`No Room for Student Input,' Activists Say

"Whenever we brought up arguments during the meeting we had, [faculty members] were always quick to shoot them down," says Undergraduate Council member Lucy H. Koh '90 of the session two weeks ago when students met with members of a faculty committee on affirmative action. "I'm not sure how open-minded they were."

Koh's remarks seem to characterize much of the student reaction to the recently released Verba Report on the hiring of women and minorities. Students say the report--the result of more than a semester's work by a faculty panel headed by Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba '53--is too weak and fails to incorporate many of their ideas, which they say would have put some punch into the plan.

"There is no room here for student input," says Anabella C. Pitkin '90 of the Women's Alliance. "I am sure they know a lot more about running a University than I do, but this report is very idealistic. This is a very nice report, but it has no teeth."

The Verba Committee was formed last spring after the Minority Students Alliance (MSA) criticized Harvard for "confusion" and "complacency" in its recruitment of minority scholars. Since then student activists from MSA, the Undergraduate Council, the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship and the Women's Alliance have called on the faculty to step up recruitment efforts for minorities and women.

The Verba Report's proposals will be considered by the faculty and its dean, A. Michael Spence, throughout the spring.

Activists have been critical of the report's almost complete reliance on bureaucratic structures to increase the numbers of women and minority professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). The Verba Report proposes the appointment of an associate dean for affirmative action and the selection of one senior faculty member in each academic department to monitor its recruitment efforts.

"It relies again on individuals," says MSA member Edith I. Ramirez '89. "The fear is that if the individuals don't take a real serious interest in the issue, that very little will really be done."

Under the Verba Report's recommendations, the new associate dean would be a faculty member, and students fear that Spence might appoint someone unwilling to press departments who lag in their recruiting efforts.

They also say there is no guarantee that faculty members chosen as departmental affirmative action watchdogs would be vocal enough to jar departments out of traditional hiring practices.

"We'll just have to see how effective self-regulation is, and how committed people are in bringing up problems with their own departments or with their own colleagues," says Koh. She also says that someone involved in a department's tenure process might not be the best person to analyze it objectively.

Koh says students present at the briefing two weeks ago asked that student input be allowed in the selection of the associate dean and the departmental representatives. But Verba Committee members said it would not be appropriate for students to have any decision-making power in FAS appointments, Koh says.

Verba responds to student criticisms by saying the committee had to be realistic in its proposals.

"We decided we were going to write an honest report," Verba says, "and an honest report is one that takes into account the resistance with which one operates--tries very hard to push against those constraints as much as possible--but doesn't set up false expectations that are going to be violated."

Students say if the proposed administrative structures are to pay dividends in more women and minority faculty members, undergraduates will have to maintain pressure to see that the structures do not fall into disuse. "Its structures place a burden on students to continue to press the issue," says Ramirez.