The Supreme Court has struck down affirmative action, which was widely expected by people who pay attention to such things but Supreme Court decisions are in general hard to predict so even the “expected” is a bit unexpected. Because I expect the Dobbs decision and abortion rights to feature heavily in Democrats’ 2024 campaign, I expect there will be considerable pressure to fold this decision into a broader critique of right-wing judicial overreach and it’s important to understand that
re: maya's point, that's fine...but harvard has very few conservatives and in particular very few white evangelicals. but they're a big part of the country. isn't the discussion impoverished that way too? who cares? no one really
I love talking to conservatives at Harvard and am probably friends with way more right-leaning people than the average liberal college girl. Also Harvard essentially does rural/small state affirmative action too, so I think this point is overstated. It has more to do with the fact that young educated people are liberal -- many of my friends are left-wing kids from right-wing states! Also, college campuses do play a role in silencing conservatives (although this is overstated IMO). As a former debater, I'm very very pro-free speech and open discussion.
I think political ideology is pretty different from race though. Being conservative is a choice; being Black is not. I can't imagine discussing politics and history without hearing from a wide variety of lived experiences. How can we talk about policing without hearing from Black students? Female labor participation without female students? The Holocaust without Jewish students? As I said, the discussion becomes intellectually impoverished. Diversity matters.
You seem to assume that personal experience is the most important element in intellectual discussion. What about you ability to think critically? To read and analyze ideas of people who aren't currently 18? Even the kind of knowledge and preparation you have to engage with certain materials effectively?
P.S.
A secondary point is to wonder whether the blunt category of "race" which would consider e.g. MY as representative of the "Hispanic experience" isn't insultingly reductive to achieve diversity of experiences?
Intellectual abilities are also super important, and are most of the reason for admission to Harvard. I have never met a Black or Hispanic student who was not extremely qualified at the school. This is the whole point of holistic admissions -- consider everything
As a teacher in one of your schools "sisters" i concur that excellent students come from all backgrounds. At the same time, however, not all ivy students are equally good. Some are better than others. I wonder whether more exclusively academic criteria wouldn't help produce a class that's even stronger, academically, overall? To use a rough approximation, what would happen if Harvard was composed exclusively of the students currently getting straight As at Harvard? Wouldn't that improve the level of the average class, and hence improve the Harvard educational experience overall?
Who's "stronger" academically - a kid from a private school from a family that makes six figures that got all straight A's, and a 1600/2400 on their SAT's or a kid from an economically desolate area who has a single monther, but got nearly straight A's, and a 1450/2300 on their SAT's?
The problem is that we need not resort to such hypotheticals; we know what the median black kid with those states who attends Harvard looks like!
They’re the academically capable but not brilliant child of middle-to-professional class parents.
If you want to actually help the latter kid, who is deserving regardless of race, then you need to mechanistically give *poor* children an advantage, full stop. Without regard to other characteristics.
You need to distinguish the question of potential and actual abilities. How would you answer the question with regards eg to swimming ? Acting?
To my mind I’d want to take those who’ll do best, at least by senior year. If the gaps are too large for a student to do well at a rigorous environment, even though in a hypothetical better world they could have had they the resources - then that’s a genuine tragedy, not just for them personally but for the whole of society deprived of this lost potential. But it’s not something we can always fix when they’re 18. We need to fix k-12 education. We need massive wealth redistribution etc. and I’m for all of that, but there are no shortcuts, and attempting them may well do more harm than good.
I work at another Ivy... I wouldn't say that the straight A students are necessarily the ones that are the most talented.
I suppose if we are to define academic success as the ability to get straight As at Harvard, then your idea holds up based on pure tautology. But I don't think the classroom made up of all the straight A students is going to be a classroom of better thinkers.
I said "rough approximation". I wouldn't literally go by that, but, ideally, grades should reflect the quality of the work, and, at least in more advanced classes in the humanities, the quality of the work ought ot refelect the qulaity of the thinking (or at least the one the student is currently able and willing to share with the class - shouldn't that be the one that matters for the academic experience?)
P.S.
I have no problem with the suggestion that intersting life experience might help you become a kore interesitng thinker. My point is that we should judge people, directly, on how good/interesting they are as thinkers, no rely on some a priori assumption based on, at best, extremely rough correlations.
I went to Northwestern for undergrad and Oxford for grad and I was far, far, far more impressed with Oxford's undergrads' depth of intellect/substance than I was NU. On the other hand, NU's grads are gonna rule the world of business so...
Academic excellence is not the only thing that matters at college imo. There is so much learning that happens at a community level - in the dorm, among student-friend groups, in extracurricular activities, at parties etc.
So taking away institutions curation of diversity is, imo, a significant loss of educational freedom, both for those who would like to attend such institutions and for those who would like to educate in them, or those like myself who would like to support and promote such educational institutions focused on promoting cooperation rather than competition
Sure they’re learning in the form etc , but it would benefit from selecting people based on the sharpest intellect rather than a “holistic” approach that dilutes that in favor of tons of irrelevant stuff (race being just one, if the most morally egregious).
Would Tim Scott have the same beliefs about policing if he didn't have the experience of regularly being pulled over for no reason? Intellect helps you navigate the world of ideas but those ideas have nothing to do with reality unless you also have life experience to shape them. That's the difference between a thought experiment and a real one.
Is race all they’re looking at? A lot of people talk as though that’s the case, but I was under the impression that they actively consider geography, family wealth, and family educational background (ie, first generation student status).
If the goal is having variety of voices, you would only need 5 or 6% of the undergraduate class to be black, in which case most 30 student classes would have a black voice.
That is a legitimate goal, but it hardly requires proportional admissions
the political point is (to me) not that important, so i'll move to something where i think there is a major issue: religion. though i'm an atheist, i think cultural elites underweight the importance of religion in most societies because of their strong secularity. i don't think this matters for MIT or caltech, but since harvard educates ppl who go into gov. i think this probably a major problem if you care more than just 'book learning.'
i would argue religion is more important to most religious people than their race, and has just as much or more impact on their life and worldview. but perhaps others disagree and think white supremacy uber alles, idk
I think we all need to be really careful about this. There are some religious people for whom religion shapes their lives and there are people who will answer "Christian" when asked, but who have never actually read the Bible, never go to church and for whom you wouldn't know until you asked.
Getting a fair representation of the variety of religious commitment is, well, the same sort of problem as Matt expressed in regard to race - it's very easy to recruit people who are Christian (or Muslim, or Hindu, or whatever) in the same way that Matt is Hispanic.
It isn't even really at a denominational level, either. The denominations that believe that splitting (schism) is wrong - the episcopalians and the Catholics - have it worst, but most denominations have a mix of more liberal and more conservative/evangelical members.
Look at the Southern Baptists kicking out churches with female pastors - and the interesting fact that they had those churches inside the fold for 20+ years. It's genuinely hard to even identify the diversity of experience and commitment that there is in American religion, much less to generate a representative diverse sample of it.
Plus there's the secret (at any rate my suspicion) that many pastors are more liberal than they let on to their congregations because 1) they've studied the Bible and religion academically, even in conservative seminaries and 2) they are dealing face-to-face with day-to-day struggles of their church members and pretty much have to learn the caring and supportive sides of their theology. (Although I'm not sure what the heck is going on with those SBC pastors. I think that's going to backlash in the next five years or so.)
Harvard is also religiously diverse, although there's a lot of atheism b/c like w/ politics, young educated ppl are more atheist on average. This isn't a conspiracy; the school is pretty representative. Not sure what your point is? Diversity is generally important.
