"Even their letting me present my plan represents a change in their original attitude that the procedures were set for good," Pettigrew said in reference to Phelps, who is also a lecturer in German, and John P. Elder, dean of the GSAS and professor of Greek and Latin.
Under Pettigrew's plan $50,000 of the $100,000 needed for the Fellowships would be deducted from the whole GSAS scholarship pool, and $50,000 would come from each department's share of the remaining $650,000.
"I see this as a compromise between what the Committee has proposed and the ideal solution." Pettigrew said, "but each department, whether or not it recruited blacks, would be contributing about seven per cent of its scholarship budget to the goal of having black graduated students at Harvard."
Acording to Thomas K. Sisson, assistant dean of the GSAS, present first-year Black Fellows are assured of continuing support, but there is no guarantee that individual departments will enroll new Black Prize Fellows, as opposed to a larger number of other graduate students, under the committee's plan.
"There will be hell to pay if we don't have 15 Fellows, but at this point these large Black Fellowships stand out like sore thumbs because of the terrible change in graduate school funding," Sisson said.