According to the report, 18 departments are still underutilizing women in tenured positions and nine in non-tenured positions. Two departments have too few minority professors and five have too few minorities in ladder positions. Moreover, the same dearth of women and minorities exists--though to a slightly lesser degree--at administrative, professional and support staff levels throughout the University.

"Some of these targets we know we aren't ever going to meet," Nancy P. Randolph, special assistant to the president and the University's affirmative action officer says, adding that non- competitive salaries and a lack of intensive recruiting are factors in Harvard's poor performance level.

Both Bok and Randolph contend that the federal regulations requiring annually negotiated targets require cumbersome procedures unnecessary to a sound affirmative action policy.

"In particular, universities have had to elaborate statistical expositions of dubious value and fill out innumerable forms and reports, often at the cost of time that could have been better spent in trying to achieve concrete results. These administrative excesses should be eliminated," Bok writes in his open letter.

Randolph also expresses this sentiment, saying, "I think Harvard, like any university, would like to be able to do what it wants to do the way it wants to do it." She adds that position towards affirmative action might even be helpful to Harvard, and advocates "intelligent self-monitoring."

But she says the biggest problem is the decentralization of University hiring procedures. Each department, library and lab within Harvard makes its own hiring decisions--from the professorial to the clerical level. The affirmative action office can tabulate statistics and tell faculties where their employee-levels are falling short of affirmative action goals, but other than discussion and consciousness-raising the office can do nothing to affect hiring procedures.

"You have hundreds of people each hiring one somebody or two somebodies. Many of them are somewhat myopic--they're only concerned with what's happening in their own area." Randolph says, adding, "under such circumstances it's difficult to make people consciously aware of the fact that it's their responsibility to hire minorities."

It is because of this decentralization that the University's failure to define clearly its affirmative action posture has had the greates impact. Lacking a University-wide policy to which they may turn, individual employers and search committees are free to apply the definition to which they subscribe.

Perhaps the best attempt made to outline clearly the administration's policy towards affirmative action came in Bok's open letter on race. Faced with increasing controversy about Harvard's position on the issue of affirmative action. Bok listed what he saw as the three basic precepts of affirmative action. First, he suggested, every institution should carefully monitor its performance in hiring members of minority groups. Second, in all job searches, efforts should be made to identify candidates from these groups by advertising and making special inquiries. Finally, in hiring decisions the individual selected should be that person who is thought best qualified to perform the job, "subject only to the proviso that minority candidates should be chosen if their qualifications are equal to those of the other leading contenders."

Although Bok's letter makes an attempt to define a coherent affirmative action policy, it remains an opinion and not binding-policy. Furthermore, it leaves execution in the hands of the individual employers, and given the University's poor showing to date, it is uncertain whether that performance will improve.

"We can write the right letters to the right people, but the tough job is changing people's attitudes," Randolph says, adding "We're not there yet. We've just gotten far more sophisticated in our discrimination."