Word: msa
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MANY people at Harvard know about the Verba report, which was compiled last year by a senior faculty committee appointed by Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence. In response to the Minority Alliance (MSA) 1988 report on minority faculty recruitment and hiring at Harvard, the Verba committee made specific recommendations towards improving the recruitment and hiring policy for minorities and women...
...understand what the Verba committee set out to do and why the process was a failure, we should go back to the first meeting at which representatives of MSA expressed to Dean Spence their concern regarding Harvard's embarrassingly low number of minority faculty members. Spence said that his office could not interfere with the autonomy of the departments in hiring decisions, so he invited MSA to talk directly to the department chairs about the problem...
...MSA recognized that the root of the problem was confusion and complacency inside most departments, and that the solution lay in effecting change at the departmental level. Since professors in many departments react strongly against the possibility of such change, a mechanism had to be devised to some-how make the departments accountable for their efforts to improve their attitudes and policies...
Thus, the Verba committee's primary task was to devise such a mechanism. Most of the discussion between MSA representatives and the committee members focused on this--MSA sought an institutional insurance of accountability...
...meeting with MSA [Minority Student Alliance] at the end of last year, Dean Spence and [Associate Dean for Undergradute Education David] Pilbeam told us that they would either get Morales-Carrion or somebody else," Ocasio says...