How Inclusive Can Elite Institutions Really Get?

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Readers and staffers explore the tension between selectivity and inclusivity, sparked by Harvard’s sanctions against same-gender groups. To join the debate, drop us a note: hello@theatlantic.com.

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Chris Bodenner

1:39 PM / June 2, 2016

Should Harvard Select Students Based on Lottery?

A reader who graduated from Harvard last year, Eric, responds to Li’s latest note:

Your reader, Ethan, jokingly mentions that “will Harvard soon be doing away with its admissions process and allowing entrance by lottery? Of course not.” In fact, last month, such a scenario could have easily begun to come to pass.

In the spirit of disruption that pervades this year, a slate of outsider candidates calling for “Free Harvard, Fair Harvard” successfully petitioned for inclusion on the ballot for election to the Board of Overseers, one of two governing boards of Harvard. (Unusually, Overseers are elected by the alumni, allowing such a scenario to be mechanistically possible.)

Their campaign platform, in brief, was two-fold: redirect the university endowment to eliminate undergraduate tuition, and increase “transparency” in undergraduate admissions. As detailed in a very thorough article in Harvard Magazine, one of the petition candidates, Ron Unz, has explicitly proposed using a lottery to select the vast majority of the undergraduate class.

The reasoning behind that proposal from Unz—a former businessman and former publisher of The American Conservative—is complex and thought-provoking. You don’t usually hear a business conservative proposing free college tuition at a private university, but Unz is pushing for it based on a conservative belief in meritocracy and an opposition to affirmative action. The lottery part of his admissions scheme is also meant to prevent the deliberate admission of students based on race or ethnicity, a process at Harvard that is now, according to Unz’s research, under-admitting Asian Americans and over-admitting Jewish students relative to merit. Read the bottom of this note for a fuller view of his research and reasoning, but here’s the gist of what Unz is proposing, excerpted from the Harvard Magazine piece:

His solution is “two rings” of admissions. For an entering Harvard College class, the inner ring, of perhaps 300 academic and intellectual stars, would be carefully selected on purely objective academic and intellectual meritocratic criteria (“representing just the top 2 percent of America’s [National Merit Scholar] semifinalists”) from among the most promising candidates. Everyone else, the outer ring in each class (1,300 undergraduates per year), could be selected randomly—the proverbial flip of the coin—from among all the applicants who seem able to handle rigorous undergraduate studies.

Back to Eric’s note:

The discussion of the merits of the “Free Harvard, Fair Harvard” platform is a complex one fraught with nuances of class, race, fairness, and pragmatism. Many alumni, myself included, viewed the platform as a de facto Trojan horse designed to overturn the status quo of holistic review in admissions under the veneer of a “free Harvard education.” However, I fear further exploration of this would be a digression from the current discussion—but the Harvard Magazine article is a good starting point.

I graduated May of 2015 from Harvard College, and this election was the first in which I voted. I was pleased to see last month that none of the petition candidates were elected. But in a year where the unfathomable has repeatedly become electoral reality, it’s not hard to imagine things turning out differently, and waves of disruption lapping at even Harvard’s ancient walls.

If you’re a Harvard alum or a current student or faculty member and would like to chime in, please let us know. And of course all readers are welcome to join the discussion, especially if you’d like to push back on Unz’s proposal.

***

Here’s the full section on Unz’s reasoning behind his “‘two rings’ of admissions,” excerpted from that long article in Harvard Magazine:

Unz’s background in quantitative disciplines and theoretical physics very much comes through in his approach and analysis. In part, [his American Conservative essay “The Myth of American Meritocracy”] is a review of the argument in Golden’s book and other books on admissions, documenting past infamies such as the “Jewish quota” on admissions in the early twentieth century. In part, it is a statistical analysis of the family names of National Merit Scholarship (NMS) semifinalists (which are based on students’ Preliminary SAT, or PSAT, scores), “a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age population,” and of winners of elite national mathematics and science competitions, also seen as proxies for academic achievement and capacity.

