Report Excerpts

.The subject of affirmative action arises out of the University's moral commitment to excellence in learning in the service of scholarship and society. This commitment extends to the foundation of the University as a moral community of scholars. The joint action of Church and Colony in the formation of the College speaks to this conjunction of civic and scholarly virtue. Harvard has never been devoted simply to abstract scholarship, and it has always understood its primary commitment to the preservation and dissemination of knowledge in the active rather than the passive voice.

.Faculty can and should increase its efforts to recruit more from each group. The situation differs, however, between minority and female faculty and among the several minority groups. For American Blacks, more than the other groups, there is a contemporary residue of past discrimination that is manifested in on-going socio-economic disadvantage....For women, the main problem is the residue of past discrimination, as well as continuing, often implicit, prejudice and disadvantages in career opportunities.

.For the purpose of this report we do not take the expression "affirmative action" to mean preferential treatment for disadvantaged groups....We take affirmative action to mean conscientious effort to counteract passive as well as active discrimination....Affirmative action involves vigorous effort to search beyond traditional networks; to broaden traditional definitions of field, approach or criteria; and to resist the inertia that works to ensure relative homogeneity among faculty and students.

.Our report would be less than honest if we did not include the cautionary note that the most sustained and vigorous search may not produce the results that we would like.