Is it really all that diverse? How many that think LGBT+ is sinful? Lots of women wearing niqab? Lots who are not having sex before marriage? It's not just Christians or Muslims or Hindus, it's people who take the religion seriously, who attend a religious service multiple times a week and who try to live their lives by the demands of their faith.
I suspect that there is a much bigger percentage of Americans, even of young Americans who regard their faith in that manner than there are of Harvard students. It's not the atheists that I think people are concerned about, but rather the religious people who don't take it as seriously.
Anecdata so take it with a grain of salt, but there's roughly 12-15 practicing Catholics at my (small, Northeastern, liberal arts) college of 3,000. Of the 12-15 of us there's probably three that do anything more than attend Mass weekly, though I'm not one of them so it's hard to say. I have to imagine that on both counts the college population is hugely out of whack with the country.
As an aside it's considered kinda gauche to say you're Catholic on our campus, so I wouldn't know the numbers if I wasn't regularly attending Mass and therefore wouldn't even really be able to guess at any other sect/religion's following.
This is the sort of thing I mean when I talk about religious diversity. There may well be a reasonable proportion of Catholics in the sense of people who check the "Catholic" box on surveys, but not in the sense of people who actually attend Mass.
Most educated young people in the US are pro LGBT and generally have more liberal attitudes, which makes sense that this is reflected in Harvard's student body. Also yeah I'm probably one of said "religious people who don't take it as seriously," a relatively secular Jew, and there's a lot of people like me in the Harvard applicant pool and at Harvard! literally nothing wrong with that; there's also plenty of Orthodox students
Sure. But diversity would mean including some who don't.
There is a conflict in diversity here: if you want viewpoint diversity (and religious diversity, if it is to mean anything more than a nominal tickbox, has to create viewpoint diversity) then you will be faced with the problem that some viewpoints are hostile to some people. Can you include both someone who hates group X and a member of group X? But if you can't, then you weaken your viewpoint diversity.
Can you include both racists and black people? I think not. But that doesn't mean that you aren't losing something from your discussions by excluding racists. Can you include both homophobes and LGBT+ people? I think not, but you certainly are losing some diversity by excluding homophobes.
And you lose just as much diversity in a classroom discussion by allowing racists and homophobes as long as they keep quite about their racism and homophobia.
Finally, of course, there is one form of diversity that Harvard intentionally excludes: poorly educated people.
I think what Just Some Guy, Richard, and myself are on about is that there is indeed nothing wrong with that but that we should also stop calling it religious diversity.
You've mentioned "young educated people" a few times in this thread but I think it's also doing a lot of work here in terms of mopping up the lack of view-point diversity. As Razib pointed out, that's probably fine at places like MIT and CalTech, but I think he's right that it creates some pretty big problems for society when government-centric schools do it. Perhaps we need to round up a bunch of evangelicals and keep them in a laboratory at Harvard's social sciences department... so that they can be observed and interacted with. I only partially joke.
Moving from teaching at USC to Texas A&M I’ve discovered a huge change on the religion issue. Even in upper division philosophy classes, where the students are mostly endorsing liberal/progressive political views, there are still a lot of highly religious people, in a way that there hasn’t been at other institutions I’ve been affiliated with.
What do you mean by "young *educated* people are more atheist on average" Isn't that petitio principii? Are you claiming that the religious people are significantly more likely to be high school dropouts? If not, how, precisely, are they less "educated" than other college applicants? The fact is that the class at Harvard is , presumably, far more secular than the age-cohort as a whole, but the cause remains to be determined, and the fact that "elite educated" 22 year olds consequently are more secular cannot be used to reverse-engineer an explanation for this.
It's not actually true that more-educated people are less religious; that's a widespread myth. Education is correlated with religiosity; people with graduate education are more religious than people with BAs, who are more religious than people with high school degrees, who are more religious than people who didn't graduate from high school.
The reason that it seems that it's true is that Harvard draws students from a very small social and geographic subset of the country. Harvard Law, which is more selective but draws more broadly across the country, is significantly more religious.
Religious diversity is important to me because I'm concerned about cultural hostility to religion. This has been around for a couple of centuries with the rise of rationalism, but currently the more thoughtless among the population equate "organized religion" with 1) conservative political evangelicals 2) unwanted proselytizing and 3) the experiences of survivors of abusive religious situations.
I was recently informed in a NYT comment thread that the elite schools **are** religiously diverse. I tend to believe this, because any time I visit less illustrious campuses and read their bulletin boards, I see evidence of religious activities and groups.
Diversity doesn't just have to be face-to-face conversations. It can be walking through a campus and seeing posters for community centers for various groups, becoming aware of those groups and then hopefully becoming curious about the kinds of support people seek out and find.
As for religion, one of my "missions" in life is to suggest that people not resist exploring some kind of spiritual path just because it might be mocked by one's friends or because of a culturally preprogrammed internal response like "I can't go there because it would be irrational!" Religion is about a lot more than "believing as fact" some kind of supernatural proposition. (Another misperception floating around out there.)
Your point is valid, but how would this work in practice? Attempting to capture religiosity and not just religious affiliation strikes me as impossible for a secular(ish) institution. Some private religious schools have applicants sign a statement of faith, but they're not shooting for diversity but rather the opposite.
I think this would also be my critique of the Maya's assertion that "Harvard is also religiously diverse." It feels like box-checking. Like the guy whose grandmother is Episcopalian and who went to church on Easter as a kid checks the box for "Christianity". That's fine. I'm not mocking that at all. But it's also not constructive as diversity. He's going to have much more similar opinions to the peers he parties with than a devout Catholic convert who attends church three times a week. If we don't care about religious diversity, we should say that. And that might be okay. But I think we should stop pointing to stats that say "60% of such-and-such are Christians."
To make a point that dovetails well with the theme of this article, there are actually a pretty decent number of evangelicals at all of these schools, but they are disproportionately Asian or black (and even more different from the caricature JSG references than David French is).
The problem is I doubt most Harvard student actually encountered genuine religious diversity or ever interacted with too many seriously religious people. The US is so big, and so "bubbly" that most Harvard students aren't even truly *aware* that religious diversity exists. It's like living in 2d and not being able to even conceive of a third dimension. They think what they were raised to see as "diversity" is all there is, whereas you and I call it box ticking and have experienced some genuinely devout people who in many (not all) cases seriously offend our liberal values.
Brand new subscriber here. Yes, I am an evangelical as well and people assume a lot about us that is not true. Or is not true of many of us. And yes, I have plenty of issues with the evangelical church today.
I think David French and Russell Moore represent Evangelicals more in the way I would like to see us represented.
100% a good thing. It’s certainly given Mr. mel ladi and me more boldness in speaking up amongst our brothers and sisters in Christ. Our new young Pastor is not a nationalist, and that helps.
I mean, considering Russell Moore & David French were both, to differing degrees, pushed out of the modern evangelical movement, I question whose wrong here.
Where you're going wrong here is that because you are enough of a news junkie to subscribe to Slow Boring, you are equating "the evangelical movement" with *political evangelicalism*, but those are not the same thing. Both of those guys are still members in good standing at churches in Nashville that can't possibly be characterized as anything other than evangelical from a theological standpoint (Moore, obviously, is on the pastoral staff at his).
If you want to find out what the "evangelical movement" is, you need to visit a cross-section of evangelical churches and talk to folks, not read about them in The New Yorker.
