Does Johns Hopkins hate whites?

A few months ago, I was surprised to learn that white representation in the student body of Princeton is down to about 35 percent and that white representation among undergraduates at Stanford is down to 26 percent. Now, I learn from the Washington Post that at Johns Hopkins, whites made up only 17 percent of last year’s freshman class. A decade earlier, white representation was 46 percent.

It turns out that all the talk about creating a campus that “looks like America” was BS, just as we suspected all along. The real goal seems to have been to “screw Whitey.”

How did Johns Hopkins suppress the white presence on campus so dramatically? According to the Hopkins party line, as reported by the Post, three steps made the difference: “the elimination of preferences in admission for children, grandchildren and siblings of alumni; a massive increase in financial aid for families in need; and more extensive recruiting in places where the university is not well known.”

This is a lie. The main reason why Hopkins has been able to replace white students with blacks and Hispanics is its use of different admissions standards for members of different races and ethnicities — in other words, racial discrimination.

The Post never mentions this reality, choosing to accept uncritically Hopkins’ lie. But the central role of racial discrimination is evident from the fact, reported by the Post, that Hopkins believes the Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard case jeopardizes its diversity regime because of the decision’s impact on colleges’ ability to make race-conscious admission decisions.

Nothing in the Harvard decision, or any other by the Court, prevents Hopkins from continuing to eschew legacy preferences. Nothing prevents it from granting generous financial aid to needy families. And nothing prevents it from recruiting where Hopkins is not well known.

All the Harvard decision tries to prevent is preferring applicants due to their race. If the decision jeopardizes Hopkins’ “diversity” regime — and it does — that’s because the regime depends on admitting blacks and Hispanics whose credentials are significantly inferior to those of white applicants it currently rejects.

Absent discrimination against white applicants, refusing to prefer legacy applicants will have almost no impact on the racial composition of the student body. As I demonstrated here, legacies tend to be more qualified for admission than non-legacies. Most legacies would either be admitted with no preference or would be admitted with no preference but for their race (all legacy status does for them is wash away the disadvantage of being white).

To be sure, ending legacy preferences will result in some legacies losing out. But absent discrimination, they will be replaced by high achievers, the vast majority of whom will be white or Asian-American. They would be replaced by significant numbers of blacks and Hispanics only if the admissions office, in violation of the law, were to disregard their comparatively low test scores and grades.

As for generous financial aid, it might enable some black and Hispanic applicants to accept, rather than decline, their offer of admission, and others to apply when they otherwise might not have. But if the admissions statistics at Hopkins are anything like those of Harvard and Yale, the vast majority of these applicants wouldn’t be accepted absent strong racial preferences.

Beating the bushes to find diamond-in-the-rough minority applicants can succeed in identifying some who, in a colorblind admissions process, can compete well for admission. However, other elite colleges will be seeking these students too, so the competition to attract them will be fierce. I very much doubt there will be enough of them to make a big difference at Hopkins.

I base my skepticism in part on my experience performing pro bono legal services for a charter school in a very poor part of the deep south. When I visited the school, which was almost 100 percent black, an impressive black student showed me around. She was at the top of her class and was applying to several elite colleges. The principal was confident she would be accepted at one or more of them.

After I sat in on her advanced calculus class, the teacher proudly informed me that my guide had scored a “3” on the AP exam for the calculus class she took her junior year. I couldn’t help thinking that every year at our local high school in Maryland, dozens of students — many of whom are rejected by the most elite colleges — score “4” or “5” on AP calculus exams.

It should be obvious that Hopkins will not be able to keep suppressing its white population and maintaining anything like its current level of blacks and Hispanics unless it discriminates against whites and in favor of blacks and Hispanics.

To me, the real question is why Hopkins wants to suppress white representation so severely. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that Hopkins has it in for whites. And given the degree to which Critical Race Theory, talk of “white privilege,” and critiques of “whiteness” hold sway in academia, we shouldn’t be surprised.