President's Report Explores Diversity

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Diversity in higher education, an ideal often associated with the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, is shown to have far older and sturdier roots in President Neil L. Rudenstine's Report to the Board of Overseers, released this past week.

The scholarly and often passionately argued report traces in its more than 60 pages the history of the idea of diversity at Harvard from its mid-19th century beginnings to the present day. In the last section Rudenstine considers diversity's future.

The report calls for the continued support of diversity in both undergraduate and graduate admissions, at a time when conscious efforts to achieve greater diversity have led to increasing national controversy and political debate.

For Rudenstine, the principal value of diversity in higher education is its capacity to broaden and strengthen students' minds by exposing them to beliefs, points of view, and backgrounds that they would not ordinarily experience. In order to realize such a goal, it is not enough to have students read about the opinions of others. They must, as John Stuart Mill said, "be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them."

"The primary purpose of diversity in university admissions," Rudenstine writes, "is not the achievement of abstract goals, or an attempt to compensate for patterns of past societal discrimination. It represents now, as it has since the mid-nineteenth century, positive educational values that are fundamental to the basic mission of colleges and universities."

Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William Fitzsimmons commented on Rudenstine's report, pointing out that diversity at Harvard is part of an approach to education that takes the entire student experience into account.

"President Rudenstine's report spells out in the clearest possible terms how a diverse student body enhances the quality of a college education, not only in the classrooms, but in the dorms, the dining halls, and in extracurricular activities," Fitzsimmons said.

"This message will grow in importance as the American population transforms itself over the next several decades to one that is increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-racial. And as this happens, Harvard will continue to seek students from every background in order to be able to continue educating its share of those who will lead our country in the generations to come," Fitzsimmons said.

Diversity: The History of an Idea

Rudenstine traces the idea of diversity in higher education in the writings of John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and John Henry Newman, in the public statements of a series of Harvard presidents, and in the rulings and opinions of the Supreme Court. He observes that while diversity has always been recognized as a valued component of education, it has never come without controversy.

"The extent of our nation's success in dealing with diversity can be measured only in the full light of our entire history," Rudenstine writes. "Without such a long-term view, as well as an informed awareness of what can be achieved in a heterogeneous society (and at what speed), we will almost certainly undervalue all that has been accomplished so far, and we will be tempted to overdramatize the shock effect of periodic incidents: incidents that can easily be interpreted as evidence of crisis or failure, when in fact they are often no more than signs of the inescapable if unsettling stresses which exist in a large and complex democratic society such as ours."

Much of Rudenstine's report is concerned with the history of diversity in higher education generally and at Harvard in particular. What these sections bring home is the consistency of the school's aims in striving to broaden the minds of students through exposure to a diverse group of peers. What has changed over the years is not the philosophy, but the degree to which its implications have been translated into reality.

The earliest Harvard president in whose writings Rudenstine finds the idea of diversity as a positive educational force is Cornelius Conway Felton (who served 1860-62), who, on the eve of the Civil War, advocated the recruitment of students from throughout the United States and territories.

Such a policy, he wrote, "must tend powerfully to remove prejudices, by bringing them [students] into friendly relations.... Such influences are especially needed in the present disastrous condition of public affairs."

President Felton's offer to ease the nation's ideological stresses by encouraging friendly relations in a nationally diverse student body led to a tradition of diversity at Harvard which grew increasingly wider in its range of application.

One of the most notable figures in Rudenstine's report is Charles William Eliot (1869-1909), who not only presided over the transformation of Harvard College into Harvard University, but declared that a Harvard education should be available to children of the "rich and poor," the "educated and the uneducated."

Toward the end of his long tenure, Eliot expressed satisfaction that Harvard was now open to students and faculty of "every religious communion, from the Roman Catholic to the Jew and the Japanese Buddhist."

In addition to instituting financial aid policies to help poor students attend Harvard, Eliot succeeded in creating a far more diverse student body. During the years he served as president the proportion of Roman Catholic students rose from one to nine percent and Jewish students from one to seven percent. Black students, W.E.B. Du Bois among them, began attending Harvard during Eliot's presidency, though in very small numbers.

Rudenstine goes on to recount the contributions to diversity made by Harvard's 20th-century presidents. James B. Conant put into place recruitment policies to seek out talented students from a wider geographical and socioeconomic pool, and instituted the Harvard National Scholarships program to provide financial aid for these students.

Presidents Nathan M. Pusey and Derek Bok continued to push admissions policies in the direction of greater inclusiveness, concentrating more on candidates as whole, rounded human beings rather than as aggregates of standardized test scores. During this period, Harvard made significant gains in enrolling minorities and women.

Challenges to Diversity

In discussing how diversity in higher education can best be achieved, Rudenstine draws on the Supreme Court's 1978 Bakke decision, the Court's most explicit statement to date on race, ethnicity, and university admissions.

He observes that Justice Powell's pivotal opinion in Bakke, although it disapproved a system of set-asides used by the University of California (Davis) Medical School, approved the consideration of race or ethnicity as factors in an admissions process that weighs many different factors into the balance.

"In such an admissions program," Powell wrote, "race or ethnic background may be deemed a 'plus' in a particular applicant's file, yet it does not insulate the individual from comparison with all other candidates for the available seats."

Rudenstine notes that Powell's opinion cites the Harvard College admissions process as a leading example of how race or ethnicity may properly be taken into account.

Rudenstine also stresses that Powell's conclusion, supporting the consideration of race or ethnicity as a "plus" factor, rests squarely on an educational rationale: universities have a substantial interest in a diverse student body, because interaction with a diverse group of peers is an important part of learning.

The Future of Diversity

Rudenstine advocates for the continuation of an admissions policy based on this principle, making the point that "a college or university is responsible first and foremost to the applicants it chooses to admit, and it must attempt to create the best possible educational environment for them."

In order to create such an environment, admissions officers must keep the big picture in mind. Admissions decisions cannot be viewed as "isolated, atomistic events." Rather, "each decision is made in the context of others, where the pattern of the whole is also taken into account. This pattern contributes significantly to student diversity -- and diversity, as we have seen, is strongly linked to the quality of learning."

Finally, looking toward the future, Rudenstine emphasizes that diversity in education, difficult as it may be to achieve, must not be neglected. It is essential to the process of learning and to a healthy democratic society.

"Such diversity is not an end in itself, or a pleasant but dispensable accessory. It is the substance from which much human learning, understanding, and wisdom derive. It offers one of the most powerful ways of creating the intellectual energy and robustness that lead to greater knowledge, as well as the tolerance and mutual respect that are so essential to the maintenance of our civic society."