Is the Ph.D. Pool Really the Problem?

When the Minority Students Alliance (MSA) released a report last spring highly critical of the University's record in hiring minority faculty members, administrators and affirmative action officials responded with a familiar refrain: it's a problem with the national pool.

The University contended that the number of minority faculty members will never increase until there is a dramatic growth in minority Ph.D. candidates from whom it draws its new recruits. But to those critical of the administration, the emphasis on the "pool" is merely a way of avoiding the immediate and serious problem of Harvard's failure to hire minority professors.

While they acknowledge that the focus on the pool may reflect underlying problems hampering minority recruitment, they add that without new minority appointments now, the pool will likely remain small.

For minority faculty members like Associate Professor of Sociology Roderick J. Harrison '70, until the University shows that it will hire minority professors, it will be extremely difficult to attract minority students to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS).

As Harrison says, "Any effort made now to recruit [minorities for graduate school] will just be beginning to be felt at around the turn of the century. This clearly indicates that we need short-term efforts in the meantime."

But whether or not focusing efforts at the graduate school level is too little, too late, as many minority professors and students here believe, all sides agree that the University must take an active role in recruiting qualified minority candidates for its Ph.D. programs.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) had only 26 tenured minorities on its 383-member senior faculty last year, or about 7 percent of the total. That number includes Asians and foreign nationals, a counting strategy which itself has drawn criticism.

And at GSAS, which is educating the next generation of university professors, only about 5 percent of the students are minorities despite an aggressive recruitment drive which resulted this year in the highest number ever of entering minority Ph.D. candidates.

The effort is made all the more urgent because by the year 2000, nearly one-third of Harvard's senior faculty will reach retirement age. And unless the percentage of minorities who receive Ph.Ds increases in the near future, educators say, the number of minority professors will not increase that much in the long term.

To meet what is a fast-approaching deadline, GSAS has invested both time and money--including a $100,000 yearly budget solely for minority recruitment--in increasingly sophisticated recruitment efforts. But the program's success has been limited by the lack of minority role models in academia, the attraction of higher-paying professions such as law, medicine and business, and the relative lack of a minority presence at Harvard.

Drusilla Blackman, who is the director of GSAS admissions and who personally takes charge of its minority recruitment drive, phrases the problem simply: "For most institutions, the only way you can get minority faculty is to get minorities into graduate school."

Administrators note that the competition among graduate programs for the small number of minorities interested in entering the profession is high. And the GSAS recruitment strategy is designed accordingly, with a large budget, carefully targeted mailings and many recruitment trips geared toward identifying minorities who are both qualified and interested.

In part, those efforts have been rewarded--37 Black and Hispanic students will register today as first-year students at GSAS. And the numbers are the best yield of minority students at GSAS in the 15 years it has been keeping records about the recruitment and admission of minorities, says Blackman.

Last year, there were 238 minority applicants (excluding Asians) and of that group 48 students, or 21 percent, were admitted. Today, 37 of the 48 admitted will register, thus making the minority yield of 77 percent far higher than the 56 percent acceptance rate among the total applicant pool.

Blackman, who describes Harvard's recruitment strategy as "fairly sophisticated," says that the University's efforts to locate and admit minority students are geared toward reassuring potential applicants that academia is a viable career option for minorities. And she says that last year's success is a result of a renewed commitment on the part of administrators to beef up GSAS's numbers.

Over the course of the past few years, a stepped-up GSAS recruiting effort has expanded the range of the admissions office--as an example, in 1987-'88 GSAS recruiters visited nearly 50 colleges around the country to meet with prospective applicants, whereas the previous year they visited only 12 colleges.

The lynchpin of the GSAS recruitment drive, according to Blackman, is personal contact. Assisted by between 30 and 40 minority graduate students, Blackman travels to colleges around the country and holds both group meetings and individual sessions with prospective minority applicants. She says that sending students out on recruiting trips has been effective because they can address their peers' fears about academia as a viable career option.

