WHERE DOES Larry Summers, Harvard University’s new president, stand on affirmative action? That may or may not have been the major concern of the senior members of the Afro-American Studies Department who laid various grievances before Summers in recent weeks. But by year’s end it had elbowed aside all other issues, thanks in part to the predictable intervention of Jesse Jackson, who called Summers’s position on affirmative action “disturbing.” On January 2, Summers issued a statement that in its support of “diversity” made very happy the Afro-studies profs and their outside supporters, including the ubiquitous Jackson. It would thus appear that Summers and his pro-affirmative action critics now see eye to eye. But the Wall Street Journal resists that interpretation. In its lead editorial Monday, the Journal correctly noted that Summers’s statement “lacks any mention of affirmative action.” The Journal concluded: “We’d like to think we’re watching a stand-off and not a surrender here.”

Opposed as I am to race-based affirmative action, I’d like to think that, too. But I’d be ignoring evidence to the contrary in Summers’s statement if I did. “I take pride in Harvard’s longstanding commitment to diversity,” it says, in pertinent part. “I believe it is essential for us to maintain that commitment, working to create an ever more open and inclusive environment that draws on the widest possible range of talents. Our approach to admissions, cited as a model in the nation’s highest court, advances our compelling interest in racial and other forms of diversity. Diversity contributes to educational excellence by enabling outstanding students, faculty and staff of all backgrounds to come together and learn from one another.”