With due respect to evan bear, yeah, they’ve faced a lot of heat from the religio-political right, up to and including physical and economic threats to their person and their family. Both are seen as traitors by a twitter-loud segment of politicized evangelicals, most particularly the Trump-supporting ones. We could also talk about what Beth Moore (no relation) has faced as well.
R Moore, however, is the EIC of Christianity Today, long-standing flag ship magazine of many evangelicals (founded by St. Billy of Graham). French writes opinions for the NYT. They’ve not been ostracized, and both hold positions of significant cultural media power. As well, both are religiously orthodox in their beliefs.
Like most normal people, most evangelicals don't follow politics at all or even read the news. In any demographic group, voting behavior tends to reflect the masses following the lead of the small subset of politics junkies within the community. This is not to say that there's disagreement between the masses and the opinion-leaders. Just that the masses are generally only superficially engaged with the issues.
I have to say this is why I'm a fan of David French despite not sharing his politics. I grew up in a mainstream Protestant denomination and didn't get a good read on Evangelism, and he's filled out the picture in humanizing ways.
I've attended both mainline and Evangelical churches at different points and think the difference between them is overstated by both sides. Yes, plenty of each group are loopy in each direction, but among the "normal" ones the main practical difference is high vs. low church, with little difference in teaching (except perhaps on gender issues).
Agree. I am married to someone who grew up Southern Baptist in the rural South. There are definitely people who conform to the stereotype, but a lot do not. I have a knee-jerk reaction to religious stereotypes, though, because I am also a relatively progressive person who is also a practicing Roman Catholic for lots of complicated personal reasons.
Exactly Evangelical culture is, well, culture. Religion, including rational secularism, are dominant aspects of culture, and every culture has positive and negative aspects. I just wish people would become aware of our natural tendencies to hypocrisy: If Muslim culture happens to be cool because Trump wouldn't allow anyone from those countries to enter the U.S., then why not adopt an equally open mind towards Evangelical Christianity?
For many of us, Christianity in its myriad forms is our cultural legacy, going back centuries. It makes more sense to at least try to understand it, because it has shaped who we are and what our country is.
Even though there's a kind of overarching culture at those universities, every student's experience will of course be unique. It's interesting that the chief chaplain is an atheist, but a quick look at the Harvard chaplaincy page reveals quite a diverse bunch, with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship rating two chaplains. You can do a lot of personal spiritual exploration without worrying about Biblical inerrancy. (Wonder how those IVC chaplains handle those kinds of questions and conversations though.)
I mean, there's currently pushback against Dearborn as they passed a law banning Pride flags or whatever.
But yes, the Muslim community is small, and the current prominent people in that community are currently progressive (Omar, etc.) However, if the socially conservative parts become more prominent, there will be more criticism of them.
But yes, as long as Evanglical's continue to support laws that limit the rights of young women and LGBT people, you're not going to be popular on a college campus. The other reality is that even a practicing Muslim (no alcohol, prays daily, fasts for Ramadan) on a college campus might have liberal views on laws regarding abortion, LGBT, etc. even if they're personally pro-life, etc.
Haha @ "a niece who went to college who will yell at them about stuff." Very few conservatives nowadays are unaware of their transgressions. It's what makes a lot of conservatives on social media annoying a la vice-signalling.
I fear this may sound snotty and that is very much not my intent, but if it's very important to be around a diverse array of students to avoid such intellectual impoverishment, then top white students still have, and will continue to have, the option of voluntarily choosing to attend less elite/selective schools themselves.
That said, as a practical matter, for the reasons The Boss here has articulated, I tend to doubt that the demographic makeup of the student bodies at these elite schools will change very much. The schools will reach similar results using proxies. The result won't be a shift across racial categories, but rather *within* each racial category, you'll get more students who do lots of nutty volunteer work and extracurricular activities (starting their own charitable nonprofits and whatever else), and fewer students who have great stats but opt out of the extracurricular rat race.
This comment struck me: “How can we talk about policing without hearing from Black students?”
Why focus on Blacks in regards to policing? How can we talk about policing without talking to Asians? Why does a Black American have special insights? Particularly when you’re at Harvard? 45% of the Black students are from other countries. Right off the bat, 1/2 the Black students didn’t even grow up with American police.
Wouldn’t be great if we did have stereotypes like Maya has associating Blacks with law enforcement? How do we get there? Probably putting work into changing the data. Unfortunately young people like Maya do not want to take that journey instead they want to double down on the stereotype.
I don't think being conservative is 100% a choice. At least at a population level. Andrew Yang talked a lot about how it's more like 50/50 innate/socialized. In any society you are going to have a significant portion of the population that is conservative in their outlook and it's good to recognize both the universality of that and the deep importance of having those people as part of the conversation in important places (in the same way you suggest having people of different races is also important).
I am more lukewarm than others on AA (helps not to be an American!) - but I do wonder how much diverse opinions you get from someone who is basically the same as you in intelligence, personality types, and socioeconomic status except race.
If the goal is to increase the fractionalization of views - which is what the stated goal was under the policy, its not clear that race as consideration is sufficient (despite the costs).
"How can we talk about policing without hearing from Black students? Female labor participation without female students? The Holocaust without Jewish students?"
These conversations also need to be able to happen *without* any students with personal experience. There are 12000 Rohingya in the US, or about .004% of the US population. Harvard has an undergraduate class of about 7000 students, and (as you note elsewhere on the page) its demographics correspond to the US population as a whole. But the statistically 1/4-person at Harvard who is Rohingya cannot spend their whole time at Harvard offering "local color" to classes on modern Myanmar and the Rohingya genocide.
The 30 Armenians have it a little better — if there's one class a semester, then each Armenian only needs to attend 1.5 semesters on the Armenian genocide. But what if they want to fulfill their Gen. Ed. requirement some other way? Will you *force* them to take the course (and thereby impoverish their education) for the greater good?
Humanities scholars use written descriptions of a person's experiences as a substitute for talking to that person precisely because it doesn't suffer from this problem: one can always copy a text. If Harvard can't teach students to extract lived experience from written texts, then Harvard is incompetent.
Political ideology seems more important to discussions than race, though? People with different political views will have very different perspectives to offer, whereas a black progressive will probably make basically the same points as a white progressive.
> I think political ideology is pretty different from race though. Being conservative is a choice; being Black is not.
In some sense this is correct and I totally hear your point, but in some other sense this feels incorrect. I do actually sometimes wish I had different political opinions than I do or at least that I felt less/more strongly about certain things. But I was pretty much born a neoliberal shill. I could force myself to vote against what I feel is correct I guess, but I don't remember making any choices here.
Hi, Maya. As a university lecturer in the UK in a wildly undiverse department (despite our best efforts; it’s a whole other story), I am actually regularly confronted with the problem of teaching on topics without the benefit of students representative of populations who are disproportionately affected by those topics. I agree that it is good to get input from students with direct experience of various phenomena like the ones you mention, but a) from the instructor’s point of view, we’re really trying to avoid tokenization or making students into avatars of communities they may or may not identify with (and even if they do, may not want to be called on to represent) and b) sometimes (like in my case) we just don’t have the relevant student experiences to draw on. But we can’t make our teaching contingent on the presence of that experience. To use one of your examples, the Holocaust is way too important to not teach it because there are no Jewish students present.
