[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 31 (Wednesday, February 26, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2829-S2832]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               RACE-SENSITIVE ADMISSIONS: BACK TO BASICS

  Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following 
paper, ``Race-sensitive Admissions: Back to Basics,'' by William G. 
Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University, and Neil L. 
Rudenstine, president emeritus of Harvard University, be printed in the 
Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

       The controversy (and confusion) surrounding the White 
     House's recent statements on the use of race in college and 
     university admissions indicate the need for careful 
     examination of the underlying issues. The Justice Department 
     has filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging it to 
     declare two race-sensitive policies at the University of 
     Michigan unconstitutional; however, the brief does not rule 
     out ever taking

[[Page S2830]]

     race into account, but argues that institutions should first 
     exhaust all ``race-neutral'' alternatives. Secretary of State 
     Colin Powell has publicly said that he supports not just 
     affirmative action, but also the Michigan policies. National 
     Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice says she opposes the 
     specific methods used by Michigan, but recognizes the need to 
     take race into account in admissions.
       As the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments in a 
     case that will shape college admissions processes in the 
     coming decades, those of us who believe that such processes 
     should be permitted to include a nuanced consideration of 
     race must speak out clearly as well as forcefully. Too often, 
     we fear, the key issues have been oversimplified or 
     overlooked. Having been personally involved with this highly 
     contentious subject for more than 30 years, we would like to 
     try to frame the discussion by offering a set of nine 
     connected propositions about race and admissions that derive 
     from core human values and substantial empirical research.
       1. The twin goals served by race-sensitive admissions 
     remain critically important.
       The debate over race-sensitive admissions has relevance 
     only at public and private institutions of higher education 
     that have to choose among considerably more qualified 
     candidates than they can admit. Essentially all of these 
     ``academically selective'' colleges and universities have 
     elected to take race into account in making admissions 
     decisions, a fact that, in itself, has considerable import. 
     Race-sensitive admissions programs are intended to serve two 
     important purposes:
       To enrich the learning environment by giving all students 
     the opportunity to share perspective and exchange points of 
     view with classmates from varied backgrounds. The recognition 
     of the educational power of diversity led many colleges and 
     universities--well before the mid-1960s, when the term 
     affirmative action began to be used--to craft incoming 
     classes that included students representing a wide variety of 
     interests, talents, backgrounds, and perspectives. The Shape 
     of the River, written by William Bowen and Derek Bok, 
     provides abundant evidence that graduates of these 
     institutions value educational diversity and, in general, are 
     strong supporters of race-sensitive admissions. Survey 
     responses from more than 90,000 alumni of selective colleges 
     and universities show that nearly 80 percent of those who 
     enrolled in 1976 and 1989 felt that their alma mater placed 
     the right amount of emphasis--or not enough--on diversity in 
     the admissions process. That same survey also found that 
     there is much more interaction across racial lines than many 
     people suppose. In the 1989 entering cohort, 56 percent of 
     white matriculants and 88 percent of black matriculants 
     indicated that they ``knew well'' two or more classmates of 
     the other race.
       To serve the needs of the professions, of business, of 
     government, and of society more generally by educating large 
     numbers of well-prepared minority students who can assume 
     positions of leadership--thereby reducing somewhat the 
     continuing disparity in access to power and responsibility 
     that is related to race in America. Since colonial days, 
     colleges and universities have accepted an obligation to 
     educate individuals who will play leadership roles in 
     society. Today, that requires taking account of the clearly 
     articulated needs of business and the professions for a 
     healthier mix of well-educated leaders and practitioners from 
     varied racial and ethnic backgrounds. Professional groups 
     like the America Bar Association and the American Medical 
     Association, and businesses like General Motors, Microsoft, 
     and American Airlines (among many others), have explicitly 
     endorsed affirmative-action policies in higher education. 
