A year later, the committee proposed the creation of the Harvard Foundation for Cultural and Race Relations, an organization that strives to promote cultural awareness.

But some members of the Third World organizations said at the time that the foundation, which still exists, failed to address their initial goals.

“The mission of the foundation was to...have students of color be representative and be ambassadors of their cultural groups,” Kiang explains. “In that framework, students of color were expected to help white students become more aware and sensitive. That’s a fine goal, but that’s not the goal we were demanding that Harvard address.”

Kiang attributes the necessity of such an “infrastructure of support” to the “tokenized” role of minorities on campus.

“Students of color were either completely neglected or marginalized,” he says.

He points to instances of discrimination and insensitivity among student groups like The Crimson and the Hasty Pudding. The Crimson, Kiang says, published a story about a prison riot in New Mexico. The accompanying photo that ran was of African-American students at Harvard with bars superimposed to represent prisoners.

And the Hasty Pudding’s theatrical production featured a racist caricature of a Chinese person, Kiang says.

“These were the mainstream instances,” Kiang says. “It was obvious at that time anyway that the realities of people of color and the presence of people of color on campus made no difference. It was amazing that stuff like that could happen.”

LINGERING QUESTIONS

Matthews recalls filling out his freshmen rooming questionnaire, which at the time asked that students indicate whether or not they would mind living with someone of a different race.

While rooming forms today ask instead about music and tidiness preferences, both alums and current students continue to assess how far Harvard has come in terms of addressing minority issues.

Adela M. Cepeda ’80, a former member of the Committee on Race Relations, contends that race relations have seen significant improvement.

“I think race was more of an issue because there was more class differentiations than, I would say, today,” she says. “For example, my daughter is at Harvard today. She can kind of fit in anywhere there. So the fact that she’s black or Hispanic or anything doesn’t make as much of a difference.”

Looking back on her own experiences, Cepeda says the administration has always been willing to invest its academic and administrative resources, even helping her jump-start a forum on Latino politics at the Institute of Politics while she was an undergraduate.

But Kiang paints a different picture of the College, which he says still has neither made enough of an effort to incorporate cultural awareness into its curriculum nor funneled its resources in that direction.

“About a dozen of us, upon graduation, we made a pledge to not donate as alumni to Harvard, at least the College, until we felt that issues, especially in the curriculum, had been addressed in substantial ways,” Kiang says. “I have every year have had to say that to the people calling me asking for donations, because I still don’t feel that, especially in terms of the Asian American studies, there’s anything after all those years.”

And Kiang, as Director of Asian American Studies at University of Massachusetts at Boston, says he regularly fields requests from Harvard students soliciting resources for Asian-American studies.

“Harvard students call me asking for resources for Asian American studies, and it’s just so ironic,” he adds.

—Staff writer Margaret W. Ho can be reached at mwho@fas.harvard.edu.