Roger Clegg, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity who co-signed the letter, stressed that the organizations are not asking Harvard to shut down SVMP altogether.

“We’re not asking them to end the program, but to open it up to students regardless of race and ethnicity,” Clegg said.

Among the other university leaders to whom the two groups have sent letters, several have replied asking for time to investigate the programs in question, Blum said.

MIT changed its six-week summer MITES program to admit both minority and non-minority high school seniors after the Center for Equal Opportunity filed a formal complaint with the Office for Civil Rights.

Princeton University also changed its policy of admitting only minorities to its Junior Summer Institute, a six-week program for college juniors run by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International affairs.

Blum said the University of Virginia, Virginia Polytechnic and State University and Iowa State University have also recently changed the admissions policies of similar programs.

And while the letter comes one month after Harvard filed its friend-of-the-court brief supporting affirmative action admissions policies at the University of Michigan, Blum said that this case involved a very different issue—restricting admissions to certain races, not considering race as one of many factors in admissions.

“The Supreme Court case has nothing to do with the kind of program Harvard is offering here,” Blum said. “[SVMP] is racially exclusive, whereas the University of Michigan’s admissions program is a racial preference question.”

—Staff writer Jenifer L. Steinhardt can be reached at steinhar@fas.harvard.edu.