"If we cannot keep a fully-diversified set of higher educational institutions, we're going to be in substantial trouble--educationally and in terms of the society we live in," Rudenstine says. "So there's a lot to be done there, and we'll have to keep doing it."

Harvard also played a critical role in higher education's most important legal battle since Brown vs. Board of Education.

The case was Bakke vs. California, and the Supreme Court ruled that while strict quotas were illegal universities could use race or ethnicity as "plus factors" in admissions, that is, if two equal candidates are competing for one slot, race can be the deciding factor.

Though the University did not use the system of quotas under attack in Bakke, it submitted a friend-of-the-court brief defending institutions' right to use non-metric qualities including ethnicity and gender in selecting students.

Harvard was cited in a majority opinion as a model of how to obtain diversity through admissions. It is this legacy that Rudenstine has defended and Harvard has pursued.

The efforts of Eliot, Bok and former president A. Lawrence Lowell, class of 1877, as well as Harvard's other 20th century presidents, served as the grounding for the Diversity Report which Rudenstine says--besides publicizing Harvard's efforts--was his own reckoning of Harvard's long history with the subject.

Stories Without Numbers

While social scientists and educators almost unanimously hail the benefit of a diverse student body, Rudenstine's efforts to champion the cause of diversity are further hindered by a lack of empirical evidence that variety is educational.

Using race is "no more rational on its own terms than would be choices based upon the physical size or blood type of applicants," reads the opinion in Hopwood vs. Texas, a challenge to Supreme Court Justice Powell's 1978 opinion in Bakke that diversity is beneficial.

According to Gary A. Orfield, professor of education and social policy at the Graduate School of Education, who recently helped organize a conference on affirmative action, academics have neglected to gather the research necessary to support Powell's assertions under the "strict scrutiny" that federal courts are applying to racial preferences.

"Most social scientists thought the benefits of diversity were self-evident," he says.

"College consider themselves normal and the rest of the world that is in need of study," he jockes lamenting that academics have neglected to research and present to the public the "tremendous energy" in a diverse student body.

This lack of evidence leaves affirmative methods to obtain diverse populations in a precarious legal position as conservative benches roll back methods of racial remediation.

"It's hard to overstate how valuable [empirical evidence] could be," Edley says.

He cites the plethora of research on how to make diversity more effective--as opposed--and says, "That's important work, but it doesn't help me with the legal need or the public need to explain.