Harvard wants diversity? Fine. But offering prospective first-years prizes for their skin color is a patronizing and superficial approach, whether those prizes are special recruiting efforts, affirmative action admissions policies or special scholarships for minority students--as the staff said may be needed in the future.

The staff's emphasis on Harvard's need for a competitive edge in the minority bidding wars treats minority bidding wars treats minority students as mere trophies to be won by the University, and condescendingly glosses over other, non-financial reasons why minorities may not attend Harvard.

The staff recommends class-based recruitment programs (and, if necessary, scholarships) as a way to eliminate some of the inequities implied by race-based preferences. And it's true that expanding the focus of recruitment programs to include the recruitment of low-income students may indeed help ensure that the minorities who benefit from affirmative action are from ghettos and not Exeter. This solves the economic fairness question.

But if Harvard is already recruiting the disadvantaged, why go out of the way to recruit especially minorities? Aren't all poor people created equal? Class-based recruitment and other such programs would extend sufficient opportunities to the minority (and the white) underclass; the addition of race as a factor would only help those minorities who are not economically disadvantaged.

Moreover, the staff's diversity argument is patronizing to both minority and low-income students. Unlike purely race-based preferences, class-based affirmative action actually can be justified on the basis of equity--they offer educational opportunities to the disadvantaged and take into account that a student's intelligence may be higher than his test scores indicate (because of his poor educational background). There is no need for an appeal to diversity, which sounds as if we rich white Harvard students want to have some poor minority kids around as a learning experience for us.

However, even if one is convinced by the diversity argument and thinks Harvard should make an effort to attract students of a certain race or ethnicity, one should realize that colleges that offer race-based aid packages (or any other perks based on skin color, like affirmative action) are really bribing the students into accepting a college whose race relations climate might otherwise turn them off. Universities find it simpler to lure minorities with money than to make the campus attractive to them in its own right.

As the staff admits, race-based affirmative action without class-based affirmative action is potentially unjust. But once you have the latter, the former is irrelevant. Concentrating on diversity (the composition of the group) rather than equity (a level playing field for the individual) turns such programs into patronzing tokenism--an attitude we once had the courage to call racism.