President Neil L. Rudenstine said yesterday he and other Harvard administrators are taking "very seriously" concerns voiced by a coalition of minority student groups over the last few weeks regarding the University's atmosphere for minorities.

Responding to a list of demands issued by nine groups last Friday in a flyer distributed at a Junior Parents' Weekend panel on diversity, the president said the students were raising "genuinely substantive issues" that need to be addressed.

But Rudenstine stopped short of endorsing the students' goals, saying they must be further examined by members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in cooperation with the central administration and the student body.

"I don't know what the answers are, but I think whenever you have a curricular issue of genuine substance in any field it requires a lot of thought," he said. "I think that there will be thought and I can imagine there will be action. I think it would be a big mistake to say this is not taken seriously."

Rudenstine said he met on Monday with Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles and other administrators to discuss the students' concerns and how the Faculty might implement possible solutions.

He said many of the academic issues raised in the flyer needed to be handled by Knowles and the Faculty. But he said University officials have "for quite some time...been working very hard" on improving faculty diversity.

"I don't mean that I', uninterested in it, but there's no question that when you come down to the basic points, it's the Faculty and academic deans...who will have to analyze, think through, talk with students and figure out what is the right direction to go there," he said.

Rudenstine said he would be willing to meet with students to discuss their concerns. But he questioned the feasibility of a "town meeting," attended by students and senior University officials, as requested in the flyer.

"I would be happy to participate it whatever appropriate moments and in whatever appropriate ways could be possible," he said. "But I wouldn't want to set on one format and I certainly wouldn't want to do it before the FAS people had a chance to think about what, from their point of view, would work."

Rudenstine said he might want to meet with students over the course of several meetings, rather than at one, campus-wide session.

In the flyer, the coalition set a deadline of March 24 for a town meeting and April 16 for the start of a candidate review process for the tenured appointment of a Latino professor.

In interviews over the last several days, student leaders of the coalition have not specified what actions they might take if the deadlines are not met.

Rudenstine also strongly defended the administration's response to remarks by Thomson Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield which linked grade inflation to increasing enrollment of Black students in the Late 1960s.

The student groups called on Mansfield to substantiate or apologize for what they termed "his unfounded and racist comments." and asked Rudenstine and Knowles to apologize for the administration's "silence in the issue."

But Rudenstine said he responded to the remarks promptly and publicly in an interview with the Crimson in late January. The president's reaction was not reported in the Crimson until March 3.

"My sense was that a good deal of the frustration was that nobody had said anything, whereas I had said something within about three days," Rudenstine said yesterday. "I said it publicly, or at least I said it in what I thought was a public way, quite promptly and without any hesitation."

Informed of Mansfield's comments in late January, Rudenstine said, "Jeez, I didn't see that comment."

Rudenstine added that he believed the grade inflation that began in the late 1960s was the result of a widespread questioning of the value, accuracy and meaning of grades as an indicator of ability and achievement.

"I don't think that had anything whatsoever to do with minority students," Rudenstine said at the time. "That was well in motion, well before minority students were being enrolled in any numbers. It had an awful lot to do with the frame of mind and ideology of the 60s."

Rudenstine stressed again yesterday his own disagreement with Mansfield's comments, referring to his own observations and experiences as a graduate student in the early 1960s and, later, as a junior faculty member at Harvard and an administrator at Princeton.

"When I was in graduate school, if you got a B-plus you knew that you had virtually flunked the course," he said. "I think everybody learned how to read transcripts."

Still, Rudenstine refused to agree with the flyer's characterization of Mansfield's remarks as "racist." "I really can't attribute, and wouldn't attribute, an attitude to Professor Mansfield, and I don't even know the context in which he was speaking." Rudenstine said. "I think he's a person who analyzes situations as he sees them. He gave an analysis. I don't have to agree with it.