As the Supreme Court readies to hear oral arguments tomorrow in a landmark affirmative action case, Harvard is voicing its support for the race-conscious admissions—from the highest level of the administration down to the grassroots.

University President Lawrence H. Summers wrote a New York Times op-ed Saturday and two buses of students plan to travel to D.C. today to defend admissions policies at the University of Michigan and beyond.

Summers, along with Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law Laurence H. Tribe, argued for the educational benefits of diversity and against the Bush administration’s opposing position in the pair of cases before the Supreme Court.

Summers has spoken out in support of affirmative action in the past, but never before from such a high profile platform.

Tribe, an expert in constitutional law, was one of the main drafters of Harvard’s friend-of-the-court brief, co-signed by seven other universities, which argued that the Supreme Court should find constitutional both the University of Michigan’s law school and undergraduate race-conscious admissions policies.

Tribe and Summers’ op-ed largely paralleled the brief, which Harvard filed mid-February.

The article did go beyond the brief in one significant respect, explicitly rejecting opponents’ characterization of Michigan’s policies as quotas.

“Setting aside a fixed number of ‘slots’ for which racial minorities are eligible would be a forbidden racial quota,” Summers and Tribe wrote in the op-ed. “But that epithet does not fairly describe Michigan’s policies...”

The amicus brief focused mainly on the particulars of Harvard’s undergraduate admissions policy, and did not deal in depth with Michigan.

Summers and Tribe also argued that Bush’s preferred “race-neutral” alternative to Michigan’s undergraduate policy—guaranteeing admission to the top ten percent of high school graduates—was flawed.

Neither could not be reached for comment this weekend.

While Summers and Tribe expressed their views in print, Harvard graduate students were finalizing plans for on-the-ground action.

The students have organized two buses to bring nearly 70 people to Washington, D.C. early tomorrow morning, in time to rally outside the hearing.

Alejandro Yepes, a student at the Kennedy School of Government who helped arrange the bus trip, said that some of the students are hoping to be able to enter the Supreme Court to listen to tomorrow’s oral arguments.

According to Yepes, an umbrella group called the African, Latino, Asian and Native American Council, is overseeing the trip.