Andreu Mas-Colell, the new associate dean for affirmative action, has faced tougher opponents than the Harvard bureaucracy in his 45 years.

When Mas-Colell was a college student in Spain during the 1960s, he was active in the underground resistance to dictator Francisco Franco.

He was arrested several times, spent a month in prison and was finally acquitted in 1964 on charges of illegal association and illegal propagandizing.

"Although my professional avocation is mathematical economics--it is a bit abstract--I have been involved in the past in progressive politics," says Mas-Colell with characteristic understatement.

Mas-Colell's life since his undergraduate days has been less adventurous.

After doctoral study at the University of Minnesota and a teaching stint at the University of California at Berkeley, Mas-Colell secured a tenured post at Harvard in 1981.

The editor of Econometrica magazine, Mas-Colell specializes in economic theory with a strong quantitative component.

Social Causes

But Mas-Colell, who is the Berkman professor of economics, says he has never forgotten social causes. And he says his two decades in the U.S. have convinced him of the central role race plays here.

"Coming to this country I could recognize that the ethnic issue, the racial question was central to this country," he says.

Mas-Colell was appointed a month ago as the first associate dean for affirmative action in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

And now he faces a daunting task: trying to increase the paltry numbers of women and minority scholars in FAS in the face of tradition-bound hiring practices and, in many cases, a dwindling pool of candidates.

According to Mas-Colell, progress will not be achieved on affirmative action with strident rhetoric or draconian penalties, but through quiet, behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

"I will try to make as little noise as I can. I believe that is the way the office can be most effective," says Mas-Colell.

But Mas-Colell is hardly representative of the traditional FAS administrator. A relative newcomer to Harvard, Mas-Colell has never held an administrative post--even within the Economics Department.

"On the minus side, it may be that some of the things I do this year are very naive, [things] I would not have done with more experience," says Mas-Colell. "On the plus side, perhaps it's a new face on the block. Perhaps I am less conditioned by the previous way to do things."

Unique for Another Reason

The appointment is unique for another reason. Mas-Colell, a Spanish national with permanent resident status in the U.S., is considered a minority by the federal government's affirmative action criteria. There are no other minorities with the rank of associate dean or higher in FAS.

Harvard's practice of counting foreign-born scholars when compiling lists of minority faculty drew fire last year from the Minority Students Alliance (MSA), which said the University was manipulating the count to pad its numbers.

Mas-Colell, who was a member of the faculty committee which drafted a new affirmative action plan for FAS last year, says he was introduced to the debate for the first time during those deliberations.

"To my amusement I discovered last year that I qualified as Hispanic. I say `to my amusement' because I had never thought of myself as qualifying as Hispanic," says Mas-Colell. "I still think that the definition of Hispanics is somewhat curious."

Mas-Colell notes that affirmative action regulations regard native Spaniards as Hispanic, but not Brazilians.

And he adds that the dividing line between foreign-born scholars and American ethnic minorities is a hazy one.

"The community of scholars is really an international community. This is not true just abstractly--it's true very concretely," says Mas-Colell. "This country has benefited much by being a haven for foreign scholars."

Mas-Colell acknowledges that foreign scholars might not serve as role models for American minority students, but says they can still contribute to the diversity of a faculty.

"One has to consider every case on its merits," he says.