I disagree with the current top-voted comment, so I wanted to add a defense that doesn't care about disadvantaged white people:

Harvard is one of the core institutions for inducting new members of the US elite, aka the people who will be placed into positions of power over the next 10-20 years.

Deciding who gets in primarily on racial and gendered grounds without even a fig leaf requirement of intelligence or academic competence is going to deeply wound US culture. This is supposed to be an ideology abandoned in the 60s. Abandoned for good reasons, I might add. The universities are publicly and purposefully screwing up decades of social progress and the shockwaves could be broad because racial ideologies do tend to get out of control.