     Leading law firms, hospitals, and businesses depend heavily 
     on their ability to recruit broadly trained individuals from 
     many racial backgrounds who are able to perform at the 
     highest level in settings that are themselves increasingly 
     diverse. A prohibition on the consideration of race in 
     admissions would drastically reduce minority participation in 
     the most selective professional programs. Does it make any 
     sense to resegregate, de facto, many of the country's most 
     respected professional schools and to slow the progress that 
     has been made in achieving diversity within the professions? 
     We don't think so.
       2. Private colleges and universities are as likely as their 
     public counterparts to be affected by the outcome of this 
     debate.
       The fact that litigation over affirmative action has, thus 
     far, centered on public universities should not lead that 
     private institutions will be unaffected. The 1996 federal-
     court ruling in Hopwood v. Texas, banning race-sensitive 
     admission policies in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, has 
     been understood to cover Rice University as well as public 
     universities such as the University of Texas. Title VI of the 
     Civil Rights Act of 1964 subjects all institutions that 
     receive federal funds to any court determinations as to 
     what constitutes ``discrimination.'' Because many private 
     colleges and universities have invested substantial 
     resources in creating diverse entering classes, they might 
     well be more dramatically affected by any limitation on 
     their freedom to consider race than would most public 
     institutions. That is especially true because they are, in 
     general, smaller and more selective in admissions than 
     their public counterparts.
       It matters that minority applicants have access to the most 
     selective programs, at both undergraduate and graduate 
     levels, in both private and public institutions. The argument 
     that they will surely be able to ``get in somewhere'' rings 
     hollow to many people. As one black woman quoted in The Shape 
     of the River observed wryly to a white parent: ``Are you 
     telling me that all those white folks fighting so hard to get 
     their kids into Duke and Stanford are just ignorant? Or are 
     we supposed to believe that attending a top-ranked school is 
     important for their children but not for mine?'' That 
     interchange was not just about perceptions. Various studies 
     show that the short-term and long-term gains associated with 
     attending the most selective institutions are, if anything, 
     greater for minority students than for white students, and 
     that academic and other resources are concentrated 
     increasingly in the top-tier colleges and universities.
       3. Race-sensitive admissions policies involve much 
     ``picking and choosing'' among individual applicants; they 
     need not be mechanical, are not quota systems, and involve 
     making bets about likely student contributions to campus life 
     and, subsequently, to the larger society.
       Contrary to what some people believe, admissions decisions 
     at academically selective public and private colleges and 
     universities are much more than a ``numbers game.'' They 
     involve considerations that extend far beyond test scores and 
     GPAs. Analysis of new data from leading private research 
     universities for the undergraduate class entering in 1999 
     (reported in the forthcoming Reclaiming the Game, by William 
     G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin) indicates that a very 
     considerable number of high-scoring minority students were 
     turned down. For instance, among male minority applicants 
     with combined SAT scores in the 1200-1299 range (which put 
     them well within the top 10 percent of minority test-takers 
     and the top 20 percent of all test-takers, regardless of 
     race), the odds of admission were about 35 percent: that is, 
     roughly two out of three of these minority applicants were 
     denied admission. At the very top of the SAT distribution (in 
     the 1400-plus range), nearly two out of five were not 
     admitted. Public universities are larger and somewhat less 
     selective, but they also turn down very high-scoring minority 
     candidates. At two public universities for which detailed 
     data are available, one out of four minority candidates in 
     the 1200 to 1399 SAT range was rejected.
       In short, admissions officers at both private and public 
     universities have been doing exactly what Justice Powell, in 
     the landmark 1978 decision, Regents of the University of 
     California v. Bakke, said that they should be allowed to do: 
     pursuing ``race-sensitive'' admission policies that entail 
     considering race among other factors. They have been weighing 
     considerations that are both objective (advanced-placement 
     courses taken in high school, for example) and subjective 
     (indications of drive, intellectual curiosity, leadership 
     ability, and so on). And they have been selecting very well. 
