Harvard College, the undergraduate component of Harvard University, has a really big problem. It’s the kind of problem that most of the other colleges and universities in the country would love to have: The brightest, most talented, and most accomplished high schoolers in the country (not to mention students from foreign lands) are knocking themselves out trying to gain admission there.
Indeed, the Harvard brand is dazzlingly powerful.
The fierce competition for the limited number of slots in Harvard College’s student body isn’t completely devoid of unpleasant aspects. In our culture, where egalitarian busybodies take it upon themselves to tell highly successful individuals and institutions what they should do for others, Harvard is the target of its fair share of moralizing sermons. Just as there’s no shortage of voices telling Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, et al., what they should do with their billions, there’s no shortage of voices telling Harvard what type of students they should admit.
Even President Joe Biden has gotten into the act, urging Harvard and other colleges to find ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s June rulings in two cases that affirmative action admissions policies are unconstitutional. The president is one of many voices raised against Harvard’s accepting legacy admissions on the ground that such a policy favors white people.
No matter who Harvard decides to admit in the coming years, it will not satisfy everybody. Harvard is caught between a rock and a hard place.
When it comes to legacy admissions, they are disproportionately white, for the simple reason that Harvard’s student body historically has been predominantly white. And yet as venerable an institution as Harvard can’t afford to completely abandon its history. Legacy admissions can burnish the Harvard brand by providing for a certain amount of institutional continuity. I say “a certain amount,” because I’m confident that Harvard is too wise to weaken their brand by admitting legacy students of an inferior caliber.
Of course, the great defect of the affirmative action policy was that it discriminated not only against white Americans, but even more aggressively against another minority group—Asian Americans.
We have to admit that if the goal is to assemble a student body that looks more like the United States as a whole, then the policy of legacy admissions is way out of line, because children of Harvard grads are one of the smallest demographic slices of our population that you can think of. Legacy admissions smack of anti-democratic elitism. It’s a form of “the old boy network” that’s an affront to the American value of meritocracy.
Let me interject here my own experience as a student at Harvard. I wasn’t a degree candidate there, and so I didn’t have to pass through a rigorous admission application procedure. I was still teaching high school at the time. In the summer of 1979, I received a grant from the private school where I was teaching to study moral education—a very new field of study—at Harvard during the summer.
On the first day in one class, we were given a thick manuscript of a textbook that one of the professors team-teaching the course had been working on for three years. I leafed through the first few pages and then caused the professor some consternation by pointing out that his statements on page four directly contradicted statements on page one. Oops. Let me emphasize that I’m not saying that this kind of mistake was common at Harvard. It just demonstrated that Harvard profs are human and fallible just like everyone else. (And remember, this was in the school of education, perennially one of the weak links in higher education.)
What I found more disturbing, though, was the attitude of my fellow students. Harvard’s motto is “Veritas”—Latin for “truth”—but I detected zero interest among my classmates in asking probing questions or digging for truth. We were at Harvard, and the Harvard connection was all that mattered. Prestige and connections were far more important than truth.
It’s easy to understand why so many strive so mightily to gain admission into Harvard and other top schools. It should also be plain that there’s no obvious formula, no set of quotas, that can provide a perfectly just set of admissions criteria for those schools. That being the case, I don’t see any justification for outside agencies—including and especially the government—to presume to tell the Harvards of the country which applicants they should accept. Let them work it out.
