"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.

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