And Epps, the College's point-man on the issue with over 25 years under his belt in the upper echelons of the College bureaucracy, has responded with a proliferation of committees which plan to issue recommendations. "I think it's mostly been a lot of bureaucratic shuffle," says Richard Garcia '95, president of Raza, the Mexican-American students organization.

In lobbying the administration to hire more tenured Latino faculty--one of the current minority coalition's demands--Garcia says he got a look at the insides of the inefficient bureaucracy of University Hall.

In November, Garcia says he met with Knowles. Knowles referred him to Epps, who sent him to Associate Dean for Affirmative Action Marjorie Garber.

Under the current system, presumably the matter would be handled by the Appiah committee on curricular reform--charged with improving faculty diversity--which has not met and has no plans to meet.

Or maybe, it would be handled by the Educational Policy Committee's subcommittee on ethnic studies, recently commissioned by Knowles and chaired by Dean of Undergraduate Education Lawrence Buell.

A third option is a faculty committee on ethnic studies, chaired by Professor of Sociology Aage B. Sorensen, which approves visiting professorships on ethnic studies.

Both Sorenson and Appiah serve on Buell's subcommittee.

"If you look at the list of deans, it looks really efficient," says Garcia. "But it seems like just a big tangle where no one is in charge of anything and stuff just gets passed around," he says. Garcia says recent administration movement on the issue of bring Latino faculty may be a result of its inclusion in the coalition's list of demands.

"There has been a degree of confusion," says Ouzama N. Nicholson '94, a member of the Epps' Operations committee.

Nicholson says the bureaucracy is not only confusing but ineffective.

"We're not doing anything," says Nicholson, who is also co-chair of the Foundation's Student Advisory Committee (SAC). "My problem with the way we discuss race problems is that I feel like nothing we say really matters. I haven't seen anything come out of it... We could be using our time better."

Even Appiah concedes the bureaucratic answer may not be the best one, but says the more people working on an issue as complicated as race relations the better.

"The more people giving thoughtful attention to such a subject, the better," says Appiah. "I happen to think there are too many committees generally at Harvard. There may be better things for us to be doing but I don't think that's a problem in itself."

Epps has a more encouraging view of the administration's work in race relations this year. "I think that the work so far has given us a partial understanding of the dynamics of race at Harvard," he says.

"We have indentified a specific agenda which includes more training such as the Negotiation Project, an evaluation of Black-Jewish relations, and the need to communicate through publications and the existing resources at Harvard," Epps adds. "We have an agenda to work on."