Dean of Faculty A. Michael Spence two weeks ago named a new faculty committee to review affirmative action at Harvard. Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba, who chairs the committee, says the group will spend the summer examining the effectiveness of Harvard's policy for hiring minority and women faculty members and comparing it to other universities' plans. Verba says he hopes to make recommendations for a better recruitment policy to Spence by next Thanksgiving.

But many faculty members say that no matter what Harvard does, the University will have difficulty filling posts with minorities because the demand exceeds the supply. Although the number of minorities receiving Ph.Ds is rising, it is still not increasing as fast as the demand for Black, Hispanic and other underrpresented scholars.

One long-term solution to the problem is enticing more minorities to enter academia. In the last few months Harvard has launched programs to attract minorities to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), both at Harvard and across the country.

Kenan Professor of English and American Literature and Language Helen H. Vendler, who is working to increase minority interest in graduate schools, says Harvard has a well-qualified body of minority undergraduates but needs to persuade them to go into academia. In the past, universities have been reluctant to encourage minority students to enter academia because it is not as stable a profession as law or medicine.

"The aspiriation to professions usually comes before the aspiration to pure scholarship," says Vendler of the pattern to create a minority middle class. But now, Blacks and Hispanics have begun to establish a middle class and can afford to venture into teaching, she says. "I would think there is a large enough Black middle class that their children can be scholars."

In addition, academic posts are expected to be more plentiful in the next few years, as about half of the current tenured professors reach retirement age. Vendler says she now feels confident enough when advising students about academic careers that she can predict that jobs will exist when they finish school. "The time has come to press very hard," she says.

Harvard's efforts to attract minorities will focus on "getting the news out," Vendler says. The main efforts toward Harvard undergraduates will include informational meetings at the DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research and within concentrations. GSAS sends a brochure to prospective students, and the school encourages students who have not taken the traditional educational route to explore the possibility of graduate school.

Harvard is also giving the faculty more say in graduate student admissions, Herron says. She says Vendler has helped increase the direct contact among the faculty, Dean of the Graduate School Sally Falk Moore and prospective students. "Since January of this year, the effort here has gone to a new level of intensity," Herron says, adding that she can now contact Moore directly to recommend candidates and gets an immediate answer to her requests.

And Herron says Moore's openness helps make students more secure about coming to a university that is associated with isolation and selectiveness. `It's very hard to convince students that we need and want you when you've had a mystique for so long," Herron says.

Dominguez says that attracting Hispanics to GSAS has been a particular problem. He says that when the University made a commitment to increase the number of minority students some years ago, GSAS was the one school that was unable to attract many Hispanics.

"That is why we have the odd circumstance of a fairly substantial number of Hispanic [undergraduates] and virtually none in the faculty," he says, adding he has seen little gain in attracting either Hispanics or people interested in studying Chicano culture since it first became a subject of academic study about 15 years ago.

Even if efforts to attract minorites to graduate schools are successful, they will not reach fruition for about 12 years, when students now beginning Ph.D programs will be up for tenure. And in the meantime, the system risks self-perpetuation because minority students may be reluctant to come to an institution where there are few minority faculty members.

Nonetheless, Vendler expresses optimism that minorities will follow the recent route of women scholars. "When possibilities are opened up, people rush in to fill them," she says.