Harvard Moves Into The Arena

When the United States Supreme Court decided this week to review a lower court decision about a "reverse discrimination" admissions policy at a California state medical school, they probably didn't foresee that Harvard's legal luminaries would jump into the fray.

Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University, announced this week that Harvard will submit an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, supporting the affirmative action admissions policy at the University of California at Davis Medical School.

Earlier this year, the California Supreme Court ruled that the school's practice of reserving 16 out of 100 places in each year's entering class for minority students is unconstitutional and discriminates against students who may be more qualified than the 16 minority students who are admitted under the quota.

The terms "more" and "less" qualified can be limiting and misleading, Steiner said yesterday. There are "educational advantages" to having a diverse student body, but diversity should not be equated with inferiority, he said.

There are many more academically capable students applying to colleges and professional schools than the institutions generally have room to admit, but admission decisions should be based on more criteria, Steiner said.

Members of minority groups are poorly represented in many professions, and "colleges and universities have an obligation to try to increase those numbers," Steiner said. The California ruling, if upheld, would bar certain institutional attempts to improve these balances.

The University's brief will urge the court to interpret the Constitution broadly, permitting universities to implement a wide variety of affirmative action admissions procedures to achieve racial, ethnic and sexual diversity.

For its own part, Steiner said, Harvard "seeks to bring excluded groups into the mainstream" but has no formal admissions quotas.

The brief will also argue that universities should remain relatively free of government interference in determining internal polices, a major concern of President Bok's Steiner said. Bok was out of town and unavailable for comment yesterday.

The court will probably not hear the case until next fall.