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PRESIDENT BOK flew down to New York last week to speak at a NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund dinner given in honor of John W. Davis. Because Davis has been a pioneer in the modern struggle to give black people equal rights in the educational system, Bok said he wanted his speech to offer an accounting of the way Harvard has tried to mete out justice in its treatment of black. Considering that the Bok administration has never had a very easy time dealing with minorities, a general stocktaking such as the one the NAACP was privy to last...
...early sixties, universities like Harvard took a simplistic approach to their treatment of minorities, Bok said, but were forced to deal more seriously with race later on in the decade after black students began to discover "the subtle, pervasive flaws in our attitudes toward minority groups." Bok told the NAACP that when these black activists took a close look at Harvard's hiring and academic policies in the sixties they found "a vast capacity for benign neglect, easy rationalizations for inaction and myriad forms of subtle discrimination that infected many levels of administration throughout our complex institutions...
...subtle" racism that prevailed here during the Pusey administration provided the dialectical thesis and black activists offered the corresponding antithesis, the Bok administration--true to form--sallied forth with an attempt at synthesis. After Harvard's discriminatory ways had been exposed, Bok told the NAACP, "much of our attention in recent years has been directed to overcoming these problems." And like a proud father, Bok pointed to the "sudden appearance" of affirmative action programs, minority recruiters and the Afro-American Studies Department as proof of Harvard's steadfast determination to deal straight-forwardly with its institutional failings...
Judging from his NAACP speech, Bok would seem to be better aquainted with the theory of dialetics than he is with the facts of the matter. While it is no doubt true that racism--subtle or otherwise--thrived at Harvard during the sixties and while it is also true that many black students identified Harvard's institutional prejudices and tried to rearrange them, the whole analysis begins to break down when you start talking about the Bok administration's efforts to redress the problem. The three programs that Bok mentioned in his talk--affirmative action, minority recruitment and black studies...
...response of some city councilors to the black patrolmen's complaint angered community groups including the local chapter of the NAACP and the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee, as well as many white civic leaders. Council independents Daniel Clinton, Walter Sullivan and Thomas Danehy made public statements last month that led one civic group to charge "racism" in the city council...