Building the Whiner Elite
The Left never wanted scholarship or achievement; it wanted race-schlepping Queen for a Day. And now we're going to get it.
Glenn Loury has a piece out titled, “The First Thing You Learn at Harvard.” Written with liberal journalist Jay Caspian Kang, it tells you a good deal of what you need to, but would prefer not to, know about “elite” higher education. Loury notes that Kang
…has been following the Students for Fair Admissions cases for the better part of a decade as they’ve wound their way through the courts. In the beginning, Jay was a believer in affirmative action. But by the end, as the discovery process revealed more and more evidence showing that Harvard clearly discriminated against Asian Americans and other applicants, he found that he could no longer support the policy as it’s practiced.
As Jay sees it, one of the major problems the case revealed is that Harvard (along with many other selective schools) favored those who claimed to suffer trauma due to their race, especially if they were black or Latino, no matter how objectively privileged they were. In essence, students who could play the role of “victim of systemic racism,” no matter their actual lived experience, had a much better shot of getting in than those who couldn’t or wouldn’t, regardless of how much better the latter group’s test scores and grades were.
I must slightly depart from Loury here. In my view, your “lived experience” (is there some other kind?) should be at most a secondary consideration in admission to an elite college, at least if “elite” is to retain the meaning it’s had up to now, to wit, the best and brightest. But that’s the biggest “if” around.
And if you were an Asian applicant, even off-the-charts academic performance couldn’t earn you a fair shot at getting in, regardless of how many actual difficulties you and your family had faced.
This concrete evidence of discrimination would be bad enough. But Jay points to a possible, more insidious consequence of these policies: Applicants who conjure up trauma narratives might actually start to believe this institutionally mandated bullshit.
I suppose this was bound to happen in a society that lives off victimhood rather than achievement, but it’s still depressing to see it put in such blunt terms by someone who has seen it up close.
After all, if Harvard signals that its applicants must cook up a story about their own oppression and then legitimizes the story by admitting the student, the student could be forgiven for taking their acceptance as confirmation that, whatever their own initial feelings, they have been traumatized. Even in a scenario in which the student knows they must tell a made-up story about themselves simply to gain admission, these schools require a startling amount of cynicism from the students they so often champion as young idealists.
Let me try to put that in condensed form. What Harvard and similar schools are teaching their student applicants is that they should be dishonest and cynical in addition to, and as an offshoot of, being whiny. Welcome to the new version of “equity.”
Either way, the first lesson Harvard teaches its students appears to be the following: Market your identity-based oppression. And if you’re not oppressed, start acting like you are. Elsewhere in our conversation, Jay asks why we permit the existence of an elite tier of schools in this country, if this is what they’ve come to. Jay’s a left-wing guy, I’m a conservative. But I have to say, given all the evidence, I think it’s a pretty good question.
A good question indeed, and it’s past time to ask it out loud.
The question, specifically, is whether we want our best universities to be devoted to excellence or to “equity.” They can’t produce both, since they’re opposites. And this fact is not going to change with all the fancy wording in the world, such as — as I have seen here and there of late — creating the Associate Dean for Diversity and Excellence. It’s a nonsense title put together to give better PR to a nonsense idea.
One more thing to note here, although it feels hackneyed to say it, is that a university that thinks it’s going to produce both excellence and equity will produce neither: The abandonment of any focused pursuit of excellence is a sure thing, while getting to equity will be mostly an illusion, built on a foundation of lying student applicants and credulous and/or complicit admissions officers.
If we as a country really want to put aside the pursuit of excellence in favor of the pursuit of “equity,” we should say so candidly and be frank about what it’s going to cost. But with the gross dishonesty we already indulge, and the glorification of victimhood we not only indulge but encourage, that is the one thing that’s certain not to happen.