Meanwhile, at the Med School...

Last spring Dr. Oglesby Paul '38 was a lonely man. As the Harvard Medical School's new director of admissions, Paul was pushing for the elimination of a special minority admissions subcommittee to the full admissions committee; and he was doing so in the face of unanimous opposition from the full committee, ardent lobbying by Third World and minority students, and ruffled dissent from the rest of the Med School faculty.

But in June Paul got himself some not entirely unexpected company, in the personages of a divided Supreme Court in the Bakke case. Four justices agreed that the University of California at Davis Medical School had discriminated against white applicant Alan Bakke by maintaining a special minority admissions structure including quotas. Four other justices held that race should be a criterion in admissions decisions, in the interest of a diverse student body, like Harvard's. Justice Lewis Powell went both ways.

The Bakke decision might have been different if the Court had come down strongly for or against affirmative action. But the Court's wishy-washiness, combined with the fact that no Harvard graduate program except the Med School has a special minority admissions structure, meant that the Bakke decision hit the University's graduate admissions like a pebble plopping into sand.

At the Med School, however, Bakke has probably sounded the death knell for the minority admissions subcommittee. Oglesby Paul's original proposal for its elimination did a bureaucratic shuffle last May into a review committee surveying the whole of admissions at the Med School. The Third World and minority students thought then that they had won at least another year for the sub-committee--assuming that the bureaucracy would creep at its usual petty pace.

But the terrible ambiguity of Bakke may have scared the bureaucrats enough for what must be a world-record sprint for a review committee--one summer. The University won't say what the committee recommends, just that "they're considering whether changes should be made before this year's admissions process begins," which means within the month.

Now that the issue has come down to the timing of changes, the subcommittee's own demise can't be far off. In its particulars, the subcommittee could hardly have been more different from the UCDavis structure that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional. Instead of quotas and separate admissions, the Med School's subcommittee only screened minority applicants and made recommendations to the full admissions committee. There were goals, but no hard-and-fast numbers. So it's not a threat of possible "reverse discrimination" lawsuits from rejected applicants that has spurred changes; rather the Supreme Court's profound waffling has left affirmative action in doubt everywhere.

Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel the University, put it this way, "Under the Bakke decision I think there can be minority sub-committees--the question is what their functions will be." That was a question the Bakke case was supposed to decide, but didn't.