6
THE HARVARD CRIMSON
EDITORIAL
JUNE 30, 2023
OP-ED
Admissions Can’t Be a Dirty Word BY TOMMY BARONE
T
o fight for diversity on campus, we students have to talk about admissions. Behind every movement lies discourse. Only by the free exchange of ideas can we diagnose issues as worthy of action, identify solutions, and convince others to join us. That’s why the thing that unsettles me most about today’s decision is that admissions remains a dirty word on Harvard’s campus. There exists a politics of politeness that proscribes honest discussion about Harvard College’s admissions practices. This reluctance has long held back reform; now, it could restrain the student response to the fall of affirmative action too.
“
Why, then, are we keeping mum about everything else wrong with admissions? The short answer is that we’re worried about being impolite.
EMILY N. DIAL—CRIMSON DESIGNER
OP-ED
The Supreme Court Killed Campus Diversity. What Now? BY JOSEPH W. HERNANDEZ
H
arvard as we know it has come to an end. As each class is admitted without affirmative action in place, the Harvard that I applied to will slowly wither away, dying the day that the Class of 2027 graduates. After all, they will likely be remembered as the last diverse class to attend Harvard. As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down affirmative action, race can now only be considered in college admissions indirectly, such as when an applicant details specific experiences of racial discrimination in their admissions essays. As colleges nationwide struggle to make sense of their now-shattered admissions systems, one question looms over them: What can they do to pick up the pieces? Both Students for Fair Admissions, which prevailed in the case, and a concurring member of the decision’s majority suggested that universities like Harvard could maintain diversity by adjusting their admissions policies to consider an applicant’s socioeconomic status. Such an approach, which is long overdue, may well be universities’ best option in a post-affirmative action world — it could allow colleges to account for the United States’ educational inequality, stratified by race and socioeconomic status. Even still, it is clear that educational disparities cannot and should not be reduced to a purely socioeconomic issue. As of 2019, the average primarily white school district — that is, in which over 75 percent of students are white — received $2,226 more in overall funding than the average school primarily attended by students of color, according to public education nonprofit EdBuild. Worse yet, even only including districts with poverty rates over 20 percent, primarily white school districts still received an average of $1,487 more per student than their primarily non-white counterparts.
“
Given the omnipresence of racism in the American education system, colleges simply can’t put a student’s accomplishments in proper context without considering race in admissions.
Though the Supreme Court may try, there’s no denying not only the prevalence of racism in the classroom but also its pronounced effects on students’ mental health, ability to engage in the classroom, and social isolation. Similarly, students of color are far more likely to be suspended for the same behavior as their white peers, starting as early as early as preschool. Unsurprisingly, the end result is an education system where equally intelligent students of color routinely perform worse on standardized tests and receive worse grades. Without affirmative action, these classroom inequalities will reign over admissions, unable to be accounted for unless a student treats their personal statement and supplemental essays as a laundry list of their experiences with racism. The painful truth is, the short-lived era of diversity on the college campus is about to draw to a close. Given the omnipresence of racism in the American education system, colleges simply can’t put a student’s accomplishments in
proper context without considering race in admissions. As a result, race-blind admissions will inherently favor white students. We’ve already seen this disaster play out before. When California outlawed affirmative action policies in its public universities in 1996, its flagship colleges saw an immediate dropoff in on-campus diversity. After well over twenty years of University of California-led efforts to pursue diversity with affirmative action outlawed, students of color remain drastically underrepresented.
“
While there will still be students of color who manage to win the upward battle that is Harvard admissions, it’s clear that the days of a diverse Harvard are coming to a close.
While the UC schools reached a peak of 37 percent of students belonging to underrepresented backgrounds in 2016, this was still woefully inadequate given that 56 percent of graduating high school students in California came from these backgrounds. And it’s not as if students of color weren’t pursuing higher education: While they are underrepresented at the more prestigious UC schools, Black and Latine students are overrepresented at the less prestigious California State University schools, which offer less financial aid, fewer job opportunities, and lower graduation rates. Without affirmative action, we can expect the exact same outcome nationwide. Unable to consider a student’s race, admissions offices will be forced to compare students’ resumes without the full context of the privilege and inequality that informed them. With today’s decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices have crafted a college admissions landscape effectively stacked against students of color. While there will still be students of color who manage to win the upward battle that is Harvard admissions, it’s clear that the days of a diverse Harvard are coming to a close. SFFA’s lawyers themselves have conceded that the number of Black students attending Harvard would decrease if affirmative action was overturned, though Harvard could gain socioeconomic diversity by scrapping legacy preferences and favoring low-income applicants. But this excuse rings hollow, as we easily could have had both racial and socioeconomic diversity. So today, I grieve the loss of the deeply flawed college that I had come to know and love; this death of diversity is not the change Harvard needed. Today, I grieve the loss of the Harvard that accepted low-income students of color like me; I was the first student from my high school to attend Harvard, and today, I fear I may be the last. Most of all, today I grieve the loss of the Harvard that tore me down, telling me that I did not belong time and time again, only for its communities of color to build me back up, reminding me that low-income brown kids deserve college, too. Today, the Supreme Court has sent an abundantly clear message: College is for the privileged.
