Next year, Buell said, four visiting professors will offer courses on Asian American and Latino issues, alleviating that concern somewhat.

And the subcommittee will likely address another of the coalition's demands, that the Core Curriculum include an ethnic studies requirement. Buell said, although he personally "is not sure that's the form it should take."

On the issue of faculty hiring, McCarthy said if a Latino faculty member is not hired soon, "it will not be for lack of effort."

"There's an offer out now to a Latino faculty member," he said, although it is not for a tenured position.

Rudenstine said the University "has been working very hard at [faculty hiring]."

"We'll continue to work hard at it but we'll be taking some steps in the not so distant future that are sufficiently complicated that they're taken some time to work out," he said.

So it remains unclear when the efforts now taking place will bear fruit, and the time frame of undergraduate students is far narrower than of tenured faculty members.

"Harvard is a very conservative place from a radical student's point of view," Rosales said.

Minority student group leaders have long called for an improvement in faculty diversity and for the inclusion of ethnic studies in the curriculum. However, the response from administrators has been slow, and students say it is not always clear who is the proper person to approach with concerns over curricular and faculty issues