In an e-mail sent Sunday to students, Yale University President Richard H. Brodhead announced that Yale will be opening a freshman orientation activity that has historically been restricted to minority students to all incoming freshmen. Brodhead said, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, that last summer's Supreme Court rulings pertaining to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor's race-based admissions policies made it "harder to justify programs that separate student communities instead of building them into an interactive whole."

The program, entitled "Cultural Connections," typically allows 125 incoming freshmen to spend a week familiarizing themselves with the campus during late August. Students engage in faculty-led dialogues about ethnicity, nationality and race, and hear talks about Yale's academic expectations.

Gila Reinstein, a Yale spokeswoman, told The Chronicle that Yale had to receive the approval of outside donors who financially support the programs before making the decision to open the programs to all students.

In the e-mail to students, Brodhead noted that Yale had already changed the selection criteria for two fellowships and for its Science, Technology and Research Scholars Program, which each year provides curricular enrichment and research opportunities to nearly 100 students from groups that are underrepresented in the natural sciences and engineering, according to The Chronicle.