So I would offer a friendly disagreement that discussions on topics like those you mention are “impoverished” in the absence of direct testimony. Is that kind of immediate lived experience valuable? Of course. But it’s ultimately the instructor’s job to find a way of making material accessible to any student with the willingness to engage with it, and for us to have enough awareness of the range of opinions and perspectives that exist so that we can provide an intellectually rich environment for those discussions.
Do you have a citation on the small-state/rural "boost"? The last time I looked into it (and it was a while ago) signs of "rurality" on an application like membership of FFA* usually hurt admissions chances at Ivies and similar schools.
*I'm sure someone will interject that FFA is a vocational program. It isn't - the name is historical. Some kids intend to become farmers, others welders, others geneticists or microbiologists or lawyers or a thousand other things.
Is there a large enough population of non-white students at Harvard right now to avoid tokenization in these discussions? And even if so, is tokenization is better than total lack of representation?
OK cool, I didn't know that. So yeah, this decision is indeed tragic for the student experience at Harvard and other institutions who are good at this.
It is diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography. It heavily skews wealthy, though. The flip side is that the school can offer excellent financial aid to poorer and middle-class students because of the wealth of other students and alums.
Yeah, the %s are pretty on par with the national averages -- I find it to be very diverse. But that is now (potentially) history. We'll see about race-neutral proxies
Maya, the ruling doesn't do what you claim it does. If a black student had an experience with policing, they can put that in their essay and get points for overcoming disadvantage and having potential beyond their measurable stats. What will be banned from here on is using the skin color directly, independent of whether they actually experienced material disadvantage. Universities will be asked to move beyond their shallow preoccupation with optics and do more real work to identify individuals with relevant life experiences.
What is your issue with that?
Also, how does fairness to Asian-American students figure into your view? Would you even have got into Harvard if you were Asian-American? You sound like a lot of progressives, that seem to wholesale ignore that this was a case brought be Asian Americans that were unfairly excluded.
It also has far too few working-class students, whose perspective is likely to be at least as interesting and valuable as that of ultra-privileged kids who happen to have diverse pigmentation. The fact the so many in these institutions are hyper-focused on the supposed educational benefits from diversity deemed exclusively from the most arbitrary and superficial criteria, and care so little about actual differences in lived experience, speak volumes. This ruling is but the first step in a huge correction needed in American society, and especially the blindspots of the elites.
I'm pretty opposed to the decision, but agree with you that we need to also prioritize socioeconomic diversity. Hopefully that will be a silver lining of this ruling as Harvard and other schools look to prioritize race neutral metrics that are socioeconomic proxies
1) The lived experience of black and white people of the same socioeconomic stratum retain differences due solely or mostly to the way culture responds to their race: policing, hiring discrimination, cultural representation, etc etc. Exposing students to others with different experiences is a major goal of diversity programs.
2) Black people in particular experience economic disadvantage because of the particular injustices of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, redlining, and discrimination in nearly every facet of cultural life. That's a generational injustice that simply is not a factor for poor white folks. Does it deserve redress?
1. I’m skeptical of no. 1 esp with regards to far more salient things (eg where you grew up). The differences in experience and perspective between a black and a white child of pmc in an East coast wealthy suburb is negligible in comparison to either and a white person who grew up in Russia or even france.
2. This isn’t, strictly speaking, about race, but about the generational experience of a specific group of people (whose ancestors were victims of specific racist policies). If you want to help that group, for whatever reason (and I can think of many!) target them explicitly and specifically. The wrongs done to generational African Americans don’t justify a leg up for a Nigerian immigrant let alone for our own MY.
P.S.
I'd also repeat what I said elsewhere: "lived experience" is probably overrated in any case, with regards to its benefits for academic work. It has close to nothing to do with your success in STEM, and far less important for academic Humanities than is fashionable to claim in some circles. Moreover, to the extent that your "lived experience" makes you a better scholar, that should already be reflected in your work. In other words, its moot to debate what makes someone good at something. Maybe its "lived experience" maybe its genetics, maybe its a thousand other factors, most never to be disocvered - the point should be whether the work is good or not, whatever the reason.
> Black people in particular experience economic disadvantage because of the particular injustices of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, redlining, and discrimination in nearly every facet of cultural life. That's a generational injustice that simply is not a factor for poor white folks. Does it deserve redress?
No, not "black people in particular", a specific cohort of American black people whose ancestors were subject to these things. My friend whose parents immigrated to Canada from Nigeria, became diplomats, and moved to the US, did not experience any of that.
Couldn't you effectively achieve both through socio-economic weighting though, given the disproportionate representation of black people in the lower rungs and from certain places? I mean Harvard could create quotas for inner-city folks of a certain income and end up with black applicants without ever having to specify an AA quota.
How can race be devoid of experience? Like to the extent things like driving while black is a thing or security following people around a department store is a thing surely they’re not exempting Nigerians.
In talking to African immigrants, at least anecdotally, I've heard that they experience discrimination in very distinct ways, including from US-born black people.
No, not surely. Immigrants very often look and dress differently and if you live in an area with a lot of them you can pick up on it quickly, even wrt Black immigrants. Some immigrant dress is very obvious, but even subtler patterns are noticeable if you know what to look for. A West African IT guy look that I can spot a mile away: wireless headset, 90s style cut of blue jeans, plain t-shirt and just a "different sort of face / hair" than most American Black people.
Of course there's something to the point you're making, and there are times the immigrant will be seen as just "Black". But race and ethnicity are confounded too much in the discourse with all the complexities of ethnicity are subsumed by over-simplistic Black/White thinking.
The president of Northwestern spoke in London on Wednesday to alums and was EXTREMELY (shockingly) candid about these topics. He basically said that test optional is the future (although not indicating his personal view of it), and also that the admissions office was going to do everything they could to continue affirmative action without actually being able to ask for students' races. Using zip codes as proxies, etc. I don't get too worked up about college admissions these days, especially given I live in the UK now, but I'm extremely, extremely disturbed at test optional policies, given how the "holistic admissions process" advantages students from upper middle and upper class backgrounds. Fine, include other stuff, whatever, but please at least consider test scores!
It’s so blatantly unjust, and inefficient that I do believe it will fail, miserably, on all counts. What troubles me though is how we got tot he point that these people have this blatantly horrible obsession, and are unabashed in advocating for it. It’s the kind of jarring bigotry and unlawful conduct that hasn’t really been heard from my those kind of people since the 1930s…
P.S. let me be clearer still. We live in an increasingly global world. The leading position of us academia isn’t set in stone and mandated by heaven. It was hard earned and will be lost if they give up on meritocracy and go full speed on bizarre anti intellectual niche obsessions.
I would not say so. Working class people are generally less intelligent than those in higher classes, and intelligence is quite heritable. A fair and equitable admissions process should not sort people by anything except their capabilities.
I tend to agree that judging purely on aptitude is the best approach, but at the same time argued that to the extent that we care about either "diversity" for its educational benefits (ultimately diversity of perspectives) or we care about justice-considerations in admissions, then in both cases class ought to matter far more than race.
re: maya's point, that's fine...but harvard has very few conservatives and in particular very few white evangelicals. but they're a big part of the country. isn't the discussion impoverished that way too? who cares? no one really
(also, first!?!?!)
I love talking to conservatives at Harvard and am probably friends with way more right-leaning people than the average liberal college girl. Also Harvard essentially does rural/small state affirmative action too, so I think this point is overstated. It has more to do with the fact that young educated people are liberal -- many of my friends are left-wing kids from right-wing states! Also, college campuses do play a role in silencing conservatives (although this is overstated IMO). As a former debater, I'm very very pro-free speech and open discussion.
