While many undergraduates couldn't pick Harvard's top administrators out of a lineup, Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III cuts a recognizable figure with his trademark bow tie and boutonniere.

A familiar face in the anonymous University, Epps has made Cambridge his home for the last 40 years.

Since he entered Harvard as a Divinity School student in 1958, the dean has been admired and scorned, painted simultaneously as a sympathetic ear and an unwavering authority figure. And although he has become something of an institution in his own right, in the past Epps often found himself at the center of controversy, mediating in scores of conflicts in the past three decades.

Staring Down Jim Crow

Archie Calvin Epps III was born in 1937 in Lake Charles, La. His parents owned a laundry, Epps' Cleaners, and were prominent members of the local black community.

But their successes could not shield him fully from the discrimination endemic to the South in the 1930s.

"As a young Southerner you had to face this," Epps says. "I was always getting escorted off the bus because I wouldn't sit in the right place."

In 1958, Epps enrolled at the Harvard Divinity School, where he developed a particular interest in Islam. Epps says studying the Islamic tradition--especially the writings of Malcolm X, the one-time leader of the Nation of Islam--led him to a greater consciousness of racial issues in the years to come. In 1967, Epps edited a book of Malcolm X's speeches at Harvard.

"I had no idea there were black Muslims in the United States," Epps says. "I became aware that there was another reality represented among black Americans."

Two years after his graduation from the Divinity School, Epps applied for a job at the University's career office but says he was rejected when an officer told him that white students would not take advice from a black man. When he told former Dean of the College John U. Munro that he had been turned down, Munro promptly offered him a job in his own office as Assistant Dean of the College, a post Epps assumed in 1963.

The Administration's Man?

While race relations at the College later became an integral part of Epps' office, his first official duties were apolitical. He was charged with researching the College's requirement that students learn to swim.

Epps says he was careful to take a studiously neutral approach to race, one he now views as overly cautious.

"I'm sure I was seen as not partisan enough for black activists, and I wasn't partisan," he says. "[Later] I decided I really had been too conservative on questions of race--I had thought it didn't matter."

This attitude wasn't surprising in the early 1960s considering black students and administrators at Harvard had few resources and a fragile sense of community, says Peter J. Gomes, a close friend of Epps for more than 30 years.