     According to all the available evidence, minority students 
     admitted to academically selective colleges and universities 
     as long ago as the mid-1970s have been shown to be successful 
     in completing rigorous graduate programs, doing well in the 
     marketplace, and, most notably, contributing in the civic 
     arena out of all proportion to their numbers.
       Minority candidates are, of course, by no means the only 
     group of applicants to receive special consideration. 
     Colleges and universities have long paid special attention to 
     children of alumni, to ``development cases,'' to applicants 
     who come from poor families or who have otherwise overcome 
     special obstacles, to applicants who will add to the 
     geographic (including international) diversity of the student 
     body, to students with special talents in fields such as 
     music, and, especially in recent years, to athletes. Some 
     readers may be surprised to learn from Reclaiming the Game 
     that recruited athletes at many selective colleges are far 
     more advantaged in the admission process (that is, are much 
     more likely to be admitted at a given SAT level) than are 
     minority candidates.
       A related topic deserves some emphasis, and that is the 
     issue of ``quotas.'' There is not space here to discuss the 
     subject in detail, but one point is important to clarify. The 
     fact that the percentage of minority students in many 
     colleges and universities does not fluctuate substantially 
     from year to year is in no sense prima facie evidence that 
     quotas are being used. Anyone familiar with admissions 
     processes--and with their basic statistics--knows that 
     percentages for virtually all subgroups of any reasonable 
     size are remarkably consistent from year to year. That is 
     because the size of the college-going population does not 
     change significantly on an annual basis, nor do the numbers 
     and quality of secondary schools from which institutions draw 
     applications, nor does the number of qualified candidates. 
     All of these numbers are very stable, and it is therefore not 
     at all surprising that incoming college classes should change 
     very little in their composition from year to year. (For 
     example, we suspect that the fraction of an entering class 
     wearing eyeglasses is remarkable consistent from year to 
     year, but that would hardly persuade us that an eyeglass 
     quota is being imposed.)
       4. Selectivity and ``merit'' involve predictions about on-
     campus learning environments and future contributions to 
     society.
       One of the most common misconceptions is that candidates 
     who have scored above some level or earned a certain grade-
     point average ``deserve'' a place in an academically 
     selective institution. That ``entitlement'' notion

[[Page S2831]]

     is squarely at odds with the fundamental principle that, in 
     choosing among a large number of well-qualified applicants, 
     all of whom are over a high threshold, colleges and 
     universities are making bets on the future, not giving 
     rewards for prior accomplishments. Institutions are meant to 
     take well-considered risks. That can involve turning down 
     candidate ``A'' (who is entirely admissible but does not 
     stand out in any particular way) in favor of candidate ``B'' 
     (who is expected to contribute more to the educational milieu 
     of the institution and appears to have better long-term 
     prospects of making a major contribution to society). All 
     applicants, of course, deserve to be evaluated fairly, which 
     means treating them the same way as other similarly situated 
     candidates; but, in the words of Lee Bollinger, president of 
     Columbia University and former president of the University of 
     Michigan, ``there is no right to be admitted to a university 
     without regard to how the overall makeup of the student body 
     will affect the educational process or without regard to the 
     needs of the society . . . ``Merit'' is not a simple concept. 
     It has certainly never meant admitting all the valedictorians 
     who apply, or choosing students strictly on the basis of test 
     scores and GPAs.
       An elaborate admissions process, which focuses on the 
     particular characteristics of individuals within many 
     subgroups--and on those of the entire pool of applicants--is 
     designed to craft a class that will, in its diversity, be a 
     potent source of educational vitality. Colleges use a variety 
     of procedures to take account of race, and it is essential 
     that differences of opinion concerning the wisdom (or even 
     the legality) of any single approach not lead to an outcome 
     that precludes other approaches.
       5. Paying special attention to any group in making 
     admissions decisions entails costs; but the costs of race-
     sensitive admissions have been modest and well-justified by 
     the benefits.