Unz then compares his findings from those samples to the ethnic composition of elite universities’ enrollments. Relative to the quantitative metrics he uses as proxies for achievement and ability, he finds systematic, wholesale under-enrollment of Asian Americans. By the same measures, he finds that “Jewish academic achievement has apparently plummeted in recent decades,” resulting in a “massive apparent bias in favor of far less-qualified Jewish applicants” being enrolled, coinciding with “an equally massive ethnic skew at the topmost administrative ranks of the universities in question.” He speculates that the apparent over-enrollment of Jewish students at elite institutions perhaps reflects the school leaders’ unconscious, implicit biases.

Citing other works, Unz concludes that “it seems likely that some of these obvious admissions biases we have noticed may be related to the poor human quality and weak academic credentials of many of the university employees making these momentous decisions.” Thus,

I suspect that the combined effect of these separate pressures, rather than any planned or intentional bias, is the primary cause of the striking enrollment statistics that we have examined above. In effect, somewhat dim and over-worked admissions officers, generally possessing weak quantitative skills, have been tasked by their academic superiors and media monitors with the twin ideological goals of enrolling Jews and enrolling non-whites, with any major failures risking harsh charges of either “anti-Semitism” or “racism.” But by inescapable logic maximizing the number of Jews and non-whites implies minimizing the number of non-Jewish whites.

He concludes that in battles over admissions policies at elite, selective institutions,

Conservatives have denounced “affirmative action” policies which emphasize race over academic merit, and thereby lead to the enrollment of lesser qualified blacks and Hispanics over their more qualified white and Asian competitors; they argue that our elite institutions should be color-blind and race-neutral. Meanwhile, liberals have countered that the student body of these institutions should “look like America,” at least approximately, and that ethnic and racial diversity intrinsically provide important educational benefits, at least if all admitted students are reasonably qualified and able to do the work.

My own position has always been strongly in the former camp, supporting meritocracy over diversity in elite admissions. But based on the detailed evidence I have discussed above, it appears that both these ideological values have gradually been overwhelmed and replaced by the influence of corruption and ethnic favoritism, thereby selecting future American elites which are not meritocratic nor diverse, neither being drawn from our most able students nor reasonably reflecting the general American population.

He considers a pure-diversity admissions scheme (“require our elite universities to bring their student bodies into rough conformity with the overall college-age population, ethnicity by ethnicity”), which would be “extremely difficult to implement in practice” and would “foster clear absurdities, with wealthy Anglo-Saxons from Greenwich, Conn., being propelled into Yale because they fill the ‘quota’ created on the backs of the impoverished Anglo-Saxons of Appalachia or Mississippi.”

On the other hand, he states that “strictest objective meritocracy,” with students “automatically” selected “in academic rank-order, based on high school grades and performance on standardized exams such as the SAT,” risks introducing a high-stakes testing atmosphere like those that plague admissions to national universities in Japan, Korea, and the People’s Republic of China. That approach would also “heavily favor those students enrolled at our finest secondary schools, whose families could afford the best private tutors and cram-courses, and with parents willing to push them to expend the last ounce of their personal effort in endless, constant studying. These crucial factors, along with innate ability, are hardly distributed evenly among America’s highly diverse population of over 300 million, whether along geographical, socio-economic, or ethnic lines, and the result would probably be an extremely unbalanced enrollment within the ranks of our top universities, perhaps one even more unbalanced than that of today.”

Continued here.

Li Zhou

1:29 PM / June 1, 2016

How Inclusive Can an Elite School Really Get?

A few more readers join the discussion I started with my piece on Harvard’s sanctions against single-gender groups and then continued with my follow-up note on the hypocrisy of singling out all-male final clubs. Here’s Sasha via hello@:

The issue I have with Harvard’s actions are manifold, but I think they’ve jumbled up a series of issues into one. First, there is the notion of whether single-sex organizations have a place in the modern school (I believe they do). Second, there is the issue of sexual assault on campus: I believe the banning of single-sex organizations will have a negligible effect one way or the other, if at all, and I believe there are more effective and equitable ways to combat sexual assault.

Third, there is the issue of freedom of association, and the precedents this establishes at Harvard and the educational world at large. I for one do not want to teach our future leaders of America that values such as freedom of association and freedom of speech, which create the vibrant and resilient culture we live in today, are to be cast aside in the interest of some McCarthy-esque “club test.”

