Court Decision May Alter Grad School Admissions

Harvard professors expressed mixed reaction yesterday to the recent California Supreme Court decision which held that the preferential admissions policy at the University of California at Davis Medical School is unconstitutional.

The California Court made its decision last month based on the fact that the U.C.-Davis admissions program gives preference to applicants on the basis of race, even to applicants who are not as qualified by the university's own standards as non-minority applicants denied admission.

Jack H. Friedenthal, Visiting Professor of Law, who wrote a brief for the American Association of Law Schools on behalf of U.C.-Davis, said yesterday that the California school had 16 slots reserved solely for minority applicants.

"The decision tells the Harvard Grad Schools that what they are doing is wrong," Alan M. Dershowitz, professor of Law, said yesterday. "It may not be unconstitutional because Harvard may not be judged to be a state institution, but you have to be blind, deaf, and dumb, or want to deceive people, to say that Harvard doesn't have separate admissions policies based solely on race, and that's wrong."

"I believe in giving preference to individuals, and I stress the word individuals, who have been personally disadvantaged, who have had to work harder to get where they are," Dershowitz said yesterday.

"But the point is that you can't lump an entire minority group together and give them preferential treatment."

Robert H. Ebert, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, could not be reached yesterday for comment, while Albert M. Sacks, Dean of the Faculty of Law, and Daniel Steiner '54, General Counsel to the University, postponed comment until they have studied the court decision.

Several professors who did comment disagreed with Dershowitz's appraisal of the effect on Harvard.

Derrick A. Bell, Jr., professor of Law, said yesterday that "the type of admissions program with which the California decision deals has become obsolete. Our minority program here at Harvard really encompasses the majority. It is only a part of the rather broad and subjective criterion that admissions people use. These kinds of programs are less subject to legal attacks of this sort.

Friedenthal said that the California Court was very careful not to destroy the legality of minority programs in general. Race cannot enter into the admissions formula, but a set of criteria can be formulated to provide a "reasonable number of various minorities, given a large enough applicant pool."

The real problem, Friedenthal said, is that smaller professional schools, without the drawing power of institutions like Harvard and Stanford, would "get locked into a system where test scores are the only criterion."

"This may turn out to be a very good decision," he said. "It could take the evil of quotas out of the system and force admissions officers to define their criteria clearly as something more than just test scores.