Who's Helping Whom?

THE 1930s were the heyday for the nation's Black colleges. In the midst of a society commited to segregation, and convinced of the inferiority of Blacks, colleges like Lincoln and Howard stood out as a kind of Athens for the Black intelligentsia.

The faculties were tremendous. Ralph Bunche, Arthur Davis and Alain Locke reigned at Howard, and the student body of Lincoln boasted Thurgood Marshall, not to mention the future presidents of Kenya and Nigeria. But with the 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court decision, the need for Black colleges seemed to diminish, and the top Black minds began to join faculties and student bodies at formerly all-white institutions.

At the time, schools like Harvard did not see fit to extend invitations to those scholars to join their faculties, even if for only a brief period of time. But the times have changed.

Which brings us to the latest proposal for rectifying the virtual absence of a minority presence on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. At a meeting of the Harvard Foundation, it was proposed that Harvard informally begin to exchange professors with historically-Black colleges for a year at a time.

Each year, as the program would work, a few professors would be invited up to Cambridge so that Harvard's podiums would not feature only white lecturers. Then these professors would be flown back to their home schools at the end of the year.

All it would require in return is for a few Harvard scholars to deign to venture into such schools as Morehouse or Spelman for a year at a time. Presto, Harvard would have a minority presence on its faculty.

The plan is well-intentioned, and is an innovative effort to combat the dearth of minority faculty here. But it is quite likely that the program would do more harm than good.

A minority presence on the faculty cannot be said to exist simply because a Black man or woman will occasionally deliver a lecture. Less than 7 percent of the Harvard faculty is considered minority and that includes counting foreign nationals and Asian-Americans. This situation will persist until the University begins to hire Blacks and other minorities for tenured positions on a more regular basis.

Those who argue for the need for more Black professors emphasize the importance of role models. If the paucity of Blacks interested in pursuing a career in academia is ever to be over-come, it will no doubt require in part the help of some Black professors acting as mentors.

But the proposed exchange program does nothing to provide role models. A true mentor needs to spend more than one brief year at a school. What would become of the relationship established between teacher and student once the year was up? Furthermore, the program might only serve to highlight the difficulty of achieving tenure at a predominantly white institution if you are a minority.

Those who will come to the Harvard campus from Howard or Lincoln or Morehouse will not be like normal visiting professors, who more often than not are brought here because Harvard wants to try to keep them here. From the start, the Black scholars who participate will know that the University is not interested in tenuring them, but merely having them provide a little diversity for a year. Their students will know it as well.

THERE are those who argue that affirmative action programs only stamp minorities with a feeling of inferiority. Such arguments are unfounded, but clearly a program like the proposed faculty exchange could create such an impression.

Affirmative action programs are based on the assumption that race can be a factor, but not the sole factor, in making hiring decsions. In other words, the candidate must be otherwise qualified. But in the exchange program, the assumption would be that race was indeed the only factor, since the University would be making it clear that it had no intention of ever tenuring the professors, thus distinguishing them from other visiting scholars.

Furthermore, the candidate whom Harvard would give up for a year would logically be white in almost every case. Thus each year, a white professor would leave for a year to be replaced by a Black professor. And after all the dust had settled, who would be back teaching at Harvard as a tenured scholar? The white professor. One would not have to be a cynic to recognize the pattern and draw a rather depressing conclusion.

The University maintains that the difficulties of minority faculty recruitment stem from the small pool of minority graduate students. In response, it has made substantial efforts to increase minority recruitment in the Graudate School of Arts and Sciences. Many who have been critical of the University's efforts to recruit minority faculty question whether such efforts amount to "too little, too late."

The proposed exchange program is yet another attempt to work around the problem created by Harvard's failure to hire minority scholars. The attempts come out of a genuine desire to help and the sentiment should be enocuraged. But all such creative solutions only point out the necessity for the University to swiftly formulate a centralized strategy for identifying qualified Black candidates and then bringing them to Cambridge. For real and for good.