In Theory and In Action

Harvard's faculty is not much more diverse than it was a hundred years ago. While its student body has diversified in recent years, the yield of Black first years last year, plummeted dramatically. The staff could have written about the necessity for addressing both problems.

Instead, it has chosen to undercut serious and proper efforts undertaken by students and faculty to try to fix these problems.

In calling the recent second-round search for Black applicants an abuse of affirmative action, the staff claims that Harvard was "simply trying to change its numbers artificially rather than level the procedural playing field."

But for affirmative action to be effective, Harvard must recruit minority applicants wherever they are found and recognize the hurdles that many of these students face in just applying to Harvard.

A huge percentage of the minority students in this country attend poorly funded, understaffed urban public schools. No college counselors tell them where and when to apply. The network of alumni that links so many high schools to Harvard is largely absent. And, although the admissions office has gotten better, Harvard is largely absent. And, although the admissions office has gotten better, Harvard does not automatically send recruiters to these schools in the way that they do to St. Grottlesex. Recognizing this, Harvard made the January I deadline flexible for those students found in the later, second-round search. This is exactly the kind of effective attempt at "level[ing] the procedural playing field" that the staff claims to support. To the staff, however, deadlines are apparently more important than diversity.

Furthermore, the staff's notion that searching specifically for a Latino professor would "demean" both the professor and all potential Latino applicants is a patronizing diminuition of the very real anger that many feel. Is integration "demeaning?" Harvard's continual failure to diversify its faculty undercuts its ability to offer the wide range of perspectives so vital to academic discourse. A Latino professor at Harvard, wouldn't be a token any more than was the first Black student at Harvard, or the first female professor.

We are disturbed by the pseudo-liberal tone of the staff's position. The staff insists that it is a firm believer in affirmative action in theory. But affirmative action is not a theoretical doctrine; it is a complex public policy that tries to redress historical inequities. The staff, in recognizing only an artificially narrow interpretation of affirmative action, undermines the very policy it claims to support.