One-to-One
WITH the consummation of the "non-merger" and the appointment of the Strauch Committee to study Radcliffe's future, Harvard has recognized that equality between the sexes demands more than the present 2.5 to 1 male-female ratio. Change is in the air, and next year the Stauch Committee will examine a number of plans to bring more women into the College. But only one policy--one-to-one admissions--can begin to end sexual discrimination in the University.
Plausible arguments against setting any kind of quotas in admissions are ready to hand--although the administrators who've maintained tiny female quotas for years are hardly the right people to make them. But the chief rival to equal admissions--a "sex-blind" policy--would allow these same administrators to perpetuate discrimination covertly behind a facade of equality. Harvard traditionally places weight in admissions on sex-related traits, such as high school athletic achievement or the holding of particular school offices. Harvard could admit equal proportions of the men and women who apply, while maintaining the present imbalance of its recruiting and financial aid departments. Because of these and other possibilities for evasion, students could never be sure--particularly given Harvard's history--that a "sex-blind" admissions policy had rid admissions of sex discrimination.
Moreover, because of the high caliber of Harvard's applicant pool, setting a male-female quota in admissions would be no more arbitrary than the University's present admissions policy. Harvard doesn't take the "most qualified" applicants it gets--there's no way it could even try. Rather, Harvard picks from a pool of more or less equally qualified applicants a class it expects to be interesting and diverse. Admitting more women would strengthen both efforts, and imply no lowering of academic standards. At the same time, adopting a one-to-one policy would place Harvard in the forefront of a movement to redress the cumulative effects of centuries of discrimination. "Sex-blind" admissions, working with the status quo, does not address itself to the need to improve the socio-economic standing of women in America.
Harvard needs a policy explicitly committed to admitting equal numbers of men and women, with equal recruiting efforts and equal financial aid. But this change in policy must not bring with it an increase in class size. The Houses are already overcrowded, student contact with professors and advisors is already infrequent, the University has already become a sprawling corporate-style bureaucracy. A further increase in enrollment would seriously harm the educational atmosphere at Harvard.
Some object to this position, arguing that increasing the admission of women to Harvard is acceptable only so long as the number of men here keeps increasing too. This viewpoint is often based on arguments that alumni contributions will fall off if it isn't adopted. But these arguments come most frequently from alumni who attribute their own sexism to all their classmates--and in the last few classes, Radcliffe graduates' pledges have topped those of their Harvard counterparts. Worse yet, this viewpoint reflects an idea that educated men are more valuable than educated women. If alumni who reject this idea made contributions to Harvard contingent on its implementation of one-to-one admissions, they could help to eradicate the sexism which pervades the University, in admissions as well as hiring.
Affirmative Action
THE University's affirmative action plan finally received government approval last fall, but that is no cause for pride of self-congratulations. The fact that it took the University three years and four separate attempts to meet the federal government's minimal standards for fair hiring of minorities and women is, on the other hand, considerable cause for shame.
The reason it took so long for Harvard to win approval for its plan, it would seem, is that the plan's authors were determined to promise no more in terms of hiring women and minorities than the law required of them. When they underestimated what the law required, the plan was rejected. Now the University has met the government's undemanding guidelines, but it is still far from reaching the standards any real commitment to affirmative action would dictate.
It is apparent from the projected hiring statistics cited in the plan that Harvard as an institution regrets having to deal with the issue of giving fair consideration to minority and female candidates for Faculty positions. Only one out of 54 tenured Faculty members this year is a woman. By 1976, after affirmative action has been applied, the ratio will only improve so that one out of 50 is a woman. The problem is almost as bad with junior faculty. Under Harvard's present action plan, the percentage of women among non-tenured will only increase to 12 by 1976, as compared to the current 10 per cent.
Walter Leonard, President Bok's affirmative action coordinator, defends Harvard plan by saying that its effects will be felt only in the more distant future. Even this is dubious. Take for example the case of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which supplies Harvard with the bulk of its academic staff. Of the 550 students who were admitted to GSAS last fall, only eight were black. Under conditions such as these, it is little wonder that Harvard can make the claim it must go slow on affirmative action because it can not find enough qualified minority candidates for Faculty posts.
It is not altogether clear who is to blame for Harvard's poor showing in the equal opportunity employment field. Leonard claims, with some substantiation, that there is significant resistance in the individual departments to affirmative action. If that is indeed the case, then it is incumbent on Bok to exercise some moral leadership and turn the tide around. This is, as much as anything else, a question of morality and of a commitment to social equality. In an institution where liberal principles are preached so freely, there has been a dismal failure of its leaders to face up to their moral obligations on this central social issue.
The DuBois Controversy
BESIDES handling the University's affirmative action program, Walter Leonard also chaired a presidential advisory committee this year that issued a report on the much-delayed W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research. The Leonard committee report recommends a DuBois Institute completely devoted to research and separate from any teaching department--this despite the fact that Harvard chartered the institute at the same time it approved the formation of the Afro-American Studies Department and the Standing Committee on Afro-American Studies wrote the first prospectus for the institute.
President Bok kept the Leonard committee's report secret for several weeks and has declined to meet with members of the United Committee of Third World Organizations and Faculty members who object to the report. Bok's reticence is inexcusable; the objections to the report are well-founded. The Afro Department is understaffed and desperately needs the research-gathering help an official tie with the institute could provide, in order to increase the quality of its teaching and to attract high-quality black scholars.
The Third World committee has also called on Bok to have the institute sponsor workshops and summer research programs in order to maintain ties to the Harvard black community, another good suggestion. The University has the chance to establish an institute that could instruct and enrich the academic lives of black students at Harvard, and it shouldn't create instead a remote, pure-research institute that will help only the scholars who work in it.