–Joseph W. Hernandez ’25, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Adams House.
This hush does not result from a shortage of worthy topics. Harvard College gives significant admissions advantages to legacies, recruited athletes, the children of faculty, and the children of donors, a group that is collectively much whiter and wealthier than the rest of the student body. It holds open a backdoor for the kids of the rich and powerful in the form of the “Z-list.” And it slams the front door in the face of low-income students, with just 4.5 percent of undergraduates coming from the bottom quintile of the income distribution. In short, admissions at Harvard is perhaps more nakedly unfair than anywhere else in the nation. But, in my experience at least, you’ll hardly hear a word about admissions outside of affirmative action. Mostly, you’ll just find silence. This worries me, because if history is any guide, students have an essential role to play in holding the College accountable for reforming admissions practices to uphold diversity. From the anti-war protests of the 1960s, to the anti-Apartheid campaign of the 1980s, to the divestment campaigns of the 2010s, it is students that drive change on college campuses — and often, from there, in the wider world. And, indeed, my peers have fought the good fight for a racially diverse Harvard. Why, then, are we keeping mum about everything else wrong with admissions? The short answer is that we’re worried about being impolite. The essential problem with admissions discourse at Harvard is hidden in plain sight: We are the ones who got in. To talk about admissions is inescapably to talk about our own admission, and the admission of many of the people we love. As a result, criticizing the system feels needlessly indecent, like it questions whether any of us truly belong. So many of us stay quiet about our admissions hang-ups, or convince ourselves that they aren’t well-founded. “I know so many wonderful people admitted this way,” the logic goes, or “Admissions is arbitrary anyway.” I can appreciate this instinct to be circumspect. Kindness, respect, and humility matter greatly. But then I remember getting into Harvard, the first in my family to do anything like this. I remember the chest-emptying, body-shaking sobs from my mom. I remember the way my back crunched when my dad, blind with excitement, crushed me into a bear hug. I remember how my grandmother’s voice broke when she heard that I would attend the famous American university her husband, an immigrant from backwater Sicily, had always revered but would not live to see me enter. It was the raw, impolite joy of a family achieving a dream.
These best of memories linger like ghosts when I think about all the people for whom Harvard is unjustly put out of reach. They are what makes my blood boil when peers have dissuaded me from talking about admissions (“I just think it’s better not to say anything,” or “I think that makes people uncomfortable”). The College’s admissions practices deny life-changing opportunities to the low-income people who have historically had them least and needed them most. Unless Harvard responds decisively to today’s decision, they could again do that for people of color. A response that maintains or improves diversity on campus fundamentally requires cutting admissions preferences that benefit the white and wealthy. Cognizant of those touchy tradeoffs, we keep quiet about admissions, leaving an unfair status quo unquestioned. If we are to defend diversity, admissions cannot remain a dirty word at Harvard. To those who want to see admissions reform, I encourage you to express your views honestly and openly. More often than not, speaking with candor, kindness, and respect — no hating on rich kids or legacies, no singling out “undeserving” individuals — will not arouse bad feelings. Sometimes a little impropriety is worth it, but you must try your utmost to approach these conversations with a maximum of care. Of course, these criticisms will occasionally feel uncomfortable. When that happens, we would do well to remember that the inscrutable, impossible game of tradeoffs that produced our admission says nothing about who we are or what we deserve — at least, not in the broader, real-life sense of our personal worth. With this in mind, we should each resist the urge to dissuade
“
The College’s admissions practices deny life-changing opportunities to the low-income people who have historically had them least and needed them most.
the admissions reformists, strive to engage in good faith, and seriously examine what we believe fair admissions would look like. When we talk about free speech, it’s the culture wars that leap to mind — conservative self-silencing, groupthink, cancel culture. Awash in this noise, it’s easy to forget that plain old etiquette is often the basic reason our speech is imperfectly free. Difficult conversations require we set aside this politics of politeness and delve to the heart of things. If we don’t, I fear that when the coming years call us to speak out for diversity on campus, we just won’t have the words.
–Tommy Barone ’25, an Editorial Comp Director, is a Social Studies concentrator in Currier House. THC Read more opinions from The Crimson at THECRIMSON.COM
EMILY N. DIAL—CRIMSON DESIGNER
