I would flip the question: Does the racial and ethnic diversity at Harvard enhance the quality of the education there? My answer is a resounding yes. The best college education includes intellectual and social interactions among thoughtful people from a broad range of cultural and racial backgrounds, both inside and outside the classroom. Restricting diversity efforts will ultimately reduce the quality of education.

I am now a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, a public university that is sometimes used as a counterpoint to Harvard’s holistic undergraduate admissions policy. Berkeley eliminated affirmative action in graduate and professional schools in 1996 and in its undergraduate school in 1998. The passage of State Proposition 209 in 1996 prevented a reconsideration of this position, eliminating race as a factor for admissions.

After this policy change, the percentages of underrepresented minorities — defined as African-American, Chicano/Latino and Native American students — already low, dropped even further and haven’t fully recovered since. For example, African-Americans now account for only 3 percent of the student body at Berkeley. At Harvard, according to The Boston Globe, recent data shows they make up about 8 percent of the student body, and represent about 15 percent of admitted students.

Berkeley is working hard to promote racial diversity among its undergraduate body, but it has a long way to go. The elimination of affirmative action hinders this progress. Still, the university is able to get students representing a wide range of interests, backgrounds and identities because it’s so big (with over 30,000 undergraduates, it is almost five times the size of Harvard). Forbidding race as a factor in admissions would be a bigger blow to diversity at smaller universities, whose smaller student bodies limit the cross-section of the world that can be accommodated.

Though I’m a professor, I readily acknowledge that much of the learning occurs outside the lecture hall, in the spaces where students live and socialize. As an undergraduate at Harvard in the early 1990s, I spent countless late nights debating religion, science, culture and politics with classmates of a wide variety of belief systems, backgrounds, interests, political viewpoints, ethnicities and race. These interactions made my mental constructs of society more flexible, allowing me to incorporate new information and to learn from the experiences of others.