Finally, there is a notion that Harvard wants to present itself “inclusive not exclusive.”

(That’s laughable and I don’t see why they’d want to present that; Harvard’s brand is based off eliteness.) There’s the further notion that these final clubs perpetuate this exclusiveness. I will concede this, but what does Harvard think their “success” will be with this? The rich and powerful will congregate with others who are rich and powerful. You can make them open the doors to the room, but you can’t make them stay in the same room.

I think single-sex organizations are great, so long as you have options for the other sex and/or co-ed options. A great example of this is the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and Venture Scouts—which is operated by the Boy Scouts of America but is co-ed. (I was a Venture.) They serve similar purposes to organizations centered around ethnicity, gender, or shared interests (e.g. Star Trek, hiking, pantomime) and provide a social network that is supportive and nurturing. For college students, such networks are particularly helpful and provide lifelines to students during a tumultuous period in their lives.

Another reader, Ethan, puts a finer point on something Sasha said:

If inequality and exclusivity are truly the enemy, will Harvard soon be doing away with its admissions process and allowing entrance by lottery? Of course not.

The saying goes that “if everyone is special, nobody is,” and it rings true. One doesn’t have to envision a Harrison Bergeron-esque dystopia to see the incredible hazard in failing to acknowledge that differences are part of the beauty of our world. It’s a special kind of ludicrous to celebrate diversity on one hand, yet deny exclusivity and niche cultures that incubate and highlight diversity! Not that these groups are immune from inherent or cultural flaws, but a solution like this manages to drown the baby in the bathwater, not just throw it out.

While I agree that the premise of an exclusive institution like Harvard striving to be more inclusive embodies an inherent contradiction, this alone does not negate the value of such an effort.

Many organizations, including companies like Google, could be considered “exclusive” places to work, when looking solely at the proportion of applicants they ultimately hire. This, however, does not make it less important that the workplaces themselves treat all their employees equitably and insure their experiences are supported and fair. Just because an institution operates on the foundation of exclusivity—a problem Harvard continues to grapple with through initiatives including its financial aid program and access to online courses—does not mean the people within it shouldn’t build and promote a culture of inclusivity.

Li Zhou

2:45 PM / May 11, 2016

A Gender-Based Hypocrisy

Upon reading some of the comments and responses to the piece I published yesterday on Harvard’s recent sanctions against single-gender social groups, I’ve thought more about the nature of this policy and the reason it needs to apply unilaterally across these organizations. As one reader named Kevin notes:

While I can’t speak specifically for Harvard, the Black fraternities at my Alma-mater had non-black members. The majority of the membership tended to be black but they didn’t discriminate as long as you genuinely showed interest. Personally, I think that while it may be inequitable to also include all-women groups, it is fair. One can not justifiably defend a double standard while championing fairness.

In the article, I argued that the sanctions were flawed for including groups that haven’t faced the same kinds of critiques as all-male final clubs. Additionally I reasoned that single-gender women’s groups ought to be preserved because of the systems of power in place that spur a need for these safe spaces.

While I still believe that this latter point is an important one, I do think it can ultimately be somewhat hypocritical. Men’s organizations have clung to the importance of tradition and history in defending their continued existence. And I found myself arguing for the preservation of the women’s groups, partly based on similar reasoning—namely an aversion to change—along with a belief that the structure and support of such groups would be threatened by this development. Justifying the presence of women’s groups and not men’s also seems to suggest that men aren’t interested in the same types of community, and that in itself feels deeply unfair. That said, the all-male groups that are responsible for specific “power imbalances,” a toxic culture, and elevated cases of sexual assault, should be explicitly punished and singled out.

As the university has noted when explaining the basis for such sweeping sanctions, gender discrimination doesn’t have a place anywhere at Harvard, in any organization. And this realization, while a tough one to come to, is accompanied by the fact that there are many women’s and men’s support groups on campus that are open to everyone, regardless of gender and other qualifying factors. Similarly, affinity groups for students of different ethnic backgrounds invite diverse membership—and have thrived.

The success and openness of these types of organizations could serve as possible examples for current single-gender social groups as they grapple with figuring out what comes next.

Also, I’m interested in hearing your thoughts and experiences with single-gender social groups: hello@theatlantic.com.