EVERYONE knows that racial intolerance has been building during the Reagan years. We can all feel it--and we can point to Forsyth Country, to Bernard Goetz, and to Howard Beach as evidence. But where are the causes of this creeping racism? Who or what is to blame for derailing the consistent progress this country made towards greater civil rights in the last 30 years.

The Reagan Administration has made a surprisingly poor target. President Reagan has not been playing George Wallace, hurling racist slurs, and chanting "segregation forever." While David Stockman's book reveals some racist attitudes at the White House, and the press worried for a while that Reagan was going to "turn back the clock" on civil rights, the Reagan Administration has taken a pretty low-key posture on civil rights.

And this is exactly the problem. The Reagan Administration has not waged a loud war on civil rights. Instead it has adopted a sort of laissez-faire attitude towards racism, and allowed civil rights to fade into the background of national debate. Meanwhile it has quietly appointed scores of conservative judges to the Federal Courts and to the Supreme Court. Only now, after seven years of relative quiet on the civil rights front, are these appointments taking their toll--giving America a bitter taste of the Reagan legacy.

On April 25, Reagan's three Supreme Court appointees--Justices Kennedy, O'Connor, and Scalia--joined Justices Rehnquist and White and voted to reconsider the right of minorities to sue private parties for racial discrimination under a post-Civil War statute, section 1981 of Title 42 of the United States Code. If the Court overturns section 1981, as it is expected to do, it will be the first time in 100 years that the Court has overturned a precedent expanding minority rights.

At issue is the 1976 decision by the Court in Runyon v. McCrary which affirmed that section 1981 was intended to bar racial discrimination by private schools, employers, and other parties in deciding whom they will accept, hire, contract with, and do business. The statute states that all people have the same right "to make and enforce contracts" as "is enjoyed by white citizens."

If the decision is overturned, no Federal law would bar racial discrimination by private schools. Victims of racial discrimination by private employers would have less legal protection and weaker remedies.

For although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 generally bars large employers from discriminating on grounds of race, sex, religion, or national origin, it does not cover employers with fewer than 15 employees, has a short statute of limitations and allows victims of discrimination only reinstatement with back pay. Under the Runyon decision, section 1981 protection was interpreted to apply to all private employers, regardless of size. And victims of discrimination have a right to punitive damages for outrageous violations.

IF the Supreme Court overturns the Runyon decision, victims of racial discrimination simply won't have the same recourse to law that they have enjoyed for the past 10 years. It's one thing for sporadic racist attacks to occur in a country where the government is devoted to the protection of minorities. It's another thing altogether for the Supreme Court, a governmental check meant to protect the rights of minorities, to be stripping away the rights of minorities to protect themselves against job discrimination. Here the Reagan Administration's true colors shine clear.

Now we know why George Bush must be prevented from getting elected in November, but Presidential politics is not a sufficient answer. A Democratic President could insure that the Court's liberals are replaced by liberals, but he couldn't do anything about the comparatively young conservative majority on the Court. We may soon have to accept the fact that the Supreme Court will refuse to combat racism for a decade or more.

People who are concerned about racism must combat the new tolerance for intolerance with a hard-nosed intolerance for racism in any form, and in any place.

As Harvard students, we can start this battle at home. College students have historically been at the forefront of America's battles against racism. Black colleges in the South were centers of early civil rights activism--Jesse Jackson got his start at North Carolina A&T. During the 1960s, students pointed out that universities represent the values of our culture. By changing the university, we can begin to change the rest of the world. This lesson rings true today, when we needn't look farther than the white face of virtually every single faculty member at this College to see racism in action--and inaction.

The recent report on Minority Faculty Recruitment by the Harvard Minority Students Alliance demonstrated the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' dismal lack of any effort to recruit more minority faculty. The departments of Arts, Chemistry, and Biology--only 16 History, and Biology made 11 job searches and received 721 applications in 1986-87. Only four of these applications were from minorities, indicating that these departments make almost no effort to recruit minority applications, let alone to hire minorities.

The minority faculty statistics for 1986-87 speak for themselves. Out of 434 positions in 10 departments--Economics, Government, Psychology, Sociology, English, History, VES, Fine Arts, Chemistry, and Biology--only 16 are filled by minority faculty. Eight of these are foreign scholars.

STUDENT and faculty protests for better minority recruitment have spread like wildfire at campuses across the country this spring. Duke University students and faculty were able to change minority recruitment policy to require that each of the university's more than 50 departments hire at least one additional black faculty member by 1993. If the departments fail, they must show why they failed and undergo an outside review of their recruiting procedures.

Williams College students took over the office of the Dean of the College on April 22 to demand increased minority hiring. A group of minority students at the University of Vermont won an accord with the administration that calls for adding four to 11 new minority faculty members a year for the next four years and for doubling the number of minority students within that time. Students at Penn State took over a campus building and demanded that the university comply with a court injunction to increase the number of Black students to 5 percent, but they were refuted.

This little-noticed surge of student activism for minority recruitment is the most encouraging new blow in the fight against racism. Harvard students should take the cue and follow up on the report on Minority Recruitment with some action on minority recruitment.

If the universities don't fight the tolerance for racial intolerance that has built up in Reagan's America, who will? At a time that the Supreme Court is already revoking the rights of minorities, we can't afford to acquiesce any further to the complacency of the Reagan years.