La Cr

A brouhaha at Harvard Law School over affirmative action

The Harvard Law Review is the top of the mountain. Its members are not only at the nation's most fabled legal institution, but they are the superachieving 8% in each class who are selected to work on the prestigious journal. Law firms fight fiercely for the chance to pay them starting salaries that top $40,000. Now all those who prize and depend on this carefully structured system are in an uproar. The Review has voted to throw a short rope to minority students who have not made it quite as high as their white classmates, and critics, including most of the faculty, are decrying the fall of the "last bastion of meritocracy."

The turmoil began a year ago. At that time, the Review regularly elected as editors 28 students whose grades put them at the top of the 550 in their class. Another 20 were selected after a writing competition testing ability to craft the dry, footnote-laden articles that go into the eight issues published each year. The process yielded a strikingly homogeneous group of 89 editors last year: none was black, one was Asian American and eleven were female. In contrast, the student body was 14% minority and 28% women.

To correct the imbalance, the Review first voted to adopt a rigid quota system. Three editors quit, and dissension among the rest was so great that two weeks later, by a 44-36 vote, the journal decided merely to allow race and sex to be considered in choosing up to eight of the 48 editors. That too drew heavy fire, and the Review put the matter on hold for nearly a year. Last month the editors narrowly approved the mildest plan yet. Starting this spring, minority applicants may submit statements describing "economic, societal, or educational obstacles that have been overcome." One key clause, a piece of polished legalistic ambiguity, requires that anyone selected under the new system have grades "close to" those posted by students chosen in the usual fashion.

Women were included in the first plans, but in the year of reconsideration five women made the Review through the existing writing competition, up from one the year before. Buoyed by that "bumper crop," women students passed word to the editors that they no longer wanted to be part of the affirmative action program. They feared it would only stigmatize those women who did make it.

For their part, minority students consider affirmative action essential. "It's a question of having minority members on the Review with some stigma or of having virtually no minority members at all," says Black Leader Cecil McNab. The lower grades of minority students, he adds, are the result of subtle discrimination, "not underachievement." Minority students believe that the Review should be a voluntary organization, as it is at Yale. Otherwise, many simply will not participate in what is seen as a white-dominated system of judgment. Says Ray Hernandez, a latino: "There's a lot of pressure on us not to succeed to the point where we're going to alienate our own people."

Many on the faculty give that argument low marks. The new plan, argues Professor Charles Fried, "attempts to confer the benefits of membership in a meritocratic organization while being dishonest about the attainment of merit." Other critics fret that come hiring time, Review membership will be a devalued credential. Perhaps. But many firms have their own affirmative action goals, and few will pass up a minority student from the Review simply because he may have had a B + average rather than an A.

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