"We have found that on-site visits [by current minority students] are effective because Harvard has a reputation as a really presitigious institution, and [many of the prospective students] in their own minds just didn't think that they stood a chance of getting in," Blackman says. "Our recruiters are visible proof that they can."

To locate potential graduate students, Harvard subscribes to the National Name Exchange, a consortium of 27 colleges that exchange names of minority students each year, and the Minority Locator Service, which is a listing of minorities who have taken the appropriate graduate school admissions tests.

Once GSAS recruiters have identified the pool of prospective applicants, they move into the personal contact phase, calling students to sustain their interest in applying and "acting as advocates" for those minority students who do apply, says Blackman.

Each application from a minority student-for GSAS purposes, Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans are counted as minorities--is then reviewed by Blackman and her assistants before it is sent on to the departments who ultimately make the admissions decisions.

According to a review of the minority recruitment activities for 1987-'88, the reason for a centralized review of minority applications is that "it has been established that minorities sometimes submit ill-prepared applications which hinder their admission...Fine tuning of their application was suggested when appropriate."

"We do things like suggest they get their application typed, that kind of thing," Blackman says. These preventive measures, she says, make it more likely that minority applicants will receive equal consideration from the departments.

Once the admissions decisions are made, Harvard continues to pursue minorities, paying for them to fly to campuses and visit classes. Any minority student accepted by the graduate school automatically becomes eligible for a minority student fellowship, which pays for all tuition and living expenses.

But, despite the plethora of recruiting programs, many minority students and faculty members, who have led the fight for revamping Harvard's minority recruitment efforts--both at the graduate school level and among the ranks of the faculty--remain skeptical.

Remaining Skeptical

The MSA report released last spring attacked the administration for complacency and indifference in the area of minority hiring, noting that searches rarely turned up minority candidates. It called on the University to formulate a centralized plan for handling the problem.

The theory behind such a plan is that until the University hires minority professors, minority students will lack the role models that could convince them to make a career in academia.

"Most of us take our signals from role models and in academia right now, role models are few and far between," says David L. Evans, a senior admissions officer at the College. "One does not easily go into the unknown, especially an academic career."

Evans likes to tell the story that a few years ago his office looked over the application forms of minority students listed "academia" as a profession they would like to enter.

Educators say that one reason for the lack of interest in academia among minorities, beyond the small number of minority faculty members, is the attraction of higher paying professions, such as medicine, law and business.

"There are some very practical problems with academia as a career. [Minorities] are not as familiar with academic careers, and their parents see straighter lines of success in professions," Harrison says.

Blackman notes that on her recruiting trips, the main question she must answer is why talented minority students, who are much sought after, should pass up a lucrative career for the academic life.

"Many of the most talented students are now focused solely on the professions, but we are trying to convince them that academia is one of their opotions for being successful," Blackman says.

But critics of the University's affirmative action programs say that Harvard will not be really successful in attracting minority graduate students until it becomes more receptive as a community toward minorities.

In order to lure minority undergraduates to academia, Harrison says that "you need a curriculum and a faculty here working in areas that minority undergraduates are likely to find exciting." And right now, he says, Harvard is not really competitive with the other professions because minority students are not getting the right signals. Minority Enrollment at Harvard

(percentage of the student body within each school)

  Black  Asian  Native American  Hispanic Harvard-Radcliffe College  7%  10%  .4%  5% GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES  2%  3%  .3%  2% Divinity School  5%  1%  .2%  2% Medical School  9%  11%  6%  6% Dental School  3%  25%  0%  3% School of Public Health  3%  5%  0%  2% Law School  9%  3%  6%  5% School of Design  7%  8%  0%  5% School of Education  4%  2%  2%  5% Kennedy School of Government  3%  4.2%  .6%  3.1% Business School  5%  2%  0%  3% Extension  2%  2%  0%  .6% Total  5%  6%  .4%  4%