Faculty Report on Minority, Women Recruitment Expected This Month

Nearly a year ago, students released a report assailing Harvard's record of "complacency" and "confusion" in minority faculty recruitment.

A faculty panel will finally answer those charges in the next week or two, with its own report on hiring women and minorities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Although the 10 faculty members on the committee have been closemouthed about the report's contents, Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba '53, the committee chair, has said the group will recommend changes in current FAS hiring practices.

When the panel began meeting last summer, Verba said he expected to have a report on Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence's desk by Thanksgiving. The latest word from Verba and Lecturer in Economics Jeffrey Wolcowitz, the committee's spokesperson, is that the results will be out "sometime in the next few weeks."

Except for one open meeting this fall, the panel has done its investigation behind closed doors. Wolcowitz says that the group met with department heads, administrators and representatives from student groups in conducting its investigation.

Wolcowitz says that the faculty committee has yet to approve a final draft of its report.

But while students wait for the Verba group's recommendations, activism has burgeoned around the issue of hiring women and minorities.

The Minority Students Alliance (MSA) set off the new tide of activism last spring by producing the original report on minority faculty recruitment. After meeting with MSA members, Spence commissioned the faculty group and charged it with investigating the MSA's claims that minorities are not as actively sought out by Harvard as they should be.

Since then, the Undergraduate Council, the Women's Alliance, Phillips Brooks House and the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship have jumped on the bandwagon, calling on FAS to step up its recruitment efforts. This fall, over 2000 students signed an Undergraduate Council-sponsored petition asking Harvard to reconsider its policies.

Student activists criticized the Verba Committee throughout the fall, saying that they were skeptical about the results it would produce. MSA members have said that they fear Harvard will bury the forthcoming Verba Report in the same way that a 1980 report, produced by Dean K. Whitla, was forgotten.

In addition, students from the MSA and the Women's Alliance say that the inclusion of both women and minorities in the committee's report would only dilute its potential effectiveness.

But Wolcowitz says that the report will attempt to answer all the objections of student activists.

"We are trying to address the issues that the dean set for the committee," he says. "We have tried to address, or at least to think about what some of the difficulties are that led to the Whitla report basically being forgotten."