University of Texas Executive Vice-President and Provost Mark G. Yudof says the previous policy was not intended to be significantly different from what the plaintiffs in the case wanted.

According to Yudof, under the previous system, there were no separate cutoffs for minority and white applicants. However, minority applicants were examined by the assistant dean of the school, in addition to the standard admissions committee, while white applicants were not.

In order to assuage concerns that the U-Texas policy amounted to separate committees reading the applications, Yudof said the school modified its previous system several weeks before the trial, so that the same committee read all of the applications.

"The university defended everything," Yudof says. "We defended based on past and present discrimination and made a lot of arguments about the need to integrate professions and the socioeconomic pipelines through which people can obtain jobs."

"We won a smashing victory in trial court," Yudof says. "The judge made extensive findings to say that what we said was true."

The judge agreed that Texas' policy fell in line with national law under the Bakke case, according to Yudof.

In appellate court, however, Yudof says the university "ran into a buzzsaw." Not only did the court rule that the previous structure of separate readings for the applications was unconstitutional, but the court also ruled that taking race into account at all was unconstitutional.

"The court ruled that Bakke was no longer the law of the land," Yudof says.

The Stormy Present

The results in the Hopwood case have left national laws ambiguous, with Hopwood applying in three states and Bakke in the other 47.

The result has been that colleges and universities have scrambled to determine their courses of action; affected schools have had to completely redesign their admissions processes and non-affected schools have had to ready themselves for possible future changes.

From the Harvard perspective, the Supreme Court's decision over the summer is a mixed blessing, Rudenstine says.

"Bakke remains the law of the land, which is where we want to be, where we stand and where we ought to be," Rudenstine says.

The Harvard admissions process was, in fact, cited in by the Supreme Court in the Bakke decision as a model for other schools to follow.

Harvard's Director of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons '68 says admissions offices around the country have been talking about the decision, and everyone is watching for another case to reach the Supreme Court.