WHY A DIVERSE STUDENT BODY IS SO IMPORTANT

By Neil L. Rudenstine

Few issues have aroused more debate in recent years than those surrounding diversity and university admissions. Out of the controversy, several proposals have emerged to eliminate factors such as race, ethnicity, and gender from consideration in the admissions process. The University of California system, at the direction of its Board of Regents, is scheduled to implement such changes soon. A few weeks ago, in Hopwood v. State of Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the University of Texas may not consider race as a factor in its law-school admissions, despite the university's assertion of a compelling interest in fostering student diversity.

In a debate so often framed in terms of the competing interests of different groups, it is all the more important that we continue to stress the most fundamental rationale for student diversity in higher education: its educational value. Students benefit in countless ways from the opportunity to live and learn among peers whose perspectives and experiences differ from their own.

A diverse educational environment challenges them to explore ideas and arguments at a deeper level-to see issues from various sides, to rethink their own premises, to achieve the kind of understanding that comes only from testing their own hypotheses against those of people with other views. Such an environment also creates opportunities for people from different backgrounds, with different life experiences, to come to know one another as more than passing acquaintances, and to develop forms of tolerance and mutual respect on which the health of our civic life depends.

Some historical context can be helpful in our present situation. The deliberate, conscious effort to achieve greater student diversity on our campuses was not born in the 1960s, as some might believe. It did not originate with formal programs of affirmative action. It reaches back at least a century earlier, to a time when issues of racial, ethnic, and other forms of diversity were no less volatile in American life than they are today. I discussed some of this history in a recent report to Harvard's Board of Overseers. While the report focused largely on Harvard-and while different institutions have taken various approaches-some aspects of Harvard's experience highlight points of more general significance.

Diversity as an important concept in education was discussed as early as the mid-19th century. At Harvard, the coming of the Civil War prompted some of the earliest comments on the subject. On the eve of the war, Harvard President Cornelius C. Felton saw an urgent need for universities to reach our more consciously to students from different parts of the country. Gathering such students, he wrote, "must tend powerfully to remove prejudices, by bringing them into friendly relations."

Felton did not suggest that there was any link between geographical background and individual academic achievement or promise; his rational was quit different. He understood that students from different parts of the nation, from different states and regions, possessed a variety of cultural, political, and social attitudes born of their own experiences. By bringing such students together in a residential community dedicated to learning, he reasoned, a university could not only offer a more challenging education, but also could help " to remove prejudices" and foster greater mutual understanding.

Only a few years earlier, Henry Adams had attended Harvard with classmates who were drawn largely from well-established New England families. But, as he later wrote, "chance insisted on enlarging [his] education by tossing a trio of Virginians" into the mix, including "Roony" Lee, son of Robert E. Lee. Adams, as he wrote of himself and the Virginians, "knew well how thin an edge of friendship separated them in 1856 from mortal enmity," but they managed a friendship that was "unbroken and even warm."

For the first time, Adams's education "brought him in contact with new types and taught him their values. He saw the New England type measure itself with another, and he was part of the process." Decades later, Adams still vividly remembered the "vital lesson" he had learned in first coming to know and to understand people whose outlooks were so different from his own. After the Civil War, Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, expanded the conception of diversity, which he saw as a defining feature of American democratic society. he wanted students from a variety of "nations, states, schools, families, sects, and conditions of life" at Harvard, so that they could experience "the wholesome influence that comes from observation of and contact with" people different from themselves. He wanted students who were children of the "rich and poor" and of the "educated and uneducated," students "from North and South, from East and West," students belonging to "every religious communion, from the Roman Catholic to the Jew and the Japanese Buddhist."

Although Eliot's turn-of-the-century conception of "race" differed from our own-particularly in its emphasis on characteristics that we might today associate more with ethnicity, national origin, immigrant status, or religion-Eliot identified the "great diversity in the population of the United States as regards racial origins" as a critical element in America's heterogeneous society.

And so Harvard-quite consciously-began to open its doors to children of new immigrants, to members of religious minorities, and also (although) in small numbers) to African Americans. One of those black students, W. E. B. Du Bois, class of 1890, would later affirm the significance of Eliot's broad vision. Harvard, Du Bois wrote, "was no longer simply a place where rich and learned New England gave the accolade to the social elite. It had broken its shell and reached out to the West and to the South, to yellow students and to black. . . [Eliot and others] sought to make Harvard an expression of the United States."

