Defend Diversity at Michigan

When the Supreme Court announced last Tuesday that it would review the University of Michigan’s affirmative action admissions policies, it rejoined the battle that has been brewing over racial preferences in higher education. At stake is the future of diversity in American universities. Following in the footsteps of University Presidents Derek C. Bok and Neil L. Rudenstine, Lawrence H. Summers should lead Harvard in a vigorous fight to preserve the use of race in admissions.

Since the court’s deeply divided ruling in the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, institutions of higher education across the nation have awaited a new decision on the appropriate role race should play in college admissions. The two cases under review, Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, address whether minorities can be given extra “points” in the admissions process and whether a “critical mass” of minority students is a legal means by which to encourage diversity.

In Bakke, Harvard College submitted a friend-of-the-court brief describing its undergraduate admissions system of giving a “plus” to students from diverse backgrounds, including racial minorities. Justice Lewis F. Powell, expressing the judgment of the court, cited Harvard’s process as a legal way of promoting educational diversity because it did not “insulate the individual from comparison with all other candidates for the available seats.” Harvard’s admissions system, where every application is evaluated individually, is the ideal toward which other colleges should strive.

But many large institutions, like the University of Michigan, lack the resources to thoroughly scrutinize a mountain of applications. For these schools, a point system is a legitimate alternative. Michigan’s undergraduate admissions system assigns points to a wide variety of different criteria—grade point average, SAT score, essay, legacy status and race, among others—and then admits its first-year class based on composite score. This policy is substantially the same as Harvard’s; it merely quantifies the factors that Harvard considers. In a point system, applicants still compete directly against one another for the same spots using the same criteria, and there need be no minimum quota set on the number of minorities. To outlaw the use of race in a point system would mean that many universities would be powerless to use affirmative action merely because of logistical deficiencies—making it impossible for some schools to actually realize the benefit of having a diverse student body.

Of course, not all preferential systems should be embraced. Bakke rightly outlawed racial quotas, which infringe individual rights by excluding white students from consideration for seats set aside for minorities. As such, the University of Michigan law school’s admissions policy—which seeks to enroll a critical mass of minority students—should be struck down. As plaintiff Barbara Grutter argued in her final brief to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, critical mass “is a concept based on numbers.” The fact that critical mass is a vague range of acceptable percentages of minority students means that there is a minimum permissible level of minority representation—a concept that is effectively a racial quota, and wrong for the same reason.

Diversity in universities is a compelling state interest, as Powell wrote in Bakke, and so universities ought to be able to weigh race in their admissions decisions. But true diversity cannot be achieved by considering race alone. “The diversity that furthers a compelling state interest encompasses a far broader array of qualifications and characteristics, of which racial or ethnic origin is but a single, though important, element,” Powell wrote. To attain a meaningful sense of diversity, universities must ensure that they take socioeconomic, geographic and personal factors into account, in addition to race and ethnicity.

Harvard’s last two presidents went to great lengths to ensure that diversity could be considered in college admissions. The Bakke brief was submitted under Bok’s tenure, and Rudenstine coordinated an effort by 62 schools to place a full-page advertisement in The New York Times testifying to the importance of diversity in higher education. Summers’ initial comments—that “race is one of many factors universities should be able to take into account in a well-designed admissions process that promotes the vital educational interest in diversity”—are encouraging. The University should certainly file a friend-of-the-court brief in the Michigan cases, and Summers should similarly continue to forcefully defend Michigan’s undergraduate admissions policy.