To the editors:

While walking through the Yard today I saw a poster that made me despair about the state of race relations at our fine institution. It read: "49 percent: The number of white males who believe that Harvard's Faculty is 'diverse enough'."

Harvard has an extremely restricted pool of candidates from which it must hire if it is to maintain its level of excellence. In addressing the issue of faculty diversity, one must consider the issue of race at every level in our academic system, including the time required to get a Ph.D. and establish oneself as one of the most highly regarded authorities in one's field. I don't deny that faculty diversity is a problem, but it's certainly not simply a matter of changing hiring practices.

So it makes me truly sad to see a poster which seems to have no other purpose than to portray me, being a white male, as an ignorant, bigoted, racist. We're all on the same team here. I realize race relations have been adversarial in the past, but the solution is not to direct society's animosity toward a different faction of the population. All of our efforts to create a society truly free from racism are for nought as long as this adversarial system of race relations persists. GREGORY S. NOVAK '00   March 11, 1998