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.”
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