DIVERSITY RULES
After the fervor of the late 1960s, the 1970s ushered in yet a new white backlash to the "affirmative action" policies. Harvard's policy, documented and celebrated as "ideal" by the Supreme Court's 1974 Bakke v. California case, was to maintain its admissions system, but shift away from the language of affirmative action altogether.
Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis '70-'73 stresses to this day that Harvard does not use an "affirmative action" admission system.
"We regard affirmative action as a term to describe an employment practice," she writes in an e-mail message. "It does not connote very well our admission practices, which include regarding ethnicity and other aspects of background as `plus' factors, but which do not include a systematic formula of preference."
Though the numbers haven't wavered much in recent years, admissions officers emphasize that they don't try to reach magic ratios.
To ensure that sufficient attention is given to racial and ethnic diversity, however, since the 1970s, the committee on admissions often employed an additional reader, explains Lewis, "to help the committee be sure that each candidate's particular circumstances (especially connected to ethnicity or culture) did not obscure the excellence of the case."
This year brought an end to the role of that special "fourth" reader for minority applications. Fitzsimmons and Lewis agree that awareness at Harvard and in the rest of the nation have changed sufficiently that such an additional reader is no longer necessary.
"We are quite confident now that our staff and committee are informed and sensitive, in ways that we might not have been as we were gaining experience," Lewis The real battle for a racially diverse College,Fitzsimmons says, is fought in who applies to thecollege--not whom he and other admissions officerschoose to admit. Their main weapons includespecial letters, brochures and the UndergraduateMinority Recruitment Program (UMRP), whichprovides 10 minority contacts for potentialapplicants and sends them on trips to recruit atschools in their hometowns. "There are still misconceptions out there, Itis our role to dismiss them," says Heather C.Chang '99, a student coordinator of the UMRP. THE BLAME GAME AGAIN While the emphasis on "diversity" providedshelter from attacks against affirmative action inthe 1980s, those displeased with the end result ofHarvard's system have found new avenues forattack. In November 1998 and January 1999 editorialcolumns, Republican presidential candidate PatrickJ. Buchanan asserted that Harvard and the rest ofthe Ivy League need to "look more like America,"specifically critiquing the "overrepresentation"of Jewish and Asian-American students at Harvard. "If proportional representation is the name ofthe game, Christian and European-Americans shouldget into the game, and demand their fair share ofevery pie: 75 percent, and no less," Buchananwrites. Fitzsimmons emphasizes that Harvard doesn'tslice up pies. "Diversity is really much more of ameans to an end. You want people of all differentkinds of excellences," he says. But even if Harvard won't admit it, attacks byBuchanan and others who hope to claim a piece of"diversity" for themselves threaten to damage thelegitimacy of Harvard admissions'community-building project. The strategy--for now--seems to be yet anothershift in the language of the College'sself-proclaimed selectivity. The first pages ofthe admissions brochures from throughout the pastdecade show that the self-proclaimed "hallmarks"of the Harvard College experience have changedfrom "diversity" in 1991 to "distinction anddiversity" in 1994 to the "pursuit of excellence"in 1999. The words may change, but Byerly Hall today isstill plagued by dilemmas of representation andinequality that began to be exposed duringLowell's leadership. The problem of the 21st century will involvethe debate over who has access to the powergranted by a Harvard education--a question leftunanswered after Du Bois posed it nearly a centuryago.