AFTER working together all of last year, the Minority Students Alliance (MSA) and the Undergraduate Council's Ad Hoc Committee on Minority and Women Faculty Hiring had managed by the spring to convince most undergraduates that the University needed to intensify its efforts to recruit minority and women faculty.

The issue assumed an air of militance by reading period, when the Women's Alliance and other campus activists joined with MSA and council members to form a "human chain" around University Hall during a full meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Among the chants at that May rally--held just a month after the 20th anniversary of the 1969 student takeover of University Hall--was "FAS, don't stall, next time we'll be in U. Hall."

Such stridence--not to mention the spirited criticism that shaped discussion of the issue all last year--is undoubtedly a good thing. As long as minority and women faculty hiring is alive as a political issue, department chairs and faculty committees will have to consider the race and gender implications of their hiring decisions.

It is thus disturbing that all of May's militance seems to have disappeared over the summer. This fall, instead of anger or even reasoned discussion, silence has surrounded the issue of Harvard's hiring practices.

Political activism takes a while to gear up every year at Harvard. Cynics have learned not to even read the papers until April. But with the sort of support this issue gained last year among students, November is late enough.

THE fact is that nothing has changed since the spring, except for the degree of student enthusiasm about the issue. The statistics are well-known by now: only 6.3 percent of the University's senior faculty are women; 6.2 percent are minorities. And for tenure-track junior faculty, the statistics are not much better: 16.9 percent are women, 8.6 percent are minorities.

University policy has not changed either. Hopes for improvement--at least within FAS--actually ran high for a brief period last spring, after the well-publicized Verba Report was released and before it was vitiated by the Faculty Council.

The report gave rise to optimism mainly because of its bold proposal to restructure affirmative action procedures within FAS's academic departments. Under the initial recommendation, each department would name a senior faculty member other than the chair as an affirmative action representative to oversee the recruitment process.

The Faculty Council--the 20-member FAS steering committee that weeds out proposal for consideration by the full Faculty--utterly undermined the Verba Report when it did away with that intradepartmental mechanism.

Department chairs are still responsible for affirmative action efforts under the edited version of the Verba Report, which FAS approved May 16. Essentially that leaves things the way they were.

Members of the Faculty Council claimed they did not want to create an adversarial relationship between a department's chair and its affirmative action representative. But the very point of the Verba Report was that change would not come without such structural tension.

IN the wake of FAS's rejection of the report's spirit, the issue of Harvard's minority and women faculty hiring must return to the forefront of campus politics, and soon. The Undergraduate Council's ad hoc committee should get its act together, broaden its attack and be unabashedly militant.

The first thing to do is widen the terms of debate. According to the University, the reason there are so few minority and women professors is that the pool of women and minorities with Ph.D. s is too small. And that's true. And that should become a major component of the issue.

Why isn't Harvard doing anything to increase the pool? The Mellon Foundation has given Harvard $350,000 to set up a program of research opportunities in which Black, Hispanic, and Native American students would work with faculty members in their fields of study. The goal is to encourage them to attend graduate school and eventually become professors. Then why hasn't Harvard actually done anything to implement this program?

Columbia University has initiated a $25 million fellowship program to provide research internships for minority undergraduates and to fund their graduate studies. Columbia has also adopted a loan forgiveness program, under which minority students will find it less costly to go on to graduate school. Why isn't Harvard doing anything like that?

IN addition to broadening the terms of the debate, campus activists should not hesitate to be militant about their demands. Lucy H. Koh '90, the chair of the Council's ad hoc committee, has concluded that the only way to deal with this issue is to "make people uncomfortable enough so that they'll do something."

And it's high time to make people feel uncomfortable. This is an issue on which Harvard's far-flung activist communities can unite: the minority communities, the feminist community and activists from other liberal and progressive groups should come together to forge a coalition around this issue. And then they should figure out the best way to make the inertia-laden people up top feel uncomfortable.