On its face, the employment proposition a Harvard admissions officer put to David Evans seemed far-fetched: leave a prestigious job working at NASA and take a pay cut to come to Cambridge and work at Harvard College.
Now, 50 years later, as Evans is preparing to retire as a senior admissions officer from Harvard, he has been recognized with the prestigious Harvard Award.
While the Harvard student body is just 41 percent white today, in the class of 1973, the first class for which Evans recruited students, blacks, Asians and Latinos made up less than 10 percent of the student body.
Yet in moving from its previous goals of one or two students per year to more than 100, Evans says the admissions department did not have to bend its standards to admit more blacks, because the college has an abundance of qualified applicants.
In the early years, Evans says, it wasn’t always easy for black students on campus.
