If Bob Young, staff coordinator between the students and the Admissions Office, goes along with no other complaint, he does agree that they are in a tenuous position with respect to the office. In other respects, however, his analysis differs from both that of the students and of Jewett. Young suggests that the performance of the students has been something less than confidence-inspiring. He says that the decision to restrict students' access to the office phones, for example, in part resulted from the high phone bill students ran up the previous year. Most of the calls, Young added, were placed to a single number.

Young goes on to say that the students don't appreciate the need to establish a certain appearance of professionalism. Thus, the other reason for the decision on the phones was something the students viewed at the time as another strip of that bureaucratic red tape. Setting up dates on the phone to recruit at a school looks unprofessional, Young says, adding that he insisted students write the school guidance counselors a letter first, "with a 'cover' letter from the dean, so as to give the students some legitimacy."

When asked about the decision to limit the student recruiters' use of the phones, Jewett was not critical of the students. "We just felt that we could cut back in use of phones throughout the offices," he said, adding, "It is very important to have written records of what appointments are being set up."

In addition, Young said the students do not operate well with alums. The students agree. Many of them said that cooperating with the alums often entails a certain amount of "ass-kissing"--something they are reluctant to do, even for the sake of the recruitment program.

Young says he has also received "lots of complaints from guidance counselors about the ineptitude of student recruiters. One guidance counselor even told me that he wouldn't permit 'incompetent' students to recruit in his school any more."

It may not even be realistic to expect students to run a broad recruiting program. Jean Camper Cahn, dean of Antioch School of Law, says that from her experience with Antioch's minority recruitment program, she believes minority recruitment is a job requiring professional expertise. With minority students making up 30 per cent of the law school's student body, Antioch operates an unusually successful minority recruitment program. "I don't believe that undergraduate students are in the best position to recruit for a college or university. They often lack both the maturity and general knowledge about the institution," she says.

Young shares Cahn's point of view. "It's not really their faults," he says, "but the recruitment program has been run badly because students, not understanding the working of the rest of the office, could not operate effectively."

Young says he devotes considerable time to helping the students gain the knowledge and experience they lack. He follows their activities closely, and when possible, meets with them once a week. To counter the problem of rapid student turnover because of graduation, he hopes to develop a manual on "how the minority recruitment program should proceed out of this office." Young is, himself, only a one-year admissions officer. His work in Harvard's admissions office ends in June.

In view of Dean Jewett's seeming reluctance to discuss areas in which the students are not functioning well and his apparently more favorable impression of the student recruitment program, it would be incorrect to equate Young's willingness to recognize the students' shortcomings and his efforts to improve their performance with an overall approach on the part of the Admissions Office.

Despite the view voiced by some admissions officers that the students provide a valuable contribution to minority recruitment, Young says the overall attitude in the office toward the student recruiters is quite negative. "Every time the key to the Xerox machine disappears, somebody says Those damn students."' This problem is only in part due to the students' performance, Young adds. Another important element is the current political climate with respect to minority rights. "These are very hostile times," he says. "People are seeing blacks under every bed."

UNTIL THE TORRENT of civil rights activities in the late sixties, Harvard had no minority recruitment program at all, and very few minority students. A decade later, with the phrase "reverse discrimination" very much in the air, Young says he is anxious about the kinds of political pressure that led to--and could conceivably put an end to--programs like this one. Indeed, if Young's fears are justified, they could go a long way toward explaining certain otherwise puzzling aspects of the recruitment picture.

"The one thing we really hoped student recruiting would do," Jewett says, "and the thing I still think is most important, is that in communities that are to some degree economically or culturally isolated, students coming from comparable backgrounds may have an initial impact."

Everyone seems to agree that recruiting trips are what the students do best. Yet the Admissions Office's response to student travel seems rather unenthusiastic. A trip to several South Dakota Indian reservations planned by Rodriguez last fall is a case in point. "It took politicking for me to get access to the reservations," Rodriguez says. "The people at the reservations saw me as another flunkie for the whites. At first they told me not to plan on spending the night, because I would be with a white man [Gus Reed, the admissions officer who was to accompany Rodriguez]."

At the last minute, Reed was unable to go. The Admissions Office did not replace him. Instead they cancelled the trip altogether because the reservation was located several hundred miles from the nearest airport, and there was some difficulty concerning students renting cars under Harvard's sponsorship. One of the three reservations this trip was to cover, Pine Ridge, is the second largest reservation in the United States.

However, student recruiters and the admissions staff generally agree that a more serious limitation on minority recruitment trips is funding. Jewett estimates this year's total budget for minority recruitment at somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000. And this budget includes not only student travelling and operating costs, but any minority recruitment trips staff members occasionally take. This budget figure--less than 1 per cent of the Admissions Office's total budget--takes on more meaning when viewed in relation to the kind of money Harvard spends on other areas of recruitment. The Athletic Department, for example, will spend up to $10,000 this winter specifically on football recruitment. According to John P. Reardon '60, director of Athletics, the scope of this program will be limited to four states where alumni efforts have thus far proved insufficient. This program only supplements the various other ways in which Harvard recruits athletes, such as the Admissions Office's January return trips to prep schools.