"When the pool is small and the numbers are small...and when there are only a tiny number of people who fit your tiny number of openings and if those people happen to be very happy where they are...it just might not be so easy to move that person," Rudenstine said.

In addition, the president said that geographical factors make it difficult for Harvard to recruit minorities, especially Hispanics who are underrepresented in New York England.

"We're willing to fight the battle," Rudenstine said. "But there's a certain number of realities out there that we have to work with."

Organizers of the protest said one reason they planned demonstrations this year was to show that they were dissatisfied with the administration's response to a similar protest during Junior Parents Weekend last year.

"Harvard is not taking a pro-active, result-oriented philosophy [toward diversity goals]," Gutierrez, the Raza president, said.

But in a statement issued last week, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Jeremy R. Knowles indicated that despite many obstacles, Harvard is making progress in the hiring of minority faculty.

"Five of this year's 23 new assistant professors are from underrepresented minorities, despite the fact that, nationally, fewer than one in ten of recent Ph.D. recipients is a minority," he wrote.

Knowles wrote that FAS has already received junior faculty acceptances for next year from an African-American man in mathematics, an African-American woman in economics, a Hispanic man in government and an Asian-American woman in English.

"We shall not rest, but we have good reason to be encouraged by our progress," Knowles concluded.

It is unclear if this year's protestors will be able to match the momentum generated by last year's demonstration, which evolved into a group called the Coalition for Diversity.

With its Junior Parents Weekend demonstration last year, that group created a splash that this year's protestors were unable to emulate for drama and surprise. A year ago, minority student protestors dressed in black marched into a Science Center lecture hall during a junior parents panel.

Their presence turned that meeting from a polite panel on extracurricular life to a discussion session on the protestors' demands for more minority faculty and ethnic studies classes.

This year, however, word of the protest leaked out more than 24 hours before it was scheduled to begin. And while the protestors dressed in black, they did not draw as much attention as last year's group did.

This year's protest was also smaller: 100 students crashed Junior Parents Weekend last year, but only about 25 minority students participated this time. And while last year's protests were disruptive, this year's version barely bothered the organizers.

"While I would prefer that the protests wouldn't have happened, things did turn out okay in the end," Junior Parents Weekend Co-Coordinator Richard D. Gardner '95 said. "The two events did co-exist peacefully.