AAU presidents endorse statement on importance of diversity in admissions

By ARTHUR PAGE
News Services Director

The statement, endorsed by the presidents and chancellors of the 62 leading North American research universities in the AAU at its annual meeting, stresses the institutions' "continuing need to take into account a wide range of considerations‹including ethnicity, race and gender‹as we evaluate the students whom we select for admission."

UB President William R. Greiner was a member of the subcommittee that prepared the statement. Neil Rudenstine, president of Harvard University, led the committee, which also included Robert Berdahl, president of the University of Texas at Austin.

"As leadership institutions, the AAU membership felt we needed to reaffirm our commitment to ensuring diversity among our students‹that's an important intellectual and academic issue for us, not merely a political one," Greiner noted. "We had a lot of discussion around these issues; leaders at the various institutions thought very hard about how to maintain this commitment, and how to articulate its importance."

In the statement, which was featured in a full-page advertisement in the April 24 editions of The New York Times, the universities noted, "If our institutional capacity to bring together a genuinely diverse group of students is removed‹or severely reduced‹then the quality and texture of the education we provide will be significantly diminished."

Noting "we believe that our students benefit significantly from education that takes place within a diverse setting," the statement said: "We therefore reaffirm our commitment to diversity as a value that is central to the very concept of education in our institutions."

It noted, "We do not advocate admitting students who cannot meet the criteria for admission to our universities. We do not endorse quotas or 'set-asides' in admissions. But we do insist that we must be able, as educators, to select those students‹from among many qualified applicants‹who will best enable our institutions to fulfill their broad educational purposes."

Noting that the AAU institutions are training tomorrow's leaders, Greiner added: "Tomorrow's leaders need to learn from and with others who are both like and unlike themselves, and they need us to ensure that they will have opportunities to do that.

"In an increasingly diverse society, they come from increasingly diverse backgrounds, and they need their universities to give them every possible opportunity to learn leadership. That's why AAU institutions have this commitment, and why we believed we needed to restate it publicly."

Greiner said that for the same reasons, "UB has long had an intellectual, ethical and practical commitment to diversity in admissions. We continue to uphold that commitment, and we're proud to have our fellow AAU members standing right alongside us."