In March 1973, President Bok defended the University's seven-year-old affirmative action policy in an opinion piece published in The Crimson: "The University has a moral obligation to provide equal opportunity to women, minority persons and all other groups who work or seek work at Harvard. Our sorry record in past years suggests that we must take special efforts to fulfill this obligation."

Last February in an open letter on issues of race, Bok reaffirmed the University's commitment to affirmative action and although the content of his argument remained essentially the same, the tone and temper of his remarks had changed. After a lengthy discussion of the small pool of qualified minority applicants. Bok concluded that "we face a difficult task in trying to realize the advantages of adding talented scholars to our faculties without breaking faith with our overiding commitment to the highest attainable standards of learning and scholarship." Instead of calling for "special efforts" he wrote "we must do our best to maintain a vigorous program of affirmative action."

Although Bok's statements, presented in the open letter, represent only personal opinion and not official University doctrine, his remarks reflect to some degree the status of affirmative action at Harvard. Composed with care and tinged with caution. Bok's statements cover no new ground and, in fact, seem almost designed to avoid open confrontation with critics on either side of the affirmative action issue. Perhaps even more important, the opinion presented in his open letter--devoid of the enthusiasm of his earlier statements--has been conditioned by eight years during which the University has repeatedly fallen far short of its affirmative action goals.

In the 15 years since the University first instituted an affirmative action policy, Harvard has become one of the focal points of a nationwide debate about the legitimacy and implications of affirmative action. While few scholars have openly opposed the policy, the definitional disagreements have run rampant, and have severely hindered its operation.

On one side of the issue, faculty members including Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53, professor of Government, and Nathan Glazer, professor of Education and Social Structure, contend that affirmative action implies absolute color and sex blindness.

"I don't think [race of sex] should be important at all," Marsfield says, adding. "I don't think we should have as a goal to have more women or Blacks on the faculty. Any attempt to introduce some other factor, even if it's minimal quots will suddenly take us into trouble."

Glazer, author of the widely cited Affirmative Discrimination, agrees. "The Instrument of national social policy designed ostensibly to prevent discrimination inevitably went beyond that to positive efforts on behalf of those presumptively discriminated against," he writes in Ethnicity, which he co-ediyed with Sen. Daniel P. Moynthan (D-N.Y), a former Government professor.

Both Mansfield and Glazer equate minority and women- hitting targets of any kind with quotas and argue that by instituting these the federal governemnt is employing a form of reverse discrimination.

On the other side of the issue, people like Walter J. Leonard, formerly a special assistant to the president and the University's affirmative action officer, have led the fight for stricter enforcement of the quota system, particularly in the wake of the Bakke and DeFunis Supreme Court rulings.

University administrators have for the most part steered a middle route. Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University, said in 1976 that he views affirmative action as a temporary necessity. "We tried a color-blind approach for many years and it didn't work. Affirmative action says that it did not work, and that we must go through a period of being conscious of race." Steiner, who worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission before coming to Harvard, added.

Despite the general view in the administration that some sort of consideration of race and gender should be factored into the hiring equation, just what this "consciousness" should be has until recently remained equivocal. This vagueness has contributed to the University's consistently poor performance in the area of affirmative action.

In 1970, an executive order. Title IV, was issued requiring that all institutions receiving more than $50,000 in federal contract money negotiate an affirmative action plan with the Office of Civil Rights which would include timetables for the hiring of minorities and women.

Harvard--threatened with the loss of $60 million in federal contracts from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW)--complied, submitting the first in a long series of affirmative action plans. The plan was rejected and a letter from the HEW regional office charged Harvard with discrimination on the basis of sex. At that time only six of the University's 738 tenured faculty members were women.

Over the next three years. Harvard prepared three more affirmative action plans, each of which was subsequently rejected because it failed to conform to federal hiring plan guidelines. In 1974, the University finally negotiated a plan which proved acceptable to the federal government and began to strive for affirmative action targets. Its success has been limited at best.

Despite annual submissions of an affirmative action plan and repeated avowals of the University's commitment to hiring women and minorities on the part of Harvard administrators, Harvard's 1980-81 affirmative action plan reveals that the University still lags far behind the hiring targets negotiated with the federal government.