We all know how much this large country depends on volunteer and nonprofit activity. Bowen and Bok show how much of the laboring oar for these vital activities is carried by graduates of selective colleges, and that black matriculants were even more active than their white classmates. When I went to Yale in 1958 there were no undergraduate women and the tiniest group of African Americans. At Harvard Law School, we had five women in each first-year section and virtually no racial diversity. When I returned to Cambridge to teach in 1970, female and non-white representation was increasing rapidly at the Law School.
Law is taught by discussion and argument.
Yes, Bakke was an important step. Archie had time on his hands after having been dismissed by Robert Bork as Watergate special prosecutor. Harvard's procedures were presented to the Court again in Bakke , as part of a brief submitted by Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and Penn. Justice Powell relied on the Harvard submission, and printed in U.S. Reports at the end of his Bakke opinion an appendix, describing Harvard College's admissions procedures. Justice Powell cast in Bakke the fifth vote for the proposition that race- conscious admissions programs aimed at expanding minority enrollment can be constitutional.