HLS Students Hold Vigil Outside Faculty Meeting

Continuing last spring's series of protests for greater representation of women and minorities on the Law School's faculty, about 70 law students held a silent vigil Friday outside the school's first faculty meeting of the academic year.

Bearing signs reading, "No more closed doors, no more closed doors," the protesters silently lined a second floor corridor in Pound Hall for about 10 minutes as professors departed from the meeting. Both the students and faculty members, most of whom passed the protesters nonchalantly, avoided any direct confrontation.

Last spring, student protesters held several rallies--including two overnight sit-ins in the office of Dean Robert C. Clark--designed to increase the administration's awareness of what they left was a lack of minorities and women on the school's faculty. The Law School currently has three Blacks and five women among its tenured faculty, but it does not have any tenured Black women.

Weld Professor of Law Derrick A. Bell, who is taking an unpaid leave of absence from Harvard until it tenures a Black woman, attended the faculty meeting and quietly spoke to several protestors as he left Pound Hall.

Several protesters--including many members of the school's Coalition for Civil Rights (CCR), which sponsored Friday's vigil--said the event was intended to tell the school's faculty that activism would continue until more progress was made in diversifying the faculty.

`Nothing's Changed'

"It's a continuation of last year's struggles," said Maury Ratner, one of the protesters. "The same demands, the same struggles--nothing's changed."

Many students said the protest was especially important because in the past, the intensity of campus activism during the fall has often lagged far behind that during the spring.

"Traditionally, what has happened at Harvard and other schools is that after summer breaks, people tend to go their different ways," said Julie Ferguson. "In the fall, the administration assumes the issue is dead."

"This silent vigil is really our way of saying the issue remains, and we're waiting for your decision," Ferguson added.