Nevertheless, fears of affirmative action turning into a quota system persist. Nathan M. Glazer, professor of Education and Social Structure, argued-a year and a half ago that in most cases hiring goals inevitably become hiring quotas, and he said earlier this month he stands by that position.

Leonard says that Glazer's fear is an unreasonable one. "Nathan is speaking to the prevailing currency in the academic literature, which is anti-affirmative action," he says. "It's a fear that all of a sudden the federal government will walk in and say, 'we don't see any blacks and women here and you'd better hire some soon.'"

But the best evidence that the affirmative action plan's goals are not quotas is that in many cases they haven't been met. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, for example, is supposed to have five women deans by now, but it only has three. The Faculty is behind its goals on assistant and associate deans as well, although academic Faculty appointments are about even with the affirmative action plan's modest goals. "If we don't meet the goals, we try to find out why," Leonard says. "If it turns out that we followed the procedures, okay. If we fell short because of recalcitrance about the plan, we send back appointments."

"There are problems with monitoring affirmative action," Dean Rosovsky says. "When we see that a department's not making satisfactory progres, we make inquiries and ask for an explanation. If the explanation is not satisfactory, then I have to act."

But none of this smacks of quotas to Rosovsky; in fact, he says, if there were quotas, "I would fight the federal government. It's important that we go along with the government as long as they don't make us do things in a way that we don't want to. There are conditions in which I'd let the federal government take its money, but it hasn't in any sense come to that."

The administrators who oversee the University's affirmative action plan agree that its success hinges on the people who make hiring decisions. In a university where decision-making is as spread out as it is here, top administrators can't oversee every hire, but have to trust the people who run departments. "We have to depend on good faith," Steiner says, "because those of us in the central administration are in no position to judge whether the Chemistry Department has hired its most qualified candidate."

For his part, Leonard acknowledges that good faith "goes only so far." Phyllis Keller says that last year, her first at Harvard, there was "a good deal of meticulous conformance to the letter of the guidelines but not to their spirit."

But all this is hard to pin down. Affirmative action is especially difficult to implement in the Faculty, because the rules are so vague and easy to subvert. Delda White says departments choose male professors on the basis of promise, while selecting women and minorities on the basis of prior achievement. She cites as an example the English Department, which chose three men last year for three assistant professorship openings. Keller acknowledges that although "in any specific proposal I can't nail any evidence of discrimination," the case of the English Department "certainly leaves an impression."

There's not much the University can do directly in such cases unless the department's search description is blatantly negligent. When Keller, Leonard or Rosovsky suspects a department of discriminating, they generally can only call the chairman in for a chat. Keller says that as many as 20 per cent of the search descriptions she gets need more work, but that the University has only once flatly refused to approve a teaching appointment for affirmative action violations. Leonard says he has returned about 35 appointments for more documentation, but all of the challenged appointments were finally approved.

With non-teaching posts, the direct hiring rule provides a much stricter framework for enforcing the affirmative action guidelines, but there are still problems. John L. Morgan, the Personnel Office official in charge of minority recruiting and affirmative action, says that if someone sends a payroll authorization form to Personnel without having previously listed a job opening, he refuses to authorize the appointment. Most of the direct hires at Harvard, Morgan says, come in higher-level jobs--which is hardly surprising, since there is a long-standing tradition at Harvard of filling high posts from within.

The appointments during the summer of Francis M. Pipkin and Bruce Collier to administrative posts in University Hall, along with other direct hires in high places, prompted Leonard to write an angry memo to the Council of Deans warning against direct hires. Rosovsky defends his failure to list the hires with Personnel by saying that Pipkin was a Faculty appointment and Collier had experience that made him perfect for his new job administering housing, but this kind of justification can be made for any promotion from within. The problem, of course, is that there are very few blacks or women in lower-level administrative jobs at Harvard, and under a strict promotion system they have no shot at higher-level posts.

Even if fairly high-paying administrative jobs are listed with Personnel, it is possible to get around the spirit of affirmative action. Administrative jobs that are listed with Personnel often include phrases like "experience at Harvard would be a strong asset," which effectively preclude the hiring of women and, especially, blacks. Morgan says he sometimes rejects job descriptions as too specific, but admits that "people know sometimes exactly who they want for a job. Our policy is for them to go ahead and list it anyway, and interview. They'll probably end up hiring whoever they had in mind originally, but at least they're theoretically looking to see if there's someone better."

Affirmative action--with the constraints it imposes on hiring procedures--has been less than popular with traditionalists who prefer the older and more informal ways of choosing their university's staff. Campuses are beginning to witness the beginning of a backlash against the equal employment plans.

Princeton economist Richard A. Lester published a book this summer that voices the concerns of the anti-affirmative action camp. In it Lester argues that federally-imposed affirmative action programs constitute a serious government attack on the independence and integrity of academia. He also claims that the introduction of racial, ethnic and sexual considerations into faculty searches has led to a reduction in the overall quality of teaching staffs at universities all across the country.

Rosovsky met with Lester soon after he took his post in University Hall. "I don't agree with Lester," he says. "I didn't think affirmative action was a disaster. I think it has very positive aspects. Dilution of quality would result only if the University were forced to employ underqualified women and minorities, but we have not done that."

Walter Leonard thinks Lester is saying "what a good number of people would also like to say in the open." Lester, Leonard says, "unfortunately has as much impact on Harvard as he is having on other universities."

The Lester book, Leonard says, is just part of a general reaction against affirmative action, and he has a theory on why the reaction is taking place: "Once you get an institution to accept the fact that they have been discriminating, and after you show them how to stop discriminating, you expand competition. White males must now compete with groups that they never had to confront before and this is a threat to their security. Then they have to find means to discredit the new competition in any way possible."

Leonard says the anti-affirmative action reaction hasn't hit Harvard yet, but adds that "it could happen here." He says the time is right for backlash and that Harvard "must call on its internal strength to resist it."

Getting a plan accepted by HEW, for all the trouble it entailed, was the easy part of affirmative action at Harvard. Now the University must learn to live with it