Harvard Leadership Issues Post-Decision Statement
In a statement issued by Harvard’s leadership, including the dean of each school, Harvard affirms its commitment to “diversity and difference” and “a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.”
”We write today to reaffirm the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences. That principle is as true and important today as it was yesterday. So too are the abiding values that have enabled us—and every great educational institution—to pursue the high calling of educating creative thinkers and bold leaders, of deepening human knowledge, and of promoting progress, justice, and human flourishing…”
“Because the teaching, learning, research, and creativity that bring progress and change require debate and disagreement, diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence… Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience… Harvard must always be a place of opportunity, a place whose doors remain open to those to whom they had long been closed.”
As for the way forward? Harvard’s leadership pointed out that “the Court also ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions ‘an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.’”
