Report Questioned Diversity And Affirmative Action

Getting into the College is one thing. Thriving, at least for some black students and women, may be altogether different, a 1982 Harvard report suggested.

Two hundred students threatened to storm Mass. Hall on an October day in 1980 to protest the report, written by a special assistant to then-University president Derek C. Bok. The report suggested that black students and women at the University perform poorer academically than their test scores would predict.

The assistant, Robert E. Klitgaard ’68, also suggested in his findings that affirmative action might not be working, that it’s unclear whether diversity benefits a university, and that Jewish students—unlike their black and female peers—perform better than their test scores indicate.

But the Klitgaard Report, as it was popularly called, was prematurely released when The Crimson leaked a rough draft of the report, which was to be finished more than a year later.

While Bok criticized The Crimson for releasing excerpts from the unfinished draft, leaders of minority groups criticized Bok for commissioning a report undermining affirmative action. Bok addressed the controversy in an open letter that spring, defending the University’s admissions and hiring policy and reasserting his support for affirmative action.

But, then-president of the Black Law Students Association Penny Marshall said the open letter “does not address or disavow the findings of Klitgaard, and we are concerned about that.”

Klitgaard, who analyzed data from the College and the graduate schools for his report, today says the fallout took him by surprise.

“We expected people to be creative and rational,” he says.

A crowd nonetheless gathered in front of the president’s office and University Hall, where they called for Bok to denounce the report and terminate the study, among other demands.

When asked whether Bok supported his report, Klitgaard responds, “He was fine.”

Bok defended his motives in a letter to The Crimson in 1980 that he “did not ask Mr. Klitgaard to investigate the abilities or performance of particular groups of students—either by sex, race, or religion.” But he says that the poor performance of African Americans is still an issue.

“I still support affirmative action as strongly as ever,” he writes in an e-mail. “Just why African American students tend to perform below what prior grades and test scores would predict remains an unsolved problem.”

DOUBTING DIVERSITY

The University defended its admissions policies that considered race a factor in an amicus brief it filed with other universities in the 1978 Bakke v. Regents of the University of California and again in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger.

“The race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases,” the University’s brief in ’78 stated. Supreme Court Chief Justice Lewis F. Powell cited the Harvard admissions standard as an example of sound policy.

But at least one man at the University questioned whether affirmative action harms more than it helps.

Klitgaard says his main purpose in writing the report was to analyze whether students benefit from diversity.

He hypothesizes that a graduate school of education may benefit from admitting students from both the inner-city and the suburbs, and that a divinity school could enrich its educational experience by admitting students who follow different faiths. But diversity might not matter as much at a math or engineering school, Klitgaard argues. And he contends that the benefits of diversity in an undergraduate setting seem even less certain.

“How the average student benefits from studying at college with different numbers or proportions of blacks or Californians or athletes or socialists is not clear,” the Klitgaard Report said, according to the excerpt released by The Crimson in 1980.

“You’re not just taking the smartest people,” he says now. “You’re looking at lots of things.”

Klitgaard says he still cannot provide a definitive answer as to why minorities lag behind but that this may be a drawback of affirmative action.

“If elite universities did not compete so heavily for blacks these students might attend slightly lesser institutions where they might compete as intellectual equals,” the report stated.

Although the Klitgaard Report also mentioned that Jewish students performed better than their test scores predict, Klitgaard now says that he did not have data on Jewish students at Harvard.

BEYOND TEST SCORES

Black student groups from the College and graduate schools wrote in a letter to The Crimson in October 1980 that the report relied more on numbers than on truth.

“Since when do raw scores devoid of personal context gauge admission?” the groups wrote.

The Crimson received criticism from both minority student groups and the administration for sensationalizing the report.

“I would urge members of the Harvard community not to place any weight on isolated quotations from an unofficial draft of an outline,” Bok wrote in a letter to the editor.

“The statements were alarming to people,” Klitgaard now says. “That’s the way news works. They see a couple of points.”

Alison Dundes Renteln ’81, the president of the Radcliffe Union of Students that year, recalls fighting for greater minority representation during her time on campus.

“We were expressing support for affirmative action at a time when that was controversial,” Renteln says. She recalls advocating for more female and minority tenured faculty.

Renteln adds that she and many of her peers at Harvard in 1980 questioned the idea that SAT test scores could predict any student’s performance. She says that success in college for minorities and women largely depends on mentors—minority and female members of the faculty from whom students can learn.

“I think women wanted to have people who could inspire them,” she says.

BACK TO BOK

In the 1998 book “The Shape of the River” that Bok co-wrote with former Princeton University president William G. Bowen, Bok presents some factors that could be responsible for the supposed decline in expected academic performance.

The book suggests that pre-college influences such as the rigor of a student’s educational background and his or her family and socioeconomic situation can explain the disparity in performance between races.

“In general, black students are more likely than white students to come from educational backgrounds that will not adequately prepare them for the challenges of college,” Bok and Bowen write.

Latino students’ organization Fuerza Latina president Christina L. Anderson ’08 agrees that minority students may struggle in an environment that is more academically competitive than their educational backgrounds have been. But she says she still stands behind affirmative action.

“It aims to give everyone equal footing,” Anderson says.

Anderson does not see minority students struggle more than other students at the College.

“While Harvard is a very unique place,” she says, “I think that it poses challenges to everyone.”

As for Klitgaard, he says he is not wary of being labelled elitist.

“I think elites are a part of our society,” Klitgaard says. “The question is, ‘How do we select them better?’”

—Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.