Harvard After Bakke: Is Diversity Enough?

"In Harvard College admissions, the Committee has not set target quotas for the number of blacks, or of musicians, football players, physicists or Californians to be admitted in a given year...but that awareness [of the necessity of including more than a token number of black students] does not mean that the Committee sets the minimum number of blacks or of people from west of the Mississippi who are to be admitted. It means only that in choosing among thousands of applicants who are not only 'admissible' academically but have other strong qualities, the Committee, with a number of criteria in mind, pays some attention to distribution among many types and categories of students."

--Excerpt of a brief by Harvard University etc. quoted by Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in his opinion for the Bakke case.

"Harvard's admissions policies are so vague and discretionary as to defy description." --Alan M. Dershowitz, professor of Law

Perhaps one of the most interesting features of the majority decision in the case of "Regents of the University of California v. Bakke" was Justice Powell's praise of Harvard's undergraduate admissions program as a model for fair, non-discriminatory and most importantly quota-less affirmative action in university admissions. Justice Powell praised Harvard's use of the concept of "diversity" or weighting race as simply one of the many factors in an attempt to create a truly heterogenous student body and found that this sort of unspecified methodology was constitutional while the use of strict quotas was not.

Powell's decision makes an interesting legal point with its comparison of the two systems:

"It has been suggested that an admissions program which considers race only as one factor is simply a subtle and more sophisticated--but no less effective--means of according racial preference than the Davis program. A facial intent to discriminate, however, is evident in petitioner's [UCDavis] preference and not denied in this case. No such facial infirmity exists in an admission program where race or ethnic background is simply one element... in the selection process."

It is hard not to wonder at the apparent blatancy of this language. That which appears to be discriminatory is illegal, but that which discriminates without a set structure, or obvious facial manifestations, is fine.

Whether or not the possible constructions of the language of the decision are disturbing, the real question focuses on the actual, real Harvard admissions office and its effectiveness in bringing in minority students as opposed to the Platonic form of the Harvard admissions office, represented in Powell's decision.

The real undergraduate admissions office is run by L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of admissions, who said at the time of the decision that he was pleased that Harvard was singled out, but felt that Harvard should not be seen as the exclusive example; "we are one of many."

Because Harvard was the model of the right way to go in the Bakke decision, Jewett says, Harvard has had to make no changes in its undergraduate admissions and recruiting policies specifically to accommodate the ruling (See sidebar for Medical School reaction).

"It's hard to tell what it's going to mean in the long run, there may be subsequent decisions, but we didn't see anything in Bakke to prohibit what we're doing," Jewett says.

Harvard does recruit minority applicants, largely by sending minority students into high schools, public and private, to encourage those who have strong qualifications to apply. Students and administrators who do recruiting work are aided by Search Lists which have the names of many promising students (based on test scores) distributed by Educational Testing Services.

The key thing in minority admissions and recruiting, according to Jewett, is to attract a large pool of talented applicant from minority backgrounds. The College admits about 17 per cent of all those who apply. Therefore, for every six applicants, about five must be rejected, even though four might be "admissible" judging by their talents. In short, if the pool of talented "admissable" minority applicants is low, minority admissions will suffer.

Then there is "diversity." Jewett defines the operation of this concept as "trying to attract into the applicant pool people who wouldn't normally apply; people from socio-economic backgrounds whose horizons wouldn't normally include Harvard." As far as quotas are concerned, "diversity as practiced at Harvard has no quotas, says Jewett. "There is no downside protection for the percentages of minorities in any class," he says, adding that the percentages of any group depends largely on their percentage in the applicant pool.

There are some peculiarities, however. A survey of the past five years reveals that the percentage of black students in the College has been fairly consistent. The Classes of 1973 to 1979 all were made up of approximately 7 per cent blacks, the Class of 1980 had a black population of about 8 per cent, black enrollmentdeclined to 7 per cent for the Class of 1981 and went up again to about 8 per cent for the Class of 1982. Similar consistencies exist in the figures for Hispanics and Asian-Americans which both hover between 2 and 3 per cent over the last five years.

Jewett admits with a slightly nervous laugh that you could interpret this trend as a hidden quota system. "I cannot disprove it except by having a bad year," he says, "and I hope we'll never have to prove it that way." Still, some critcism has come on the heels of the Bakke case which contends that Harvard does indeed strive for uniformity of "diversity." Justice Harry A. Blackmun, quoted in an article in "New Republic" by Alan M. Dershowitz, professor of Law, says, "under a program such as Harvard's one may accomplish covertly what Davis concedes it does openly." Dershowitz also alleges that Harvard's system has always given weight to children of alumni and professors, who in the past have been a fairly homogenous (white) group. "It's hard to believe 7 per cent is an accident," he said last week when told of the minority figures.

Dershowitz also alleges that Harvard's recruiting policies tend to bring in middle and upper income minorities rather than those more disadvantaged. Jewett says Dershowitz's charges are "not totally true" and cites the fact that 70 to 80 per cent of all minority students receive financial aid. Jewett also says that there "is a point that people have to come to before we can admit them, maybe Harvard should have programs to fill the gaps (of a disadvantaged background) but our faculty is not oriented to provide remedial opportunities." Harvard is at the mercy of the way society is set up, Jewett says, at least as far as making up for the shortcomings of elementary and secondary education in the areas where many minority students live.

Dershowitz attributes this inability to provide remedial education to laziness on the part of the Harvard admissions office and faculty. "I think Harvard is choosing to have upper income blacks because it makes it easier for Harvard," he says, adding that the Harvard admissions office is "extremely lazy" and looks only at superficial aspects of applicants rather than aggressively trying to recruit.

Although Jewett maintains that Harvard admissions is doing "about all it can under the present system" to attract minority applicants, he admits he is not satisfied with the results. "I don't like to set numbers but to the degree that you have an imaginary total I would hope the ratio (of minorities) in the College would approximate the ratio in the country."

The current admissions staff has more officers who are members of minority groups and all admissions officers have minority recruitment as part of their concern, Jewett says. The heart of the recruitment program, the student recruiters, has a new coordinator, Constance L. Rice '78, who succeeds Robert F. Young '74. Young was critical of the student recruiting program, saying that it lacked professionalism. Rice says this year students will have access to the office computers to write letters to a larger pool of potential applicants, and will be more coordinated with the efforts of administrators in Byerly Hall. "It will be a more cohesive effort," Rice says, adding that the student program now is recognized as a permanent part of the admissions office approach to minority recruiting.

Harvard has unquestionably made gains in bringing minorities into the College over the last ten years. What remains to be seen is whether Harvard's cautious approach, based on the ideal of "diversity" will make further significant progress. On one side, "diversity" offers no guarantee that percentages of minorities in the College will not fall below their current low levels while on the other side it offers no protection against covert quota-setting.

The legacy of Bakke is one of ambiguity, and while Harvard and the rest of the nation wait for a clearer ruling it must operate within that ambiguity, a situation which avoids regression only by the good will of those in power and does little to encourage real progress.