IF any word summarizes the challenge and the promise of the year at Harvard it was pluralism. Diversity in the houses, diversity in College admissions, diversity in the faculty, diversity in the curriculum, diversity was everywhere--in a form. The task of the community of the University became bringing order out of the seeming disorder. The task was not easy. Mistakes were.

THE year at Harvard began with an innocent enough reminder. In all College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences registration packets appeared a pamphlet entitled, "Working Toward a Community of Equals." In response to requests by gay and lesbian students, the office of coeducation published the University's explicit policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and included resources and tips on "insensitive" behavior. Six houses, at the requests of their masters, named tutors for bisexual, gay and lesbian issues.

But the issue erupted in February when a gay student charged he was physically and verbally assaulted after a Mather House dance because of his sexual orientation. The incident intensified when gay students staged a "kiss-in" protest at the Mather dining hall. Later there were questions about the original attack, but meanwhile the house, and the community at large, had split into camps which labeled each other as homophobic on the one hand and overly confrontational and "improper" on the other.

To what extent, it was asked, did individuals have to accept the actions of those with whom they disagreed? When, for example, did an ill-advised, aggressive pass become offensive? When did angry confrontation become a channel for bigotry? When did a protest intended to "protest hate with love" become repulsive, if ever?

Resolution lay in a "heated and frank" discussion at a master-sponsored house dialogue, publishing the truth about both parties actions at the Mather dance, and in a realization of the difficulty of truly accepting the rights of others to do something as fundamental as kiss or hold hands with another in public., But it is a necessary, absolute acceptance.

EVEN more central to campus life this year was the intense and, at times, bitter struggle to boost minority and women faculty hiring. Nearly 3000 undergraduates signed a petition to this end this spring, and it was the Minority Student Alliance which issued the stinging critique that prodded the Faculty of Arts and Sciences into action last year.

And here the disagreement over the means and ends of a pluralist community comes to a sharp focus. Like the battle between the cultural right and left, with the literary or historical canon somehow held ransom between the two, the question over minority hiring seems to revolve around the perceived "lowering of standards" needed to diversify the faculty. Just who sets--and who judges--the standards of course is the most difficult question of all to answer. In a pluralist society, what are the certainties?

One fact for students is this: a community does not learn to resolve the past's legacy of anger and injustice by ignoring the problem in the present. We cannot understand our neighbor if we never see him. That only 1.8 percent of Harvard's just under 400 senior faculty are Black is troubling, nearly outrageous.

The problem extends beyond the present. The lack of academic role models for underrepresented groups only guarantees the dearth of future academics, as admitted in the case of women by the Government department last month.

Action must follow acknowledgement, student activists remind us, but the faculty has yet to realize it.

NOW frame the question of pluralism in another, more violent language. On one March night, two Black students run to catch a University shuttle bus but are pulled off by Cambridge police, searched and left without explanation on the curb. Ask the police why they acted so, and they answer they saw two men running on a street after a nearby convenience store robbery. Granted, they say, the suspect in the robbery was a single white male, but under the mercury lights in the Square perhaps skin color is too deceptive.

Cambridge cleared its officers of harassment, calling their action "professional and appropriate," and the question clearly became, appropriate for whom? For which race? For the 500 galvanized into protest that week, the answer was clear, as it was for Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III and University Vice President and General Counsel Daniel Steiner, who apologized to the students and appealed to Cambridge and the police. But again, the police have not responded.

Look at the issue again, in a subtler shade. Investigators from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights arrive for a compliance review of Harvard admissions with a specific directive to investigate possible discrimination against Asian-Americans. Harvard has justified the rate of Asian-American admissions--consistently 80 to 90 percent that of white students--with the group's relative lack of legacy students and small number of varsity athletes, both recruitment factors at the University.

Again, the question turns on the problem of whether a system geared toward those who have long been in the country essentially discriminates against a people who by law could not emigrate freely into the U.S. before the 1960s. And who decides on "diversity," such as exemplified by athletic ability?

SOMETIMES, responsibility seems to become too much to ask. Self-reliance indeed was the reason for the milestone summit of collegiate minorities at Harvard in February. Dubbed the Intercollegiate Conference, more than 1000 students from schools throughout New England and the Ivy League congregated in Cambridge to build coalitions between Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Native American communities.

But the giddy moment of multi-cultural promise passed all too quickly. Only three weeks later, an elaborate, College-sponsored program specifically for Harvard titled AWARE--Actively Working Against Racism and Ethnocentrism--flopped because of student disinterest, non-attendance. Billed as a means to work out mounting racial tensions on campus and targeted largely at the white community, the week of activities was supposed to help resolve "racism among the well-intentioned."

It turned out, apparently, that too few of us even cared to think about how to live together.

This apathy, this self-delusion or self-denial formed the grounds for masters and the College dean to propose in November the greatest change in residential housing assignment since the early 1970s. Alarmed by stereotypes of the houses and concerned that the houses no longer represented the educational microcosm of the University's diversity, officials moved to introduce partially random assignment of rising sophomores.

Students fought the change by claiming the right to choose, and won in the short term because masters themselves disagreed over how much social engineering was necessary to ensure "diversity," and because the masters' plan was to be unequally applied to all the houses. But when the dean of the College reversed the decision in March, he announced his resolve to forge a consensus on a better plan to enforce diversity this fall. As well he should. Not wanting to live together is not the answer to the problem of pluralism.

PERHAPS the watershed event of the year--the event which showed students' ability to govern themselves--was that which unfolded at year's end, eventually before headlines nationwide. When the Undergraduate Council voted on April 24 to ask for the return of Reserve Officers Training Corps to Harvard (ROTC), it believed it was performing a service to the 90-odd undergraduate ROTC participants forced to commute to MIT for the program.

But when the student body rallied to the cause of gays and lesbians in protest of the military's discrimination, the contest of values took on broader terms. ROTC advocates realized this when they adapted the campaign slogan, "Tolerance for everyone." But that was only a superficial acknowledgment of the underlying principle.

The council eventually overturned its decision after a contentious week that electrified the campus. It made its decision on the basis of its charter and University policy, which prohibit campus groups from discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. But underlying the council's discussion was in part the principle of education free from military influence, and in part the insistence on equality based on a historical legacy left over from a Civil Rights era a quarter century past.

At the end of a period tagged a decade of greed, which followed a "me generation" and a so-called age of permissiveness, the return of concern is encouraging. And, 25 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and 20 years after such politics culminated in students taking over University Hall, the tumult was refreshing.