       The ``opportunity cost'' of admitting any particular 
     student is that another applicant will not be chosen. But 
     such choices are rarely ``head-to-head'' decisions. For 
     example, there is no reason to believe--as reverse-
     discrimination lawsuits generally assume--that if a 
     particular minority student had not been accepted, his or her 
     place would have been given to a complainant with comparable 
     or better test scores or grades. The choice might, instead, 
     have been an even higher-scoring minority student who had not 
     been admitted, a student from a foreign country, or a lower-
     scoring white student from one of several subgroups that are 
     given extra consideration in the admissions process. Making 
     hard choices on the margin is never easy and always--
     fortunately--involves human judgments made by experienced 
     admissions officers. It is, in any case, wrong to assume that 
     race-sensitive admissions policies have significantly reduced 
     the changes of well-qualified white students to gain 
     admission to the most selective colleges. Findings reported 
     in The Shape of the River, based on data for a subset of 
     selective colleges and universities, demonstrate that 
     elimination of race-sensitive policies would have increased 
     the admission rate for white students by less than two 
     percentage points: from roughly 25 percent of 26.5 percent.
       It should be emphasized that taking race into account in 
     making admissions decisions does not appear to have two kinds 
     of costs often mentioned by critics of these policies.
       First, there is no systemic evidence that race-sensitive 
     admissions policies tend to ``harm the beneficiaries'' by 
     putting them in settings in which they are overmatched 
     intellectually or ``stigmatized'' to the point that they 
     would have been better off attending a less selective 
     institution. On the contrary, extensive analysis of data 
     reported in The Shape of the River shows that minority 
     students at selective schools have, overall, performed well. 
     The more selective the school that they attended, the more 
     likely they were to graduate and earn advanced degrees, the 
     happier they were with their college experience, and the more 
     successful they were in later life.
       Second, the available evidence disposes of the argument 
     that the substitution of ``race-sensitive'' for ``race-
     neutral'' admissions policies has led to admission of many 
     minority students who are not well-suited to take advantage 
     of the educational opportunities they are being offered. 
     Examination of the later accomplishments of those students 
     who would have been ``retrospectively rejected'' under race-
     neutral policies shows that they did just as well as a 
     hypothetical reference group that might have been admitted if 
     GPAs and test scores had been the primary criteria (which is, 
     itself, a questionable assumption). There are no significant 
     differences in graduation rates, advanced-degree attainment, 
     earnings, civic contributions, or satisfactions with college. 
     In short, the abandonment of race-sensitive admissions would 
     not have removed from campuses a marginal group of mediocre 
     students. Rather, it would have deprived campuses of much of 
     their diversity and diminished the capacity of the 
     academically selective institutions to benefit larger numbers 
     of talented minority students.
       6. Progress has been made in narrowing test-score gaps 
     between minority students and other students, but gaps 
     remain.
       A frequently asked question is: Are we getting anywhere? 
     Data on average test scores in Reclaiming the Game are 
     encouraging. At a group of liberal-arts colleges and 
     universities examined in 1976 and 1995, average combined SAT 
     test scores for minority students rose roughly 130 points at 
     the liberal-arts colleges and roughly 150 points at the 
     research universities. Test scores for other students rose, 
     too, but by much smaller amounts (roughly 30 points at the 
     liberal-arts colleges and roughly 70 points at the research 
     universities). Test-score gaps narrowed over this period, and 
     the average rank-in-class of minority students on college 
     graduation improved even more than one would have predicted 
     on the basis of test scores alone. As anyone who has studied 
     campus life can attest, there are also many impressionistic 
     signs of progress. Minority students are more involved in a 
     wide range of activities, and increasing numbers of children 
     of minority students of an earlier day are now reaching the 
     age where they are beginning to enroll as ``second 
     generation'' college students. Graduates are also 
     increasingly making their presence known in the professions 
     and business world.