I think political ideology is pretty different from race though. Being conservative is a choice; being Black is not. I can't imagine discussing politics and history without hearing from a wide variety of lived experiences. How can we talk about policing without hearing from Black students? Female labor participation without female students? The Holocaust without Jewish students? As I said, the discussion becomes intellectually impoverished. Diversity matters.
You seem to assume that personal experience is the most important element in intellectual discussion. What about you ability to think critically? To read and analyze ideas of people who aren't currently 18? Even the kind of knowledge and preparation you have to engage with certain materials effectively?
P.S.
A secondary point is to wonder whether the blunt category of "race" which would consider e.g. MY as representative of the "Hispanic experience" isn't insultingly reductive to achieve diversity of experiences?
Intellectual abilities are also super important, and are most of the reason for admission to Harvard. I have never met a Black or Hispanic student who was not extremely qualified at the school. This is the whole point of holistic admissions -- consider everything
As a teacher in one of your schools "sisters" i concur that excellent students come from all backgrounds. At the same time, however, not all ivy students are equally good. Some are better than others. I wonder whether more exclusively academic criteria wouldn't help produce a class that's even stronger, academically, overall? To use a rough approximation, what would happen if Harvard was composed exclusively of the students currently getting straight As at Harvard? Wouldn't that improve the level of the average class, and hence improve the Harvard educational experience overall?
Who's "stronger" academically - a kid from a private school from a family that makes six figures that got all straight A's, and a 1600/2400 on their SAT's or a kid from an economically desolate area who has a single monther, but got nearly straight A's, and a 1450/2300 on their SAT's?
The problem is that we need not resort to such hypotheticals; we know what the median black kid with those states who attends Harvard looks like!
They’re the academically capable but not brilliant child of middle-to-professional class parents.
If you want to actually help the latter kid, who is deserving regardless of race, then you need to mechanistically give *poor* children an advantage, full stop. Without regard to other characteristics.
You need to distinguish the question of potential and actual abilities. How would you answer the question with regards eg to swimming ? Acting?
To my mind I’d want to take those who’ll do best, at least by senior year. If the gaps are too large for a student to do well at a rigorous environment, even though in a hypothetical better world they could have had they the resources - then that’s a genuine tragedy, not just for them personally but for the whole of society deprived of this lost potential. But it’s not something we can always fix when they’re 18. We need to fix k-12 education. We need massive wealth redistribution etc. and I’m for all of that, but there are no shortcuts, and attempting them may well do more harm than good.
I work at another Ivy... I wouldn't say that the straight A students are necessarily the ones that are the most talented.
I suppose if we are to define academic success as the ability to get straight As at Harvard, then your idea holds up based on pure tautology. But I don't think the classroom made up of all the straight A students is going to be a classroom of better thinkers.
I said "rough approximation". I wouldn't literally go by that, but, ideally, grades should reflect the quality of the work, and, at least in more advanced classes in the humanities, the quality of the work ought ot refelect the qulaity of the thinking (or at least the one the student is currently able and willing to share with the class - shouldn't that be the one that matters for the academic experience?)
P.S.
I have no problem with the suggestion that intersting life experience might help you become a kore interesitng thinker. My point is that we should judge people, directly, on how good/interesting they are as thinkers, no rely on some a priori assumption based on, at best, extremely rough correlations.
I went to Northwestern for undergrad and Oxford for grad and I was far, far, far more impressed with Oxford's undergrads' depth of intellect/substance than I was NU. On the other hand, NU's grads are gonna rule the world of business so...
Academic excellence is not the only thing that matters at college imo. There is so much learning that happens at a community level - in the dorm, among student-friend groups, in extracurricular activities, at parties etc.
So taking away institutions curation of diversity is, imo, a significant loss of educational freedom, both for those who would like to attend such institutions and for those who would like to educate in them, or those like myself who would like to support and promote such educational institutions focused on promoting cooperation rather than competition
Sure they’re learning in the form etc , but it would benefit from selecting people based on the sharpest intellect rather than a “holistic” approach that dilutes that in favor of tons of irrelevant stuff (race being just one, if the most morally egregious).
I feel pretty certain we could get better results on that front by eliminating legacy admissions than affirmative action.
Why not both?
Would Tim Scott have the same beliefs about policing if he didn't have the experience of regularly being pulled over for no reason? Intellect helps you navigate the world of ideas but those ideas have nothing to do with reality unless you also have life experience to shape them. That's the difference between a thought experiment and a real one.
> Would Tim Scott have the same beliefs about policing if he didn't have the experience of regularly being pulled over for no reason?
no, but neither would a black 18 year old from a rich town who'd never been pulled over before.
if want you want is diversity of experience, filter on that. don't pretend race is the only possible option.
Is race all they’re looking at? A lot of people talk as though that’s the case, but I was under the impression that they actively consider geography, family wealth, and family educational background (ie, first generation student status).
If the goal is having variety of voices, you would only need 5 or 6% of the undergraduate class to be black, in which case most 30 student classes would have a black voice.
That is a legitimate goal, but it hardly requires proportional admissions
the political point is (to me) not that important, so i'll move to something where i think there is a major issue: religion. though i'm an atheist, i think cultural elites underweight the importance of religion in most societies because of their strong secularity. i don't think this matters for MIT or caltech, but since harvard educates ppl who go into gov. i think this probably a major problem if you care more than just 'book learning.'
i would argue religion is more important to most religious people than their race, and has just as much or more impact on their life and worldview. but perhaps others disagree and think white supremacy uber alles, idk
I think we all need to be really careful about this. There are some religious people for whom religion shapes their lives and there are people who will answer "Christian" when asked, but who have never actually read the Bible, never go to church and for whom you wouldn't know until you asked.
Getting a fair representation of the variety of religious commitment is, well, the same sort of problem as Matt expressed in regard to race - it's very easy to recruit people who are Christian (or Muslim, or Hindu, or whatever) in the same way that Matt is Hispanic.
It isn't even really at a denominational level, either. The denominations that believe that splitting (schism) is wrong - the episcopalians and the Catholics - have it worst, but most denominations have a mix of more liberal and more conservative/evangelical members.
Look at the Southern Baptists kicking out churches with female pastors - and the interesting fact that they had those churches inside the fold for 20+ years. It's genuinely hard to even identify the diversity of experience and commitment that there is in American religion, much less to generate a representative diverse sample of it.
Plus there's the secret (at any rate my suspicion) that many pastors are more liberal than they let on to their congregations because 1) they've studied the Bible and religion academically, even in conservative seminaries and 2) they are dealing face-to-face with day-to-day struggles of their church members and pretty much have to learn the caring and supportive sides of their theology. (Although I'm not sure what the heck is going on with those SBC pastors. I think that's going to backlash in the next five years or so.)
Harvard is also religiously diverse, although there's a lot of atheism b/c like w/ politics, young educated ppl are more atheist on average. This isn't a conspiracy; the school is pretty representative. Not sure what your point is? Diversity is generally important.
Is it really all that diverse? How many that think LGBT+ is sinful? Lots of women wearing niqab? Lots who are not having sex before marriage? It's not just Christians or Muslims or Hindus, it's people who take the religion seriously, who attend a religious service multiple times a week and who try to live their lives by the demands of their faith.
I suspect that there is a much bigger percentage of Americans, even of young Americans who regard their faith in that manner than there are of Harvard students. It's not the atheists that I think people are concerned about, but rather the religious people who don't take it as seriously.
