IT MIGHT be a coincidence. Or the good faith effort of Dean of the Law School Robert C. Clark to diversify the Harvard Law School faculty. Or it could be the insistence of protesting law students that minority faculty hiring become a top priority with the administration.

Whatever the reasons, some progress has been made recently on the issue of minority faculty hiring at HLS. Two women accepted tenure-track positions on the faculty last week. HLS also announced a new fellowship program that would help minority scholars complete their LL.M. masters degree.

There are both promising steps. The changes, however, come very late and are almost overshadowed during a week in which tensions have increased between Dean Clark and law students who still find the number of minority or women faculty members too scarce to support a beneficial learning environment.

THE appointment of two women to tenure-track positions comes weeks after the Law School announced it had offered spots to four white men. This isn't abnormal--all the offers were made around the same time. Now there will be eight tenure or tenure-track women professors at HLS. And there won't be a greater number of minority professors. That's still not good enough.

The Charles Hamilton Houston fellowship, which offers a law school graduate or attorney a two-year scholarship for an LL.M. degree and a $25,000 per year stipend, is a remarkable program. Why was it "in the works for a few years" as Law School spokesperson Michael J. Chmura said? It takes time to put a scholarship program together, but if faculty diversity were really a top priority at HLS, we probably would have seen this program much earlier.

Despite the fact that these advances are late, Clark and the Law School deserve praise for trying. With continued attention and dedication, they can probably solve the diversity problem.

THAT IS WHY the law students, and now other graduate school students, should not curb their protests to Clark's favored "open discussion" approach. "Open discussion" is what leaves fellowship programs "in the works" and faculty appointments in endless committees.

Sit-ins, boycotts, petitions, open letters to the community, rallies, pickets--these are disruptive protest measures, but that's the point. They shake up a system that needs to be rattled in order to progress. These methods bring attention to a problem the students feel very strongly about without being violent, destructive to property or even overly rhetorical. The message is simple: We're not going away until you hire more women and minority faculty.

Clark and other administrators can condemn student sit-ins and take disciplinary action against the students involved. They can post police outside their doors and label student boycotts as "misguided." That only makes the administration seem condescending and controlling, and is certainly not going to stop the dissent. The only thing that is going to work is results, and the Law School has now shown that it can produce some. But until more progress is seen, the protests must continue.