       Still, test-score gaps remain (of roughly 100 to 140 points 
     in the private colleges and universities for which we have 
     data), and so there is still more progress to be made. That 
     is hardly surprising, given the deep-seated nature of the 
     factors that impede academic opportunity and achievement 
     among minority groups--including the fact that a very large 
     proportion of such students continue to attend primary and 
     secondary schools that are underfinanced, insufficiently 
     challenging, and often segregated. It would be naive to 
     expect that a problem as long in the making as the racial 
     divide in educational preparation could be eradicated in a 
     generation or two.
       7. There are alternative ways of pursuing diversity, but 
     all substitutes for race-sensitive admissions have serious 
     limitations.
       Many of us have a strong appetite for apparently painless 
     alternatives, and it is natural to look for ways to achieve 
     ``diversity'' without directly confronting the emotion-laden 
     issue of race. Several alternatives to race-sensitive 
     admissions have been suggested. For example, colleges and 
     universities have been urged to:
       Focus on the economically disadvantaged. The argument is 
     that, since racial minorities are especially likely to be 
     poor, racial diversity could be promoted in this way (an 
     approach sometimes referred to as ``class-based affirmative 
     action''). The results, however, would not be what some 
     people might expect. Several studies have shown that there 
     are simply very few minority candidates for admission to 
     academically selective institutions who are both poor and 
     academically qualified.
       Adopt a ``percentage plan'' whereby all high-school 
     students in a state who graduate in the top X percent of 
     their classes are automatically guaranteed a place in one of 
     the state's universities. In states like Texas, where the 
     secondary-school system is highly segregated, that approach 
     can yield a significant number of minority admissions at the 
     undergraduate level (although the actual effects, even at the 
     undergraduate level, have been shown by the social scientists 
     Marta Tienda and John F. Kain to be more limited than many 
     have suggested). Moreover, the process is highly mechanical. 
     Students in the top X percent are not simply awarded 
     ``points,'' as the undergraduate program at the University of 
     Michigan does. Rather, they are given automatic admission 
     without any prior scrutiny, and without any consideration of 
     the fact that some high schools are much stronger 
     academically than others.
       Even if one considered the top-X-percent plan to be viable 
     at state institutions, it could not work at all at private 
     institutions, which admit from national and international 
     pools of applicants and are so selective that they must turn 
     down the vast majority who apply--including very large 
     numbers of students who graduate at or near the top of their 
     secondary-school classes. Private institutions could not 
     conceivably adopt a policy that would automatically give 
     admission to students in the top X percent of their class at 
     the hundreds and hundreds of schools--worldwide--from which 
     they attract applicants.
       The top-X-percent plan is also entirely ineffective at the 
     professional and graduate-school level, because (like 
     selective undergraduate colleges) these schools have national 
     and international applicant pools, with no conceivable 
     ``reference group'' of colleges to which they could possibly 
     give such an admission guarantee. Even if there were a set of 
     undergraduate colleges whose top graduates would be 
     guaranteed admission to certain professional schools, the 
     result would not represent any marked degree of racial 
     diversity. For example, if the top 10 percent of students in 
     the academically selective colleges and universities studied 
     in Reclaiming the Game were offered admission to a 
     professional school (an unrealistically high percentage given 
     the intensely competitive nature of the admission process), 
     only 3 percent of the students included in that group would 
     be underrepresented minorities--and, of course, only some 
     modest fraction of those students would be interested even in 
     applying to such programs. If we are examining a top-5-
     percent plan, the minority component of the pool would be 
     about one-half of 1 percent. Without some explicit 
     consideration of race, professional schools that ordinarily 
     admit a significant number of their students from selective 
     colleges would simply not be able to enroll a diverse student 
     body.
