"Now don't misunderstand me," Walter J. Leonard, special assistant to President Bok, said earlier this month. "I don't want to be misconstrued to say that everything about our affirmative action program is fine. Everything is not fine, but things are better here for minorities and women now than they were three years ago."

Leonard, the University's coordinator of affirmative action and equal employment programs, is getting to the stage where he can look back with a sense of some accomplishment at the work he has done since coming to Mass Hall in 1971. "It's difficult to delineate how the University has been changed by affirmative action," he says. "It's a change in atmosphere. There's a consciousness within the University that might not have been here before. It's difficult to talk to people where you won't get some discussion of minorities and women."

Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University and a former lawyer for the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, says that "if you attend a meeting at Harvard these days the chances of women and minorities being present is drastically different than it was four years ago."

A few blocks from Steiner and Leonard's Mass Hall offices, in a room at Fay House. Delda White, Radcliffe's director of publications, is saying far different things about meetings at affirmative action Harvard.

"When you walk into a room full of men," White says, "you can see them physically tense up. You can see it in their hands, the way they clench when you come in. It's frightening. I suppose affirmative action has had some effect, but I haven't seen evidence of a change here. People can circumvent laws, and you don't see a change in attitudes."

Almost a year after the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare accepted Harvard's affirmative action plan following extensive revisions, affirmative action continues to provoke sharply differing responses, both to its underlying ideas and its actual operation. Conservative academics say it will result in second-rate universities, while blacks and women complain it is only tokenism. At Harvard, affirmative action has spawned a complicated bureaucracy and given a new immediacy to the issues of racism and sexism. And it remains almost universally misunderstood.

The idea behind affirmative action, although obscured by a confusing welter of guidelines and bureaucratese, is simple. It is a federally regulated, systematized reform of the way institutions hire people, requiring broad and open searches for job candidates. The hiring reform, which administrators call sound personnel management, is an end in itself, but it was designed with a specific goal in mind: increasing the disproportionately small number of women and minorities in American institutions, especially in high-paying jobs.

The federal government's affirmative action program has gone through a constant series of modifications for more than 30 years, but its bearing on universities became clear less than two years ago. The first step toward making job discrimination illegal came in 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 issued an executive order that required a clause in all government contracts prohibiting discrimination in hiring. Later presidents issued more executive orders on the same subject; one authorized by President John F. Kennedy '40 coined the phrase "affirmative action," meaning that government contractors were not only prohibited from discriminating, but had to try to search out potential minority employees.

With the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the content of all the executive orders became law, but the universities were exempted until 1972 from the section of the act prohibiting discrimination by government contractors. It was not the Civil Rights Act or its 1972 amendment that prompted affirmative action in universities, however. It was President Lyndon B. Johnson's Executive Order 11246, which now, after many amendments and additions by HEW, requires all federal contractors, including universities, to have a written plan explaining how they will overcome past discrimination. "Affirmative action requires the employer to make additional efforts to recruit, employ and promote qualified members of groups formerly excluded, even if that exclusion cannot be traced to particular discriminatory actions on the part of the employer," the order states.

All of this had a direct bearing on Harvard: The University receives about $65 million a year in federal contracts, which would ostensibly be revoked if the government felt Harvard were not cooperating with affirmative action guidelines. In 1966, 1969 and 1971 Harvard presidents issued statements saying the University did not discriminate and practiced affirmative action. In 1970 the University started working on a formal affirmative action plan, which fell into Leonard's lap when he came to Mass Hall the following year. At that point Harvard had no women and only two blacks in the tenured ranks of the Faculty.

After two years of revisions that came in response to changing HEW guidelines on affirmative action, Harvard submitted a finished plan in May 1973, and the government rejected it. A month later Leonard sent in a revised version of the plan, which the HEW officially accepted in November 1973, sending along with its letter of acceptance a list of 13 points for additional documentation. Harvard has been working on the 13 points and stands in virtually no danger of having its federal funding revoked; indications are that the danger was never very real. "I'm disappointed that the federal government never cut off funds to any institutions," Leonard says. "If the regulator is weak on its commitment, the regulatee gets the message."

So now the plan is, officially at least, absolute law at Harvard. The approved version fills five looseleaf binders and over a thousand pages, and contains detailed statements from every area of the University outlining search procedures for hiring and--in the most controversial part of the plan--setting numerical goals for the hiring of minorities and women.

There are two simple sets of rules in the plan, one for teaching positions and one for non-teaching posts. Job openings for non-teaching positions must be listed with the Personnel Office five to ten days in advance of hiring. A practice called direct hiring--hiring without prior listing with Personnel, which was the usual hiring method until two years ago--is strictly prohibited for non-teaching posts. For teaching jobs, departments must submit to faculty deans and affirmative action officers full descriptions of their searches, including proof that they considered qualified minorities and women, before a hire can go through.

Meanwhile, HEW conducts a constant monitoring of the program, evaluating its progress largely by comparing the numbers of women and minorities actually hired with the numbers predicted in the plan. These numbers are a tricky business because they remind many people in universities of quotas, which make academics recoil in horror.

Phyllis Keller, equal employment officer for the Faculty, points out that when the plan was introduced to Harvard, department chairmen "had a lot of anxiety over whether you had to hire women and minorities." Keller says that in contrast with other universities Harvard has not taken the line that departments have to hold specific appointments to minorities and women. "I think we have been wise in not doing so," she says.