Anecdata so take it with a grain of salt, but there's roughly 12-15 practicing Catholics at my (small, Northeastern, liberal arts) college of 3,000. Of the 12-15 of us there's probably three that do anything more than attend Mass weekly, though I'm not one of them so it's hard to say. I have to imagine that on both counts the college population is hugely out of whack with the country.
As an aside it's considered kinda gauche to say you're Catholic on our campus, so I wouldn't know the numbers if I wasn't regularly attending Mass and therefore wouldn't even really be able to guess at any other sect/religion's following.
This is the sort of thing I mean when I talk about religious diversity. There may well be a reasonable proportion of Catholics in the sense of people who check the "Catholic" box on surveys, but not in the sense of people who actually attend Mass.
Most educated young people in the US are pro LGBT and generally have more liberal attitudes, which makes sense that this is reflected in Harvard's student body. Also yeah I'm probably one of said "religious people who don't take it as seriously," a relatively secular Jew, and there's a lot of people like me in the Harvard applicant pool and at Harvard! literally nothing wrong with that; there's also plenty of Orthodox students
Sure. But diversity would mean including some who don't.
There is a conflict in diversity here: if you want viewpoint diversity (and religious diversity, if it is to mean anything more than a nominal tickbox, has to create viewpoint diversity) then you will be faced with the problem that some viewpoints are hostile to some people. Can you include both someone who hates group X and a member of group X? But if you can't, then you weaken your viewpoint diversity.
Can you include both racists and black people? I think not. But that doesn't mean that you aren't losing something from your discussions by excluding racists. Can you include both homophobes and LGBT+ people? I think not, but you certainly are losing some diversity by excluding homophobes.
And you lose just as much diversity in a classroom discussion by allowing racists and homophobes as long as they keep quite about their racism and homophobia.
Finally, of course, there is one form of diversity that Harvard intentionally excludes: poorly educated people.
I think what Just Some Guy, Richard, and myself are on about is that there is indeed nothing wrong with that but that we should also stop calling it religious diversity.
Maya, just FYI, the percentage of Jews (of all stripes) at Harvard, is the lowest it's been in over a century.
You've mentioned "young educated people" a few times in this thread but I think it's also doing a lot of work here in terms of mopping up the lack of view-point diversity. As Razib pointed out, that's probably fine at places like MIT and CalTech, but I think he's right that it creates some pretty big problems for society when government-centric schools do it. Perhaps we need to round up a bunch of evangelicals and keep them in a laboratory at Harvard's social sciences department... so that they can be observed and interacted with. I only partially joke.
Moving from teaching at USC to Texas A&M I’ve discovered a huge change on the religion issue. Even in upper division philosophy classes, where the students are mostly endorsing liberal/progressive political views, there are still a lot of highly religious people, in a way that there hasn’t been at other institutions I’ve been affiliated with.
What do you mean by "young *educated* people are more atheist on average" Isn't that petitio principii? Are you claiming that the religious people are significantly more likely to be high school dropouts? If not, how, precisely, are they less "educated" than other college applicants? The fact is that the class at Harvard is , presumably, far more secular than the age-cohort as a whole, but the cause remains to be determined, and the fact that "elite educated" 22 year olds consequently are more secular cannot be used to reverse-engineer an explanation for this.
It's not actually true that more-educated people are less religious; that's a widespread myth. Education is correlated with religiosity; people with graduate education are more religious than people with BAs, who are more religious than people with high school degrees, who are more religious than people who didn't graduate from high school.
The reason that it seems that it's true is that Harvard draws students from a very small social and geographic subset of the country. Harvard Law, which is more selective but draws more broadly across the country, is significantly more religious.
Religious diversity is important to me because I'm concerned about cultural hostility to religion. This has been around for a couple of centuries with the rise of rationalism, but currently the more thoughtless among the population equate "organized religion" with 1) conservative political evangelicals 2) unwanted proselytizing and 3) the experiences of survivors of abusive religious situations.
I was recently informed in a NYT comment thread that the elite schools **are** religiously diverse. I tend to believe this, because any time I visit less illustrious campuses and read their bulletin boards, I see evidence of religious activities and groups.
Diversity doesn't just have to be face-to-face conversations. It can be walking through a campus and seeing posters for community centers for various groups, becoming aware of those groups and then hopefully becoming curious about the kinds of support people seek out and find.
As for religion, one of my "missions" in life is to suggest that people not resist exploring some kind of spiritual path just because it might be mocked by one's friends or because of a culturally preprogrammed internal response like "I can't go there because it would be irrational!" Religion is about a lot more than "believing as fact" some kind of supernatural proposition. (Another misperception floating around out there.)
Your point is valid, but how would this work in practice? Attempting to capture religiosity and not just religious affiliation strikes me as impossible for a secular(ish) institution. Some private religious schools have applicants sign a statement of faith, but they're not shooting for diversity but rather the opposite.
I think this would also be my critique of the Maya's assertion that "Harvard is also religiously diverse." It feels like box-checking. Like the guy whose grandmother is Episcopalian and who went to church on Easter as a kid checks the box for "Christianity". That's fine. I'm not mocking that at all. But it's also not constructive as diversity. He's going to have much more similar opinions to the peers he parties with than a devout Catholic convert who attends church three times a week. If we don't care about religious diversity, we should say that. And that might be okay. But I think we should stop pointing to stats that say "60% of such-and-such are Christians."
To make a point that dovetails well with the theme of this article, there are actually a pretty decent number of evangelicals at all of these schools, but they are disproportionately Asian or black (and even more different from the caricature JSG references than David French is).
The problem is I doubt most Harvard student actually encountered genuine religious diversity or ever interacted with too many seriously religious people. The US is so big, and so "bubbly" that most Harvard students aren't even truly *aware* that religious diversity exists. It's like living in 2d and not being able to even conceive of a third dimension. They think what they were raised to see as "diversity" is all there is, whereas you and I call it box ticking and have experienced some genuinely devout people who in many (not all) cases seriously offend our liberal values.
Brand new subscriber here. Yes, I am an evangelical as well and people assume a lot about us that is not true. Or is not true of many of us. And yes, I have plenty of issues with the evangelical church today.
I think David French and Russell Moore represent Evangelicals more in the way I would like to see us represented.
There's a Kellerite/Nationalist schism within the evangelical church that is long overdue and a very good thing.
100% a good thing. It’s certainly given Mr. mel ladi and me more boldness in speaking up amongst our brothers and sisters in Christ. Our new young Pastor is not a nationalist, and that helps.
I mean, considering Russell Moore & David French were both, to differing degrees, pushed out of the modern evangelical movement, I question whose wrong here.
Where you're going wrong here is that because you are enough of a news junkie to subscribe to Slow Boring, you are equating "the evangelical movement" with *political evangelicalism*, but those are not the same thing. Both of those guys are still members in good standing at churches in Nashville that can't possibly be characterized as anything other than evangelical from a theological standpoint (Moore, obviously, is on the pastoral staff at his).
If you want to find out what the "evangelical movement" is, you need to visit a cross-section of evangelical churches and talk to folks, not read about them in The New Yorker.
With due respect to evan bear, yeah, they’ve faced a lot of heat from the religio-political right, up to and including physical and economic threats to their person and their family. Both are seen as traitors by a twitter-loud segment of politicized evangelicals, most particularly the Trump-supporting ones. We could also talk about what Beth Moore (no relation) has faced as well.