       Other troubling questions include: Do we really want to 
     endorse an admissions approach that depends on de facto 
     segregation

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     at the secondary-school level? Do we want to impose an 
     arbitrary and mechanical admissions standard--based on fixed 
     rank-in-class--on a process that should involve careful 
     consideration of all of an applicant's qualifications as well 
     as thoughtful attention to the overall characteristics of the 
     applicant pool?
       Place heavy weight on ``geographic distribution'' and so-
     called ``experiential'' factors, such as a student's ability 
     to overcome obstacles and handicaps of various kinds, or the 
     experience of living in a home where a language other than 
     English is spoken. The argument here is that, if special 
     attention were given to these and analogous criteria, then a 
     sizable pool of qualified minority students would 
     automatically be created.
       But, as we have mentioned, colleges have been using 
     precisely such criteria for many decades, and they have 
     discovered--not surprisingly--that there are large numbers of 
     very competitive ``majority'' candidates in all of the 
     suggested categories. For example, if a student's home 
     language is Russian, Polish, Arabic, Korean, or Hebrew, will 
     that be weighted by a college as strongly as Spanish? If not, 
     then the institutions will clearly be giving conscious 
     preference to a group of underrepresented minority students--
     Hispanic students--in a deliberate way that explicitly takes 
     ethnicity (or, in other cases, race) into account.
       Similar issues arise with respect to other experiential 
     categories, as well as geographic distribution. There is no 
     need to speculate about (or experiment with) such approaches, 
     because colleges have already had nearly a half century of 
     experience applying them, and there is ample evidence that 
     the hoped-for results, in terms of minority representation, 
     are not what many people now suggest or claim. Moreover, 
     insofar as such categories were to become surreptitious 
     gateways for minority students, they would soon run the risk 
     of breeding cynicism, and almost certainly inviting legal 
     challenges.
       All of the indirect approaches just described pose serious 
     problems. Nor can they be accurately described as ``race-
     neutral.'' They have all been proposed with the clear goal 
     (whether practicable or not) of producing an appreciable 
     representation of minority students in higher education. In 
     some cases, they involve the conscious use of a kind of 
     social engineering decried by critics of race-sensitive 
     admissions.
       Surely the best way to achieve racial diversity is to 
     acknowledge candidly that minority status is one among many 
     factors that can be considered in an admissions process 
     designed to judge individuals on a case-by-case basis. We can 
     see no reason why a college or university should be compelled 
     to experiment with--and ``exhaust''--all suggested 
     alternative approaches before it can turn to a carefully 
     tailored race-sensitive policy that focuses on individual 
     cases. The alternative approaches are susceptible to 
     systematic analysis, based on experience and empirical 
     investigation. A preponderance of them have been tested for 
     decades. All can be shown to be seriously deficient. Indeed, 
     if genuinely race-neutral (and educationally appropriate) 
     methods were available, colleges and universities would long 
     ago have gladly embraced them.
       8. Reasonable degrees of institutional autonomy should be 
     permitted--accompanied by a clear expectation of 
     accountability.
       As the courts have recognized in other contexts (for 
     example, in giving reasonable deference to administrative 
     agencies), a balance has to be struck between judicial 
     protection of rights guaranteed to all of us by the 
     Constitution and the desirability of giving a presumption of 
     validity to the judgments of those with special knowledge, 
     experience, and closeness to the actual decisions being made. 
     The widely acclaimed heterogeneity of the American system of 
     higher education has permitted much experimentation in 
     admissions, as in other areas, and has discouraged the kinds 
     of government-mandated uniformity that we find in many other 
     parts of the world. Serious consideration should be given to 
     the disadvantages of imposing too many ``do's'' and 
     ``don'ts'' on admissions policies.
       The case for allowing a considerable degree of 
     institutional autonomy in such sensitive and complex 
     territory is inextricably tied, in our view, to a clear 
     acceptance by colleges and universities of accountability for 
     the policies they elect and the ways such policies are given 
     effect. There is, to be sure, much more accountability today 
     than many people outside the university world recognize. 
