Several dozen students rallied yesterday afternoon in front of University Hall, draping a Ku Klux Klan mask on the statue of John Harvard, to call attention to what they called the lack of tenured minority faculty members at Harvard.

"We want Third World representation; no more bullshit explanation," the protesters chanted, in an effort to make administrators aware of student interest in alternative action.

The coalition of minority student groups that organized the tally plans to pursue the issue in meetings with administrations, according to students in volved in the demonstration.

Black to the Drawing Board

"We are going to branch out one target at a time," Timothy A. Walkins '86, president of the Black Students Association (BSA), said yesterday. The first target is President Bok, with whom the students are attempting to schedule a meeting, Wilkins added.

Specific demands aired at the hour-long rally included attracting minority faculty members, bolstering minority and ethnic studies-particularly in the Core Curriculum-and re-hiring former associate professor of Afro-American Studies Ephraim Isaacs, who is suing Harvard for discrimination.

Other objectives include establishing a student-faculty committee to seek out qualified minority professors and getting President Bok to issue an Open Letter on affirmative action, students said after the rally.

As the 40-odd students-mostly members of the American Indian, Asian, Black, and Hispanic student groups that organized the event-walked in a circle, carrying placards and chanting, a crowd of two dozen students and a few administrators gathered to watch.

Several Harvard policemen observed the rally, and University Hall was locked during the event, but there were no confrontations.

The paucity of minority and women professors on campus-approximately two dozen out of 350 tenured faculty-as well as the Isaaes lawsuit and Harvard's continued low yield of minority student admissions sparked the student interest in affirmative action this year, Wilkins said.

"People just really didn't know the numbers were as pitiful as they were," he said. "There are no Black junior faculty this year.... This is an insult.

Bok has addressed the subject of affirmative action in his 1982 book, "Beyond the Ivory Tower," defending affirmative action but ruling out "preferential treatment" for minorities.

Bok called it "hazardous to draw

Strong inferences of bad faith merely because an institution has not succeeded in meeting its goals".

Official Action

Last week, the Faculty's affirmative action officers met with the Faculty Council, the Faculty's executive streeing committee, to discuss their annual report to federal agencies.

The preliminary report was not made public, but Phyllis R. Keller, associate dean for academic planning, indicated last month that Harvard's hiring of Blacks was in proportion with the number of Blacks in academia, while women are being "under-utilized" in almost a dozen departments.

Meanwhile, Harvard has gone without an affirmative action officer since the departure of Nancy Randolph earlier this year. Robert H. Scott, vice president for administration, said yesterday that his search committee is "trying very hard" to find a replacement.

On another front, Harvard's Committee on Women's Studies is starting from scratch in its search for the University's first professor of Women's Studies.

After Rutgers University English Professor Elaine Showalter turned down a tenure offer last spring. Harvard decided to re-solicit departmental nominations for the joint chair, rather than make an offer to the second person on the earlier list, said Barbara Johnson, new chairman of the Women's Studies Committee