Eliot realized that diversity can cause turbulence in the life of a university and make the experience of being a student more difficult and, at times, even alienating. But he insisted on the importance of a more open, diverse, and even disputatious university, where the "collision of views" would promote "thought on great themes," teach "candor" and "oral courage," and cultivate "forbearance and mutual respect." He saw that an inclusive vision of higher education not only would benefit individual students, but also would serve the needs of a society strongly reliant on a wide variety of citizens who would have to learn to live together if the nation's democratic institutions were to function effectively and if its ideals were to be realized.

The goals that Charles Eliot and other educators tried to achieve a century ago may strike many people as irrelevant to our present circumstances, because so much has changed since the early 20th century. Harvard, like many other universities, has become far more diverse. The path has been one of genuine, if slow and imperfect, progress-not without hesitation and serious lapses, not with tension and divisiveness and struggle, and not without challenges still to be met.

But the essential principles defined by Eliot and others are no less important now than they were a century ago. We must reaffirm the critical role that students with different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences play in educating on another. We need to insist upon the essential part that colleges and universities play in creating opportunities for students to live in association with peers who are, in many respects, different from themselves but who also have much in common. The process is not always smooth, but its complexity only highlights its importance.

This perspective has long been integral to Harvard's approach to admissions, and to those of many other colleges and universities. We select students not only on the basis of what they have already achieved academically, but also on strong evidence of their future promise, including their capacity to contribute to the larger society; on their character, curiosity, and determination; on their willingness to engage in discussion and debate, and to entertain the idea that tolerance and mutual respect are worthy goals. We assess individuals as individuals, looking not only at important yet imperfect measures such as grades and test scores, but also at a wide range of factors including particular talents, experiences, interests, and backgrounds.

In choosing from among a pool of qualified candidates larger than the number of available places, we also consciously consider the "mix" of the class as a whole, because we recognize how much our students' variety-along many dimensions-contributes to their education. Indeed, Justice Lewis F. Powell, in his pivotal opinion in the Supreme Court's 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case, recognized that universities have a compelling interest in the educational benefits of a diverse student body.

In the recent Hopwood case, however, two members of the three-judge appeals court rejected Justice Powell's reasoning, as well as the decision of a majority of the Supreme Court in Bakke that race may be considered as one factor among many in university admissions. The Hopwood opinion asserts that the consideration of race as a factor in the admissions process "simply achieves a student body that looks different" and thus "is no more rational on its own terms" than considering "the physical size or blood type of applicants." I respectfully and strongly disagree.

Clearly, no racial or ethnic group is monolithic, and few would suggest that race or ethnicity alone is responsible for defining an individual's experiences and point of view. Nonetheless, race historically has been, and still remains, a powerful distinguishing feature in our society. For instance, we can speak meaningfully of African-American cultural traditions and communities-while fully acknowledging their disparate elements-in ways that we could not do if we focused upon a group of men and women whose common feature was O-negative blood.

Our current situation is the product of centuries of history; circumstances may well change in the future, but they are unlikely to do so quickly or without conscious and sustained effort. Race remains a factor that significantly influences the process of growing up and living in the United States-one that clearly plays a role in shaping the outlooks and experiences of millions of Americans.

To say that factors such as race and ethnicity may be taken into account in the admissions process certainly does not mean that they should be elevated above all others. It does not imply efforts to achieve specific numerical targets through quotas. It means that an applicant's race or ethnicity may be considered as one factor among the many considerations that go into assessing each applicant as a genuine individual-as someone whose "merit" cannot be measured purely in terms of numbers; as someone who has the potential to contribute something distinctive and important to the enterprise of learning and to society.

We should not romanticize diversity as we assess its value. We know that close association among people from different backgrounds can lead to episodes of tension, and that common understandings often emerge only slowly and with considerable effort, if at all. Yet we need to remember that the character of American society, from its very beginnings, has been shaped by our collective willingness to carry forward an unprecedented experiment in diversity, the benefits of which have seldom come without friction and strain.

Without overstating our successes, we should recognize that the steady efforts to diversify our colleges and universities have brought about the most inclusive system of higher education ever achieved. American education has grown stronger as a result, and so have the prospects for our heterogeneous democracy. Whatever problems we face as a society, it is difficult to imagine that they would not be far more severe, divisive, and profound if the nation had not made a sustained commitment to opening the doors of higher education to people of all backgrounds, including people from different racial and ethnic groups.

I do not believe that we can solve the persistent problems surrounding race and ethnicity in American life simply by stating that we live, or ought to live, in a society where those characteristics have ceased to be significant. Our hope lies in finding effective ways to narrow-and bridge-the gaps that continue to exit among people of different races and ethnic backgrounds. One of the most significant ways we have begun to achieve that goal is through education. To change course now would be to retreat from decades of steady hope and progress, to follow pathways far less bright and far less full of promise.