PLANTING THE SEEDS
Students rallied behind campus groups that demanded greater recognition for women and minorities from the administration.
Final clubs were the focal point of feminist discussion at the time. One group, Stop Withholding Access Today, embarked on a crusade to upend the male dominated clubs.
SWAT had been founded after Lisa J. Schkolnick ’88 sued the Fly Club for its male-only admissions policy, which she claimed violated Massachusetts prohibitions on discrimination by sex. The case continued into 1989.
Other feminist groups rallied for reevaluating campus security protocols after a woman was raped in her office.
Minority organizations—including the Minority Student Alliance, the Black Student Alliance, and the Third World Student Alliance—also sought greater representation on campus.
Paul remembers the Minority Student Alliance sitting down with various deans and administrators to have an open dialogue about increasing number of minority faculty members.
The group also focused on recruiting and mentoring younger members.
“I think it was a hope from our organization that we could plant the seeds for future generations of people who were involved in the minority community would sort of carry the flag forward,” Paul said.
Perhaps due to pressure from student groups, the University began to make changes to its policies regarding minorities.
In 1988, Harvard launched a review of Asian-American admittance rates.
The effort, sparked by a federal investigation that alleged discrimination against Asian American applicants, examined the disparity between white and Asian admissions rates, which over the past 10 years had averaged 17.0 percent and 13.3 percent respectively.
Student activists also began to call on Harvard to divest from South Africa, which was still operating under the apartheid system.
Their efforts prompted the Board of Overseers to elect Desmond Tutu, an Anglican bishop who led the anti-apartheid movement, in 1989, demonstrating its opposition to the apartheid regime.
Although University administrators claimed that would not succumb to student calls to divest, Harvard announced in April that its investments in South Africa fell from 230.9 million to 163.8 million during the last six months of 1988.
Additionally, Harvard appointed its first woman, Judith R. Hope, to the Board of the Harvard Corporation.
De Leon now says that her activism on campus has influenced her trajectory after Harvard.
She was a member of yhe Zealots in Protest, yhe Black Student Alliance, and the Third World Student Alliance. Although those groups failed to inspire sweeping changes to University policy, she still believes her work protesting the entrenched injustices at Harvard helped shape who she became.
“The people who were most affected by that campaign were those of us who engaged in it,” de Leon says. “I think about it in terms of the making of activists.”
—Staff writer Meg P. Bernhard can be reached at meg.bernhard@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @Meg_Bernhard.