At the College this year, the continuing conundrum of race relations was squeezed into the cookie-cutter of a swelling bureaucracy--and it didn't quite fit the mold.
Race czar and Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III and Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles wrapped yards of red tape around the glowing coals of the previous spring's tense campus atmosphere, building committees, holding meetings and heralding a new scheme for College policy.
Nevertheless, the embers flared as the Coalition for Diversity, a consortium of minority student groups, sprang forth this spring with a list of demands and ultimatums, branding Harvard "the Peculiar Institution" in flyers distributed at Junior Parents Weekend.
Knowles last summer annointed Epps as coordinator of race relations policy for the College, placing the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations and the Office of Race Relations in his charge.
At the same time, Knowles commissioned a committee, chaired by Professor of Afro-American Studies K. Anthony Appiah, to make a comprehensive evaluation of the College's race relations policy.
The Race Relations Advisory Committee under Appiah did not even last through the semester, however.
"The first semester was spent trying to do a diagnosis of race relations on campus," Epps says.
And throughout the year, administrators and student-faculty committees seemed to be peering into a dense fog--unsure of what step to take next.
The result of the "diagnosis" was the division of the Advisory Committee into the Operations Committee under Epps and a committee under Appiah which considers what Epps calls "long-range issues" like curriculum reform and the organization of the race relations bureaucracy.
The mandate of Epps' committee is broad. It has met 15 times to respond to day-to-day student complaints and funnel them to appropriate officials. "Operations reacts to student ideas that are then passed into the proper channels," Epps says.
Appiah's committee, composed mostly of faculty, has met three times this year. Its mandate is to advise Knowles about long-term goals in faculty hiring and curriculum.
With Knowles' creation of a sub-committee of the Educational Policy Committee (EPC) to investigate ethnic studies, Appiah's committee, which has met only three times, has focused more on bureaucratic than curricular reform. The EPC subcommittee is chaired by Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Lawrence Buell.
The College has its own bureaucracy which has been promised a massive overhaul. Just as last summer's shake-up which placed Epps in charge, the administration may move quietly in the next few months to change the structure of the College's race relations bureaucracy.
Although Epps said there will be no hasty judgements made about eliminating elements of the present structure, he suggests a possible "umbrella" under which the currently independent organizations can be incorporated.
The three-fold structure consists of Epps' and Appiah's committees on race relations, S. Allen Counter's Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations and Assistant Dean Hilda Hernandez Gravelle's Office of Race Relations.
The Office of Race Relations, created in 1986, serves as a forum for student complaints and to introduce educational programs to promote racial harmony.
In addition the Office sponsors two students 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.
The Foundation, created in 1981, has come under fire recently for inactivity. More than half of the Foundation's Student Advisory Committee complained in The Crimson in January that the organization was not performing any function. Amid recent disagreements between Epps and Counter, it may be the first item on Epps' chopping block.
The Foundation was designed to sponsor multicultural events and distribute funds to campus organizations as well as listen to student concerns.
The Foundation doles out $20,000 to minority student organizations each semester and sponsors a program of visiting scholars from "neglected cultures."
A Tangled Web
In the course of the year, Raza President and eventual spokesperson of the Coalition for Diversity, Richard Garcia '95, ran into the cobweb of committees as he tried to lobby the administration to hire more Latino faculty.
Garcia said he met with Knowles in November. Knowles referred him to Epps, who sent him to Associate Dean for Affirmative Action Marjorie Garber.
Under the current system, presumably the matter could 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 could 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.
"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." Garcia says recent administration movement on the issue of hiring Latino faculty may be a result of its inclusion in the coalition's list of demands.
As the College moves to to untangle the knots in its seemingly redundant bureaucracy, questions burn: Will Counter, Gravelle and Epps all remain in their current positions? How drastic will the changes be?
A Harvard Negotiation Project report suggests additions, including the creation of a special mediation training center, which may impinge on the Office of Race Relations' work. And while rumors of the Founda-
'It seems like just a big tangle where no one is in charge of anything and stuff just gets passed around.'
Richard Garcia '95 president of Raza , Most important, however, is the question: Will all the bureaucratic sleight-of-hand which has characterized Epps' tenure as Race Czar amount to substantial improvements in campus race relations? What is sure is that the bureaucracy will eventually churn out a new policy plan and probably some guidelines to improve the campus atmosphere. What remains unclear is how effective these measures will really prove to be
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