The anonymous disclosure means that it would have been practically wise for Gina Grant to take the risk of trusting someone high in the Harvard echelon with the full story of her past. And it would have been the morally responsible thing to do as well.

I repeat that I do not believe that the full admissions committee should have been told. But I do believe the Dean of Admissions and the President should have been informed. Why? Because, they are the relevant senior guardians of the welfare of this community: who is accepted for admission and under what circumstances is their responsibility. Further, they are individuals in positions which have always called for great discretion and judgment. Would anyone argue otherwise? Does anyone doubt that during their long years of service they have privately adjudicated issues of the greatest delicacy?

Is anyone, including a judge in South Carolina, to say that they do not have the right to know the truth about the extraordinary past of an applicant for membership in the community they oversee because they cannot be trusted to be discreet and act fairly? Whoever wants to assert that ought to state it plainly. And then they should state what that view leads to--that Harvard is not a community where the many adhere to a code of conduct that rests on humanitarian ideals, but just a collection of individuals who are morally free to get here any way they can.

I fully realize that my position demands a great deal of an 18-year-old. But, for one thing, Gina Grant's involvement with the criminal justice system did not result from a minor infraction. She was involved in the most serious of crimes. That does impose an extraordinary obligation on her, and it will for the rest of her life, to think and act with the utmost care.

And yet, even as Gina Grant has lived a life filled with more peril than most of us will ever know, she has persevered and thrived with the help of some people who know about her past.

And she has growing evidence now in the aftermath of the disclosure--in the advocacy of two very able legal specialists, and in the support of Cambridge Public School officials and her teachers and peers at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and an apparently substantial number of students at Harvard--that many individuals will stand with her because of who she has proven herself to be.

She has risked her life before. She needed to risk her life in a different way in dealing with the Harvard admissions process, because the "risk" of exposure and rejection that involved is the risk she will face for the rest of her life.

So, Gina Grant was obligated to take the risk and find a way to tell someone in a high place at Harvard about her past. She did not do so, a transgression anyone with any sense of compassion should be able to understand. But that she did not made it imperative for Harvard to rescind its invitation to her--for the sake of the principles which undergird this community.

I am glad university officials did so.

And I would be as pleased if, now that those principles have been reaffirmed, Harvard were to re-obligate itself to this particular student whom it once admitted because she has rebuilt her life in exemplary fashion and, for her good and for the good of this community, re-admit Gina Grant.

The Writer is a Fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois center for Afro-American Research and a preceptor in the Expository Writing Program.