"I haven't seen a lot of changes. No minorities have been hired. We're not starting on a tremendously positive note," she says.

Ramsdale says coalition members stayed in touch over the summer and have not lost momentum. They plan to gather information from other schools on their minority hiring policies this year.

"You will see a much more organized approach from the CCR this year. We're much less fragmented," she says.

Several students active in the debate were disturbed by the school's decision to take disciplinary action, though minor, against some sit-in participants last spring.

Elizabeth A. Moreno, a member of the coalition, says the University ignored a tradition of treating sit-ins as an acceptable form of protest. "Harvard has decided to go back to the fifties," she says.

"Nobody from the far right to the far left thinks that the administration listens to them or cares about them. It's worse now than ever before," Moreno says.