Unfinished Business
In this piece, Harry Lewis, Harvard professor, former Dean of Harvard College, and co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, identifies a primary diversity challenge: “How to provide a quality education to students whose preparations differ greatly in quality.” FAIR Advisors Coleman Hughes, Glenn Loury (AM 82) and Ian Rowe (MBA 93) also identify this issue, however Lewis looks within Harvard for the “real work” instead of what happens before college— “I am less confident that we, the faculty, understand the challenge…that diversity of backgrounds scattered through our classes. That is where the real work needs to be done.”
A point that Lewis makes early on is perhaps the most important when it comes to issues of free speech, viewpoint diversity, and intellectual curiosity— To “continue justifying the practice [of racial preferences in admissions] on the basis of the educational merits of a racially diverse student body… is to put an unconscionable burden on minority students. It tells them, in effect, that they are expected to conform to stereotypes, to represent their group’s perspective on whatever subject is under discussion.”