     Admissions practices are highly visible and are subject to 
     challenge by faculty members, trustees and regents, avid 
     investigative reporters, disappointed applicants, and the 
     public at large. Colleges and universities operate in more of 
     a ``fishbowl'' environment than the great majority of other 
     private and public entities. Nonetheless, we favor even 
     stronger commitments by colleges and universities to monitor 
     closely how specific admissions policies work out in 
     practice. Studies of outcomes should be a regular part of 
     college and university operations, and if it is found, for 
     example, that minority students (or other students) accepted 
     with certain test scores or other qualifications are 
     consistently doing poorly, then some change in policy--or 
     some change in the personnel responsible for administering 
     the stated policy--may well be in order.
       That point was made with special force by a very 
     conservative friend of ours, Charles Exley, former chairman 
     and CEO of NCR Corporation and a onetime trustee of Wesleyan 
     University. In a pointed conversation that one of us (Bowen) 
     will long remember, Exley explained that he held essentially 
     the same view that we hold concerning who should select the 
     criteria and make admissions decisions. ``I would probably 
     not admit the same class that you would admit, even though 
     I don't know how different the classes would be,'' he 
     said. ``You will certainly make mistakes,'' he went on, 
     ``but I would much rather live with your errors than with 
     those that will inevitably result from the imposition of 
     more outside constraints, including legislative and 
     judicial interventions.'' And then, with the nicest smile, 
     he concluded: ``And, if you make too many mistakes, the 
     trustees can always fire you!''
       9. Race matters profoundly in America; it differs 
     fundamentally from other ``markers'' of diversity, and it has 
     to be understood on its own terms.
       We believe that it is morally wrong and historically 
     indefensible to think of race as ``just another'' dimension 
     of diversity. It is a critically important dimension, but it 
     is also far more difficult than others to address. The 
     fundamental reason is that racial classifications were used 
     in this country for more than 300 years in the most odious 
     ways to deprive people of their basic rights. The fact that 
     overt discrimination has now been outlawed should not lead us 
     to believe that race no longer matters. As the legal scholar 
     Ronald Dworkin has put it, ``the worst of
     the stereotypes, suspicions, fears, and
     hatreds that still poison America are color-coded . . .''
       The after effects of this long history continue to place 
     racial minorities (and especially African-Americans) in 
     situations in which embedded perceptions and stereotypes 
     limit opportunities and create divides that demean us all. 
     This social reality, described with searing precision by the 
     economist Glenn C. Loury in The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, 
     explains why persistence is required in efforts to overcome, 
     day by day, the vestiges of our country's ``unlovely racial 
     history.'' We believe that it would be perverse in the 
     extreme if, after many generations when race was used in the 
     service of blatant discrimination, colleges and universities 
     were now to be prevented from considering race at all, when, 
     at last, we are learning how to use nuanced forms of race-
     sensitive admissions to improve education for everyone and to 
     diminish racial disparities.
       The former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach draws a 
     sharp distinction between the use of race to exclude a group 
     of people from educational opportunity (``racial 
     discrimination'') and the use of race to enhance learning for 
     all students, thereby serving the mission of colleges and 
     universities chartered to serve the public good. No one 
     contends that white students are being excluded by any 
     college or university today simply because they are white.
       William G. Bowen is president emeritus of Princeton 
     University and president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 
     He is the co-author, with Derek Bok, of The Shape of the 
     River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College 
     and University Admissions (Princeton University Press, 1998) 
     and, with Sarah A. Levin, of Reclaiming the Game: College 
     Sports and Educational Values (Princeton University Press, 
     forthcoming in 2003). Neil L. Rudenstine is president 
     emeritus of Harvard University and chairman of the board of 
     ARTstor. His extended essay ``Diversity and Learning'' (The 
     President's Report: 1993-1995, Harvard University) focuses on 
     the value of diversity in higher education from the mid-19th 
     century to the present.

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