Bureaucratic Solution

"There will be no substantial answers to our problems before the end of the century. There will be visible structure--structure all over, but no visible productive fruit."

--Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes, member of the Verba Committee.

WHEN Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence created the high-profile committee on affirmative action last spring and tapped Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba '53 to chair it, many students and faculty members looked to it to decisively resolve one of Harvard's stickiest problems--its failure to add minorities and women to its faculty in significant numbers.

Women now comprise 7.8 percent of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' senior ranks and 27.7 percent of its junior members. Ethnic minority faculty make up 7 percent of FAS's tenured members and 12.1 percent of its junior faculty. These percentages are less than half those of the population of women and minorities at most other Ivy League schools.

INSTEAD of quick action, the committee proposed layer upon layer of new bureaucracy. The Verba Report makes no stinging criticisms of Harvard's recruitment policies and offers no resounding moral statements about the need to increase FAS's diversity.

It puts complete faith in a series of administrative structures--from a new associate dean to departmental affirmative action representatives--to expedite Harvard's recruitment of women and minority scholars.

Under the plan, each departmental representative would draw up lists of potential minority and women tenure candidates, check hiring practices for discrimination and prepare a written report on their department every year. All departmental representatives together would form a standing committee on affirmative action--chaired by the associate dean.

The Verba Committee may have avoided the suggestion of strong measures to avoid losing the badly needed support of conservative faculty members. That is politically understandable. But in putting their recommendations in the purely administrative realm, the committee should have tried to ensure its structures would get results. An ideologue can get away with failed policy--a technocrat can't.

The report's emphasis on structure and avoidance of measures which would make departments accountable for their deficient hiring practices sets up a wide range of possible outcomes--from substantial progess to continued smug inaction.

THE best possible outcome of this report would be that Harvard would take full advantage of the structures implemented. Spence would appoint a vocal associate dean not afraid to lean on departments who do not make increasing minorities and women faculty members a priority. Faculty representatives would put affirmative action ahead of departmental parochialism and chummy loyalties. And Harvard would lead an effort by the nation's universities to encourage minorities and women to enter academic professions.

But it's hard to predict such a sanguine picture. The Harvard bureaucracy has hardly been a progressive force. Form--no matter how elaborate and well-intentioned--cannot be expected to translate into substance. There are no guarantees that those filling the newly created positions will do anything concrete with them.

A second problem with the report is its slight of measures which would assist women faculty--including measures like childcare and expanded leave policies. The committee was criticized from the beginning for lumping women and minorities together, and committee members last week acknowleged the deficiency in their treatment of some women's issues.

Spence should immediately appoint a committee to analyze what Harvard can do--beyond improving recruitment--to attract women scholars, recognizing the differences between these two groups.

THE immediate challenge facing the Verba Report is approval and implementation by the Faculty. A past affirmative action report lost its way in the Harvard bureaucracy in 1980 and has not been seen since.

The report is a minimal first step, but it is a step nonetheless. The new structures have the potential to effect real change though they have no inherent enforcement mechanism. The report must be taken seriously by Spence and faculty members. But faculty approval and implementation should not be the end of debate over FAS hiring of women and minority professors--it must be seen as only the beginning.