with Wu for eight semesters served a valuable purpose. An extracurricular course, their seminar on Asian-American identity helped the first Asian-Americans admitted to the college in the early 1970s to feel less culturally alienated at Harvard. Last offered in 1983, the course has since evolved into a vehicle for pursuing Asian-American studies--both anthropological and historical--under the supervision of Professors Dorinne Kondo and Wei Ming Tu.

Even for such a useful and popular course as this one, the College has failed to provide a secure and continuous footing that would allow students to pursue a meaningful academic interest ignored by the regular curriculum.

Wu, whose dissertation focused on the college experiences of Asian-American students, had requested a teaching appointment which would allow her to continue sponsoring the seminar regularly--a practical difficulty for faculty constrained by departmental policies and heavy courseloads--upon Morimoto's retirement. While Wu acknowledged in a recent phone interview that there were many reasons for her departure, the University's denial of her request for a teaching post was apparently a major factor in her decision. At Brown, by contrast, she has been granted a teaching appointment, and will be leading a course next semester on Asian-American women and immigrant labor--a course some students had hoped to initiate at Harvard.

The point is not that the College is guilty of any explicit wrongdoing in the affair. Admittedly, Wu's teaching request went to the Ed School, over which the College has no authority, and thus the rules of institutional etiquette were not breached.

The reality, however, is that Asian-American students, who now comprise 10 percent of the undergraduate population, have long been demanding to see established in the curriculum a course which Dr. Wu was expressly willing to initiate and was qualified to teach.

Harvard could have allowed her to follow the precedent of other Ed School lecturers who have taught at the College; administrators contacted, however, deny any responsibility for her departure.

Regardless of the bureaucratic logic involved, the College failed to take the initiative to retain a uniquely qualified talent. This omission reflects a blatant disregard for both the instructor's merits and students' earnest and repeated demands for such a course as Wu was willing to teach. The refusal to take an academic seriously, not in spite of ethnic differences but precisely for them, is tantamount to an attitude of tokenism.

Ideally, administrators should oversee personnel and curriculum changes without the unnecessary interference of students. Minority students, however, must overcome the burden of a tradition that excludes them in both areas. If tradition is a venerable and distinct legacy of the Harvard name, traditionalism is an ideology of complacency that refuses the urgency of the new.