Voting With His Feet

In a protest that was as alarming as it was original, Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell last week declared not a sit-in but a walkout: he announced that he would take a leave of absence at the end of this academic year and would return to work only when Harvard added a tenured "woman of color" to the law faculty. "I cannot continue to urge students to take risks for what they believe," he said, "if I do not practice my own precepts." Added Bell, whose salary is about $100,000 a year: "I will view removing myself from the payroll as a sacrificial financial fast." His action won praise from colleagues all over the country, though no one else chose to follow suit.

The immediate cause of Bell's decision was Harvard's refusal to consider tenure for visiting professor Regina Austin, a black woman on the law faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. In rejecting Austin's candidacy, Harvard cited a three-year-old rule prohibiting tenure offers to visiting professors. But that technicality did not blunt Bell's anger at the school's hiring policies, which he once characterized as an attempt to recruit people "who look black and think white." Bell, who is black, now concedes that the description was "a bit unfair." But he still sees a "gap between the school's saying 'We're trying as hard as we can for diversity' and the hiring record." That record fully supports Bell's complaint: despite the administration's attempts to increase minority representation, the law-school staff of 60 tenured faculty boasts only three blacks (all men) and five women.

The key obstacle in many disciplines, according to various studies, is not simply racial or gender discrimination but also a scarcity of qualified candidates. Of 3,553 doctorates offered in the humanities in 1988, for example, 2,791 went to whites, and only 110 to blacks, 138 to Hispanics, and 197 to Asians. Last year the Washington-based National Research Council reported that of 13,158 Ph.D.s awarded in the sciences, only 275 went to blacks. Although black university enrollment has increased slightly in the past year, chances for substantial improvement are hardly promising.

The paucity of talent, meanwhile, has led to an unseemly bounty hunt, with big-budget schools scrambling to offer huge salaries and perks for highly qualified minority candidates. The State University of New York recently lured black African-studies expert Ali Mazrui from the University of Michigan with a seductive phone call from Governor Mario Cuomo and a salary of $105,000.

Bell has been inundated with offers from other schools since his announcement but has no plans to move. With all its shortcomings, he says, "Harvard is actually ahead of many other places."