NEWS - Walter J. Leonard, Pioneer of Affirmative Action in Harvard Admissions Has Passed

NYTimes

Walter J. Leonard (L) and Derek C. Bok (R)
former President of Harvard University

Walter J. Leonard, the chief architect of an admissions process at Harvard that has been emulated across the United States, opening colleges and universities to more women and minorities, died on Dec. 8 in Kensington, Md. He was 86.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his wife, Betty, said.

The affirmative action formula that Dr. Leonard designed for Harvard allowed recruiters to take into account race and ethnicity, on a case-by-case basis, as one of many factors to consider as they sought to assemble a diverse student body.

Martha L. Minow, the Harvard Law School dean, said the plan “had a ripple effect across the nation” as other institutions, facing demands for greater diversity, adopted similar ones of their own.

The Harvard formula has passed four decades of constitutional muster, though the United States Supreme Court, in its current term, is revisiting rulings on similar policies in a case involving the University of Texas.

Even before he designed the admissions policy, Dr. Leonard was aggressively recruiting more diverse applicants to Harvard Law School. Last week, the school’s bulletin, Harvard Law Today, credited him with building “the foundation for the education of more minority and women lawyers than almost any other administrator in the United States.”

Later, as president of Fisk University in Nashville for seven years, Dr. Leonard raised $12 million to restore a measure of fiscal stability to that historically black institution and even offered his $1.5 million personal life insurance policy as collateral for a loan to keep Fisk from closing. Dr. Leonard became assistant dean and assistant director of admissions of Harvard Law School in 1969, when Derek C. Bok was dean. By 1971, when Dr. Bok became president of Harvard and enlisted Dr. Leonard as his special assistant, the number of black, female and -Latino students in the law school had substantially risen.

“The dramatic increase must be credited to Leonard’s persistent recruiting efforts,” The Harvard Crimson later wrote.

The admissions policy Dr. Leonard devised for the wider university, in collaboration with other Harvard educators, came in response to complaints from Washington that the existing program at Harvard no longer met minimum federal standards. At the time, the university employed neither a black athletic trainer for its teams nor a black doctor in its clinic.

The new formula included race or ethnicity as a plus, among other factors, on an individual application for admission.

In 1978 the Supreme Court, upholding race as one factor that could be considered in college admissions in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, referred approvingly to what it called the Harvard plan, saying it weighed “all pertinent elements of diversity” in considering each applicant.

“The Harvard model provides a standard,” Prof. Ronald Dworkin of the New York University School of Law wrote in an essay for the book “The Affirmative Action Debate” (2002). “If the admissions officers of other universities are satisfied that their plan is like the Harvard plan in all pertinent respects, they can proceed in confidence.”

That view, however, has been challenged. The Supreme Court is hearing a suit filed by a white woman against the University of Texas. A separate federal lawsuit has been filed on behalf of a Chinese-American student who was denied admission and who maintains that the Harvard plan originally discriminated against Jewish applicants who had scored high on admissions tests, and that it now handicaps Asian-Americans.

Walter Jewell Leonard was born in Alma, Ga., the state’s blueberry capital, on Oct. 3, 1929. His father, Francis, was a railroad worker. His mother, the former Rachel Kirkland, was a midwife.

He enlisted in the Coast Guard during World War II at age 15 and went on to study at historically black institutions: Morehouse College, in Atlanta; what are now Savannah State University and Clark Atlanta University, where he attended the graduate school of business; and Howard University, in Washington, where he earned a degree from the law school in his mid-30s. He also received a certificate in executive management from the Harvard Business School and Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

While working his way through night school in Washington as a waiter, Dr. Leonard recalled, he happened upon a white police officer beating a black man and reported the encounter to the authorities.

“Any black person who witnessed such a scene in those days and failed to walk quietly away endangered himself,” the civil rights lawyer Dovey Johnson Roundtree wrote in her memoir, “Justice Older Than the Law” (with Katie McCabe, 2009). “Yet Walter Leonard had chosen to come forward.”

She added: “He could not do otherwise, stunning us with his dignity and his command of the facts. A wrong had been done, he said, and without the testimony of an eyewitness, an innocent black man would be jailed, and undoubtedly convicted of a crime he’d never committed.”

The case against the man collapsed.

Dr. Leonard is survived by his wife, the former Betty Singleton, and a daughter, Angela M. Leonard.

Dr. Leonard was assistant dean of Howard University School of Law when he left for Harvard. At Harvard he was chairman of the committee that created the university’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research.

Harvard Law Today quoted Dr. Bok as saying that Dr. Leonard had helped the university achieve diversity not only in its student body but also on its faculty, and even in the construction crews that built Pound Hall at the law school — all “without violating important academic principles or agreeing to steps that would ultimately work to the disadvantage of everyone, including the minority students themselves.”


Moving to Fisk University in 1976, Dr. Leonard inherited a nearly bankrupt institution; the gas company had even shut off the heat because of overdue bills. He found himself wrestling with the trustees over fund-raising. In one instance he objected to selling off the university’s art collection; in another he refused to rescind a speaking invitation to the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, who some trustees feared would alienate white donors.


After Dr. Leonard resigned, in 1983, he wrote prolifically, taught and served on numerous boards.

Dr. Leonard’s colleagues credited the endurance of Harvard’s affirmative action plan to his ability to navigate the demands of student civil rights protesters for immediate action with the practicalities of running a university.

“I’m not a preacher of patience,” he once said. “I’m highly impatient myself. On the other hand, I’m also a realist.”

SOURCE - The New York Times
BY - Sam Roberts

(c) JuicyChitChats  2015 [Tuesday 22nd December]

TAGS: JuicyChitChats-News. JuicyChitChats-Education. Walter J. Leonard. Harvard University. Affirmative Actioin. Fisk University. LiveTalkLearnProsper!
HASHTAGS: #JuicyChitChats-News  #JuicyChitChats-Education #Walter J. Leonard #Harvard University #Affirmative Action #Fisk University #LiveTalkLearnProsper