R Moore, however, is the EIC of Christianity Today, long-standing flag ship magazine of many evangelicals (founded by St. Billy of Graham). French writes opinions for the NYT. They’ve not been ostracized, and both hold positions of significant cultural media power. As well, both are religiously orthodox in their beliefs.
Like most normal people, most evangelicals don't follow politics at all or even read the news. In any demographic group, voting behavior tends to reflect the masses following the lead of the small subset of politics junkies within the community. This is not to say that there's disagreement between the masses and the opinion-leaders. Just that the masses are generally only superficially engaged with the issues.
I have to say this is why I'm a fan of David French despite not sharing his politics. I grew up in a mainstream Protestant denomination and didn't get a good read on Evangelism, and he's filled out the picture in humanizing ways.
I've attended both mainline and Evangelical churches at different points and think the difference between them is overstated by both sides. Yes, plenty of each group are loopy in each direction, but among the "normal" ones the main practical difference is high vs. low church, with little difference in teaching (except perhaps on gender issues).
Agree. I am married to someone who grew up Southern Baptist in the rural South. There are definitely people who conform to the stereotype, but a lot do not. I have a knee-jerk reaction to religious stereotypes, though, because I am also a relatively progressive person who is also a practicing Roman Catholic for lots of complicated personal reasons.
Exactly Evangelical culture is, well, culture. Religion, including rational secularism, are dominant aspects of culture, and every culture has positive and negative aspects. I just wish people would become aware of our natural tendencies to hypocrisy: If Muslim culture happens to be cool because Trump wouldn't allow anyone from those countries to enter the U.S., then why not adopt an equally open mind towards Evangelical Christianity?
For many of us, Christianity in its myriad forms is our cultural legacy, going back centuries. It makes more sense to at least try to understand it, because it has shaped who we are and what our country is.
Even though there's a kind of overarching culture at those universities, every student's experience will of course be unique. It's interesting that the chief chaplain is an atheist, but a quick look at the Harvard chaplaincy page reveals quite a diverse bunch, with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship rating two chaplains. You can do a lot of personal spiritual exploration without worrying about Biblical inerrancy. (Wonder how those IVC chaplains handle those kinds of questions and conversations though.)
I mean, there's currently pushback against Dearborn as they passed a law banning Pride flags or whatever.
But yes, the Muslim community is small, and the current prominent people in that community are currently progressive (Omar, etc.) However, if the socially conservative parts become more prominent, there will be more criticism of them.
But yes, as long as Evanglical's continue to support laws that limit the rights of young women and LGBT people, you're not going to be popular on a college campus. The other reality is that even a practicing Muslim (no alcohol, prays daily, fasts for Ramadan) on a college campus might have liberal views on laws regarding abortion, LGBT, etc. even if they're personally pro-life, etc.
Like Conservative of "Liberals" :)
Haha @ "a niece who went to college who will yell at them about stuff." Very few conservatives nowadays are unaware of their transgressions. It's what makes a lot of conservatives on social media annoying a la vice-signalling.
I fear this may sound snotty and that is very much not my intent, but if it's very important to be around a diverse array of students to avoid such intellectual impoverishment, then top white students still have, and will continue to have, the option of voluntarily choosing to attend less elite/selective schools themselves.
That said, as a practical matter, for the reasons The Boss here has articulated, I tend to doubt that the demographic makeup of the student bodies at these elite schools will change very much. The schools will reach similar results using proxies. The result won't be a shift across racial categories, but rather *within* each racial category, you'll get more students who do lots of nutty volunteer work and extracurricular activities (starting their own charitable nonprofits and whatever else), and fewer students who have great stats but opt out of the extracurricular rat race.
This comment struck me: “How can we talk about policing without hearing from Black students?”
Why focus on Blacks in regards to policing? How can we talk about policing without talking to Asians? Why does a Black American have special insights? Particularly when you’re at Harvard? 45% of the Black students are from other countries. Right off the bat, 1/2 the Black students didn’t even grow up with American police.
Wouldn’t be great if we did have stereotypes like Maya has associating Blacks with law enforcement? How do we get there? Probably putting work into changing the data. Unfortunately young people like Maya do not want to take that journey instead they want to double down on the stereotype.
Or sons and daughters of cops?
I don't think being conservative is 100% a choice. At least at a population level. Andrew Yang talked a lot about how it's more like 50/50 innate/socialized. In any society you are going to have a significant portion of the population that is conservative in their outlook and it's good to recognize both the universality of that and the deep importance of having those people as part of the conversation in important places (in the same way you suggest having people of different races is also important).
I am more lukewarm than others on AA (helps not to be an American!) - but I do wonder how much diverse opinions you get from someone who is basically the same as you in intelligence, personality types, and socioeconomic status except race.
For example, one wonders how many Black students at Harvard expresses the view on racism that Lil Baby does in his BLM song 'the Bigger Picture' (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/atlanta-rapper-lil-baby-bigger-picture-song-1027815/), which is probably much more common in how working-class Black American men define and view racism.
If the goal is to increase the fractionalization of views - which is what the stated goal was under the policy, its not clear that race as consideration is sufficient (despite the costs).
"How can we talk about policing without hearing from Black students? Female labor participation without female students? The Holocaust without Jewish students?"
These conversations also need to be able to happen *without* any students with personal experience. There are 12000 Rohingya in the US, or about .004% of the US population. Harvard has an undergraduate class of about 7000 students, and (as you note elsewhere on the page) its demographics correspond to the US population as a whole. But the statistically 1/4-person at Harvard who is Rohingya cannot spend their whole time at Harvard offering "local color" to classes on modern Myanmar and the Rohingya genocide.
The 30 Armenians have it a little better — if there's one class a semester, then each Armenian only needs to attend 1.5 semesters on the Armenian genocide. But what if they want to fulfill their Gen. Ed. requirement some other way? Will you *force* them to take the course (and thereby impoverish their education) for the greater good?
Humanities scholars use written descriptions of a person's experiences as a substitute for talking to that person precisely because it doesn't suffer from this problem: one can always copy a text. If Harvard can't teach students to extract lived experience from written texts, then Harvard is incompetent.
Political ideology seems more important to discussions than race, though? People with different political views will have very different perspectives to offer, whereas a black progressive will probably make basically the same points as a white progressive.
> I think political ideology is pretty different from race though. Being conservative is a choice; being Black is not.
In some sense this is correct and I totally hear your point, but in some other sense this feels incorrect. I do actually sometimes wish I had different political opinions than I do or at least that I felt less/more strongly about certain things. But I was pretty much born a neoliberal shill. I could force myself to vote against what I feel is correct I guess, but I don't remember making any choices here.
Hi, Maya. As a university lecturer in the UK in a wildly undiverse department (despite our best efforts; it’s a whole other story), I am actually regularly confronted with the problem of teaching on topics without the benefit of students representative of populations who are disproportionately affected by those topics. I agree that it is good to get input from students with direct experience of various phenomena like the ones you mention, but a) from the instructor’s point of view, we’re really trying to avoid tokenization or making students into avatars of communities they may or may not identify with (and even if they do, may not want to be called on to represent) and b) sometimes (like in my case) we just don’t have the relevant student experiences to draw on. But we can’t make our teaching contingent on the presence of that experience. To use one of your examples, the Holocaust is way too important to not teach it because there are no Jewish students present.
