After the Black Students Association issued a battery of charges last spring against the College and undergraduate organizations in a flyer entitled "On the Harvard Plantation," Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III said he was surprised and admitted he was "out of touch."
In September, Epps--the College's newly crowned race czar--said he did not know if any of the other minority communities were having similar problems, but insisted he planned to find out before another version of the 'Plantation' flyer surfaced.
Two weeks ago, Epps found out--as a coalition of nine minority organizations issued a flyer enumerating grievances against the University administration.
The latest round in the College's struggle to maintain healthy race relations on campus may have revealed that Epps' approach to the issues--which has focused on Black-Jewish tensions, the focal point of last spring's conflicts--has not been comprehensive enough.
And as Epps asserts his authority as coordinator of the College's race relations policy and takes the center stage, a clearer picture has emerged in recent weeks of the veteran dean presiding over a morass of slow-moving and overlapping committees.
"As I understand it, the point of appointing dean Epps in charge [of coordinating race relations] was to remove the redundancy in the system," says Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett'57.
The question arises: is the new bureaucracy to handle race relations on campus an effective mechanism or merely blue smoke to appease students and their four-year attention spans?
Epps is no stranger to the current situation. Every few years minority students agitate for change and call for increased diversity in the faculty and sensitivity on campus. The College creates a committee, usually headed by a high-profile minority professor or administrator, and the committee issues some recommendations that seem to address the problems. By the time this cycle plays out, most of the students involved have graduated.
This happened in 1980 with the original Epps committee which took two-and-a-half years to produce 13 recommen- Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III has begun to assert himself as race czar as part of the College's efforts to improve campus race relations. In the process, he has created a burgeoning bureaucracy within the College administration, which some call ungainly. Is this an effective structure or is there... In 1986, Jewett's student-faculty Advisory Committee on Race Relations, created in response to a number of hate crimes at the time, recommended the creation of the Office of Race Relations. And now in 1993, there is a committee chaired by Professor of Afro-American Studies K. Anthony Appiah commissioned in September by Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles to make a comprehensive evaluation of the College's race relations policy. The original Appiah committee has evolved into subcommittees on policy, headed by Epps, and curricular reform, headed by Appiah. Epps's group, dubbed the Operations Committee, has met 15 times and includes students and faculty members. The mandate of Eppa's committee is broad. It includes responding to day-to-day student complaints and funneling them to appropriate officials. "Operations reacts to student ideas that are then passed into the proper channels," Epps says. Appiah's committee, which is composed mostly of faculty, has not met yet and Appiah said last week the date of their first meeting has not yet been scheduled. Its mandate is to advise Knowles about long-term goals in faculty hiring and curriculum. This time around, observers say tensions on campus are more in tense and have been building for several years. Last spring, a string of controversial speakers sponsored by the Black Students Association and charges of insensitivity between Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations Director S. Allen Counter and The Crimson brought the issue of campus race relations back to the top of the College's agenda. 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." Experts trained by the Harvard Negotiation Project have been conducting an independent evaluation of Harvard race relations, interviewing students and administrators, with an eye toward providing training in conflict management and medication. A Real Race Czar Despite apparent confusion among the various committees, Epps has increasingly asserted his proconsulary authority as coordinator of race relations in recent weeks, making his presence felt at the Office of Race Relations and the Harvard Foundation which now fall directly under his authority. Epps recently attended the Foundation's spring grants meeting, raising questions about Counter's autonomy over his own organization. "We had a grants meeting but we're not even sure that the proposals are going to be passed," says Student Advisory Committee member Adam D. Taxin '93. "Epps seems like he's really running the show these days." The Foundation's grants process has been under scrutiny since Epps began an investigation of a Society of Arab Students complaint about their fall grant. "Dean Epps did indicate that the faculty would not just rubber stamp the decisions," says Nicholson. Last month, Epps said he partially blames the Foundation for the College's problems with race relations. The faculty advisory committees of both the Foundation and the Office of Race Relations, which approved the policy decisions of their respective organizations, have been dissolved and merged into what is now the Operations Committee over which Epps presides. Epps says he wanted to integrate the activities of both offices. In a written statement to The Crimson, Counter said Epps' involvement is "welcomed by all of us" and that he "welcome" knowles creation of the standing committees on race relations. For much of the Foundation and the Office's history together, there have been complaints from students and faculty about unnecessary overlap in their respective mandates. "The two groups overlap in providing educational programs," says Jewett. "To some degree, they probably hadn't worked as close together as they should do." Counter, the Foundation's director since its creation, calls the organization "The primary University office for hosting multicultural programs and projects that serve to increase racial and cultural understanding." The Foundation does out $20,000 to minority student organizations each semester and sponsors a program of visiting scholars from "neglected cultures." College officials have touted the Foundation as the "proactive" arm of its race relations programming complementing the "reactive" Office of Race Relations. In recent months, the Foundation has been criticized by members of its SAC for not doing enough to improve campus race relations. Members have said the SAC has been paralyzed because they believe the Foundation may be dissolved in Epps' reorganization efforts. Students who work closely with Dr. Counter are steadfast in defending him. "Dr. Counter is in the basement of University Hall, meeting mostly with students, from 10 in the morning to seven in the evening," says Nicholson. "His involvement is phenomenal." "He's the most involved faculty member on campus," said Aids E. Bekele '94, co-chair and member of the Operations Committee. The Office of Race Relations was "established [in 1987] with the dual mandate of responding to incidents of racial insensitivity and providing educational resources to promote racial harmony," according to a five-year evaluation report issued by the office in December. In addition, the Office sponsors two student groups: Actively Working Against Racism and Ethnocentrism (AWARE), which "organizes educational forums in order to promote racial awareness and address concerns about the campus and national racial climates," and Students at Harvard Against Racism and Ethnocentrism (SHARE), a multicultural peer education program. Though Counter, Gravelle and Epps still report to Jewett, Jewett has kept a low-profile on the race relation front. Jewett says his role as chief administrator of a number of College offices hampers his ability to give the proper attention to questions of diversity. "It was not an area that I had devoted specific responsibility," he says, referring to years previous to Epps' designation as race czar. "Really I couldn't devote the time to doing it." And this year it has been Epps coordinating what he calls "a central agenda" for what may be the most important issue facing the College administration. One influential student questions the appointment of Epps as race relations coordinator. "I think Dr. Counter and Dean Hernandez-Gravelle have been working in race issues far a number of years and I have to question the appointment of anyone else as race coordinator," says Nicholson. What exactly the position of race coordinator constitutes remains in question. Epps sees himself as a "facilitator," someone to expedite the existing organization, but the policy-making authority still lies with Knowles and ultimately President Neil L. Rudenstine. Epps will preside over committees and recommendations, but Knowles or Rudenstine will make the final decisions. As Epps continues to expand his role as race czar he knows he is venturing into the murky waters of a volatile issue. In an interview just after his appointment as the czar, Epps said associates warned him in 1980 not to get mired in a controversy over race relations. He acknowledged the precariousness of his position, as the sole Black administrator, trying to represent an over-whilmingly white administration struggling to stitch together an increasingly diverse, polarized campus. "It involves risk-taking," he said. "I would not have led the committee in 1980 if I had listened to my peers. All of them said, 'Don't do it. It'll blow up in your face. It'll hurt your career." And it appears that once again Epps and a very large list of supporting characters hope to quench the fiery issue of race relations in a cold maze of bureaucracy. D. Richard de Silva and Steven A. Engel contributed to the reporting of this article.
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