Meanwhile, in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), administrators formed a committee to deal with debate over the University's minority recruitment policy.

Harvard's dialogue on the issue reached a high point in April when a group of minority students released a scathing indictment of the University's minority hiring program.

The Minority Students Alliance (MSA), an undergraduate umbrella group of minority students blasted the FAS in the report for its "complacency" in the recruitment and hiring of minority professors. The group demanded that Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence name a faculty committee to study the issue, and that he announce a course of action by next fall.

Last month, Spence met with President Bok and the students to discuss his response and apparently agreed to their demands. In May, he named nine senior faculty members to a committee that is expected to produce its report on minority faculty by Thanksgiving. Spence said the Faculty Council, FAS's executive steering committee, will then consider the committee's recommendations.

Minorities currently comprise only 6.8 percent of Harvard's senior faculty and 11.7 percent of associate and assistant professors. Those figures are comparable to other major research universities, but they include Asians and foreign nationals, a counting strategy which the student report criticized as inflating the actual numbers of minority faculty.

According to University affirmative action figures, Blacks make up 1.7 percent of tenured faculty, and 8.9 percent of junior-level professors. Hispanics comprise about 1 percent of both junior and senior faculty.

Administrators from President Bok to FAS's Equal Employment Opportunity Officer have recognized Harvard's serious shortage of minority professors, but they contend that the pool of available job applicants is the primary reason for the problem.

"The fact is that the proportion of minority students that have sought Ph.D. degrees is small and has declined in the last seven to 10 years," Bok said. "We can't make substantial progress until these basic problems have been addressed."

"The only thing we can do is to try to break through that by encouraging students to think about these careers more seriously," Bok said.

But the MSA report and several minority professors say that the University must abandon its mentality of "passive recruitment." They say that the low overall numbers of minorities in academia exacerbate the difficulty Harvard faces, but they argue that the primary responsibility lies with insufficient efforts to reverse this trend on the part of the University.

"Confusion and complacency dominate Harvard's minority faculty recruitment. From deans to department chairmen to the general faculty, few understand how to effectively achieve better representation, even fewer make a reasonably active effort to address the issue, and no one has a University-wide, systemic program necessary to successfully do so," the report says.

After concluding that individual departments have foundered because of an overly decentralized and confused minority recruitment policy, the report says, "The Harvard community is not only ignorant about where it stands, it is content to remain sitting down."

Spence has refused to respond directly to the MSA report's criticisms, saying that the faculty committee should explore the options before he takes a position on how to increase the number of Harvard's minority faculty.

But on one point all Harvard administrators agree: there will be no quotas at the University, no numerical goals for raising the representation of minorities on the faculty. Affirmative action quotas in FAS are "not the way the University functions and not the way it will function," Bok said in an interview.

Spence said he wants the faculty committee to focus on three areas--a review of past policy and performance, a response to the MSA report, and a set of recommendations for changing existing policy. "By mid-semester they should have a brief but pointed report," said Spence.