THE STAFF of the Harvard Law Review will meet soon to select an affirmative action plan; they could end a controversy that has raged for nearly a year over the role race should play in selecting editors for the prestigious journal.

The review is tentatively committed to adopting some form of "race-conscious" policy, thanks to a razor-thin 42-39 vote two weeks ago. But recent pressure by key faculty members could easily lead the editors to overturn that commitment. We urge the review to stick to its guns, and to maintain its determination to compensate for pervasive discrimination by including race as a consideration along with grades and writing samples.

The overriding purpose of the Harvard Law Review should be to provide a forum for legal scholarship, not simply to recognize law students with the highest grade point averages, a function already fulfilled by class rank. The Review's selection process should take into account writing ability and diversity of perspective--not just academic success--in choosing its members. At the upcoming meeting, the editors of the Review should consider requiring each candidate to submit an essay or a review article that would illustrate the student's ability to make a distinctive contribution to the journal. This would allow editors to consider race, sex, economic background and other types of diversity in choosing its staff.

Law faculty have opposed the idea of using race or sex as elements in the selection process. In fact, the day after the review supported a race-conscious policy, the chairman of a faculty committee scrutinizing the journal told editors that if they opted to use race as a criterion, the law faculty would probably abandon its traditional practice of sending the grades of top first-year law students to help with the selection of editors.

Those pressure tactics not only threaten the review's attempt to acknowledge formally that the current system has not fostered diversity among the journal's membership. They also imperil the autonomy of leadership of the review itself; such meddling is particularly in appropriate among students who deserve respect for their ability to make their own decisions.

Law students should protest any move by the law faculty to coerce them into jettisoning attempts to include diversity in selecting members. And if faculty members should succeed in forcing students to scrap the use of race as a consideration, students should boycott competing for the review altogether.