So I would offer a friendly disagreement that discussions on topics like those you mention are “impoverished” in the absence of direct testimony. Is that kind of immediate lived experience valuable? Of course. But it’s ultimately the instructor’s job to find a way of making material accessible to any student with the willingness to engage with it, and for us to have enough awareness of the range of opinions and perspectives that exist so that we can provide an intellectually rich environment for those discussions.
Do you have a citation on the small-state/rural "boost"? The last time I looked into it (and it was a while ago) signs of "rurality" on an application like membership of FFA* usually hurt admissions chances at Ivies and similar schools.
*I'm sure someone will interject that FFA is a vocational program. It isn't - the name is historical. Some kids intend to become farmers, others welders, others geneticists or microbiologists or lawyers or a thousand other things.
Is there a large enough population of non-white students at Harvard right now to avoid tokenization in these discussions? And even if so, is tokenization is better than total lack of representation?
Yes, Harvard is legitimately very diverse, the admissions office is good at achieving its goal.
OK cool, I didn't know that. So yeah, this decision is indeed tragic for the student experience at Harvard and other institutions who are good at this.
It is diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography. It heavily skews wealthy, though. The flip side is that the school can offer excellent financial aid to poorer and middle-class students because of the wealth of other students and alums.
Yeah, the %s are pretty on par with the national averages -- I find it to be very diverse. But that is now (potentially) history. We'll see about race-neutral proxies
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
Maya, the ruling doesn't do what you claim it does. If a black student had an experience with policing, they can put that in their essay and get points for overcoming disadvantage and having potential beyond their measurable stats. What will be banned from here on is using the skin color directly, independent of whether they actually experienced material disadvantage. Universities will be asked to move beyond their shallow preoccupation with optics and do more real work to identify individuals with relevant life experiences.
What is your issue with that?
Also, how does fairness to Asian-American students figure into your view? Would you even have got into Harvard if you were Asian-American? You sound like a lot of progressives, that seem to wholesale ignore that this was a case brought be Asian Americans that were unfairly excluded.
It also has far too few working-class students, whose perspective is likely to be at least as interesting and valuable as that of ultra-privileged kids who happen to have diverse pigmentation. The fact the so many in these institutions are hyper-focused on the supposed educational benefits from diversity deemed exclusively from the most arbitrary and superficial criteria, and care so little about actual differences in lived experience, speak volumes. This ruling is but the first step in a huge correction needed in American society, and especially the blindspots of the elites.
I'm pretty opposed to the decision, but agree with you that we need to also prioritize socioeconomic diversity. Hopefully that will be a silver lining of this ruling as Harvard and other schools look to prioritize race neutral metrics that are socioeconomic proxies
Why not adopt socioeconomic metrics for their own sake, regardless of race? How does race matte *per se* devoid of experience?
For several reasons:
1) The lived experience of black and white people of the same socioeconomic stratum retain differences due solely or mostly to the way culture responds to their race: policing, hiring discrimination, cultural representation, etc etc. Exposing students to others with different experiences is a major goal of diversity programs.
2) Black people in particular experience economic disadvantage because of the particular injustices of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, redlining, and discrimination in nearly every facet of cultural life. That's a generational injustice that simply is not a factor for poor white folks. Does it deserve redress?
1. I’m skeptical of no. 1 esp with regards to far more salient things (eg where you grew up). The differences in experience and perspective between a black and a white child of pmc in an East coast wealthy suburb is negligible in comparison to either and a white person who grew up in Russia or even france.
2. This isn’t, strictly speaking, about race, but about the generational experience of a specific group of people (whose ancestors were victims of specific racist policies). If you want to help that group, for whatever reason (and I can think of many!) target them explicitly and specifically. The wrongs done to generational African Americans don’t justify a leg up for a Nigerian immigrant let alone for our own MY.
P.S.
I'd also repeat what I said elsewhere: "lived experience" is probably overrated in any case, with regards to its benefits for academic work. It has close to nothing to do with your success in STEM, and far less important for academic Humanities than is fashionable to claim in some circles. Moreover, to the extent that your "lived experience" makes you a better scholar, that should already be reflected in your work. In other words, its moot to debate what makes someone good at something. Maybe its "lived experience" maybe its genetics, maybe its a thousand other factors, most never to be disocvered - the point should be whether the work is good or not, whatever the reason.
> Black people in particular experience economic disadvantage because of the particular injustices of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, redlining, and discrimination in nearly every facet of cultural life. That's a generational injustice that simply is not a factor for poor white folks. Does it deserve redress?
No, not "black people in particular", a specific cohort of American black people whose ancestors were subject to these things. My friend whose parents immigrated to Canada from Nigeria, became diplomats, and moved to the US, did not experience any of that.
Couldn't you effectively achieve both through socio-economic weighting though, given the disproportionate representation of black people in the lower rungs and from certain places? I mean Harvard could create quotas for inner-city folks of a certain income and end up with black applicants without ever having to specify an AA quota.
How can race be devoid of experience? Like to the extent things like driving while black is a thing or security following people around a department store is a thing surely they’re not exempting Nigerians.
In talking to African immigrants, at least anecdotally, I've heard that they experience discrimination in very distinct ways, including from US-born black people.
Different in many ways, but also overlapping in many ways.
No, not surely. Immigrants very often look and dress differently and if you live in an area with a lot of them you can pick up on it quickly, even wrt Black immigrants. Some immigrant dress is very obvious, but even subtler patterns are noticeable if you know what to look for. A West African IT guy look that I can spot a mile away: wireless headset, 90s style cut of blue jeans, plain t-shirt and just a "different sort of face / hair" than most American Black people.
Of course there's something to the point you're making, and there are times the immigrant will be seen as just "Black". But race and ethnicity are confounded too much in the discourse with all the complexities of ethnicity are subsumed by over-simplistic Black/White thinking.
And the best way to discover lower-class but college-ready students is universal SAT/ACT testing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/upshot/how-universal-college-admission-tests-help-low-income-students.html
Except now all the elite schools are shunning the sat because it exposes all their malpractices. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better, I fear.
The president of Northwestern spoke in London on Wednesday to alums and was EXTREMELY (shockingly) candid about these topics. He basically said that test optional is the future (although not indicating his personal view of it), and also that the admissions office was going to do everything they could to continue affirmative action without actually being able to ask for students' races. Using zip codes as proxies, etc. I don't get too worked up about college admissions these days, especially given I live in the UK now, but I'm extremely, extremely disturbed at test optional policies, given how the "holistic admissions process" advantages students from upper middle and upper class backgrounds. Fine, include other stuff, whatever, but please at least consider test scores!
It’s so blatantly unjust, and inefficient that I do believe it will fail, miserably, on all counts. What troubles me though is how we got tot he point that these people have this blatantly horrible obsession, and are unabashed in advocating for it. It’s the kind of jarring bigotry and unlawful conduct that hasn’t really been heard from my those kind of people since the 1930s…
P.S. let me be clearer still. We live in an increasingly global world. The leading position of us academia isn’t set in stone and mandated by heaven. It was hard earned and will be lost if they give up on meritocracy and go full speed on bizarre anti intellectual niche obsessions.
I would not say so. Working class people are generally less intelligent than those in higher classes, and intelligence is quite heritable. A fair and equitable admissions process should not sort people by anything except their capabilities.
I tend to agree that judging purely on aptitude is the best approach, but at the same time argued that to the extent that we care about either "diversity" for its educational benefits (ultimately diversity of perspectives) or we care about justice-considerations in admissions, then in both cases class ought to matter far more than race.