CASE STUDY OF THE IMPLEMENTATION OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN THE FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY

This study describes the development of the affirmative action policy and its implementation in education in the United States. It was motivated by a desire to trace how the policy of nondiscrimination especially in education is translated into action.;Harvard has 10 Faculty Departments which implement affirmative action autonomously. Of these I chose to examine how the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has implemented affirmative action from 1971 through 1984, and to compare perceptions of the different groups that have been interviewed or have in writing commented on affirmative action at Harvard.;The study showed that administrators and faculty members understood the policy of affirmative action more or less in the same way. They differed however in the strategies that had to be used to implement it. In most cases interviewees in authority gave the reason of the unavailability of candidates for not having the adequate representation of minorities and women in many departments.;The departments of history and sociology were chosen on the basis of their more or less similar skills, their accessibility for my research, and their capacity to handle essential issues of diversity. For information I consulted published affirmative action reports, examined some unpublished documents and interviewed administrators and faculty members.;The literature written on the subject of affirmative action in higher education in the United States was surveyed. Executive Orders from 1941 are examined as they were tools by which different Presidents introduced affirmative action. The study discusses how Harvard views the policy of affirmative action and what steps it took to implement it. Harvard observed that the policy of affirmative action was a good one only if attention had also been paid to the availability of people from whom recruitment could be made.;The main finding in this study is that although some availability pools for certain departments are pretty low, not enough strategies are followed to recruit minorities and women. Even recommendations made by the Permanent Committee on Women and the Committee headed by Prof. Whitla issued after an appeal from Black Students Association were hardly followed by the Departments I investigated. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).