Almost every year, it seems, Harvard sets a record for the “diversity” of its newly admitted students. “Harvard Accepts a Diverse Class of 2015” announces the Boston Globe this year, rather blandly, in an article that reads exactly like a press release from the Harvard admissions office.
But how to measure diversity? While there has been increasing attention to
“economic diversity,” the focus is still on race and national origin. The original proponents of the “diversity rationale” for affirmative action, luminaries of higher education such as Derek Bok and William Bowen, argued that increased racial diversity would improve both education and race relations. Yet there seems to be something like a bipartisan consensus emerging, at least outside the university, that race-based preferences do not necessarily fulfill their good intentions. As an article in the American Prospect noted last year, President Obama himself has questioned the long-term benefits of affirmative action:
Writing in The Audacity of Hope, he did not expressly condemn affirmative action, but he did consign it to a category of exhausted programs that “dissect[s] Americans into ‘us’ and ‘them'” and that “can’t serve as the basis for the kinds of sustained, broad-based political coalitions needed to transform America.” As president, Obama has repeatedly eschewed race-targeting (with respect most notably to employment policy) in favor of “universal” reforms that allegedly lift all boats.
The diversity rationale, laid out most extensively in a book by Bok and Bowen titled The Shape of the River, relied heavily on the “educational benefits of diversity.” Educational benefit was defined so broadly as to mean not only increasing the variety of perspectives in the classroom, but also deflating stereotypes. Have these benefits materialized? The diversity rationale is among the most pervasive for affirmative action, but is it persuasive?
I’m not concerned, here, with whether the diversity rationale can withstand strict scrutiny in a court of law. I have my own test, which I call “sloppy scrutiny.” It’s based on the collegiate journalist’s signature mix of personal experience and armchair speculation.
The logic of the diversity rationale would seem to apply to many kinds of diversity, including geographic, racial, economic, gender, height, weight, hair color, etc. But let’s start with geography, which is among the more plausible and less contentious of these.
First, everyone knows that geographic diversity is more about burnishing the admissions brochure than education. While it’s possible that I’ve benefited immensely from the inclusion of at least one Wyominger in each admitted class, I suspect that Harvard benefits far more from being able to say that it took students from “all 50 states!” Naturally, for Wyomingers and other students from exotic locales, this leads to self-doubt and stigmatization. By my calculations this afflicts at least two dozen students from geographically underrepresented areas every year. No one should have to go through that, especially if you already have to live in a state in which the antelope population exceeds the human population.
This brings us to the other half of the “educational benefits” combo: deflating stereotypes. As the reader will have noticed, Harvard’s prodigious geographic diversity has done little to ameliorate my longstanding prejudice against states such as Wyoming.
Notably, Bok and Bowen argue that while the primary benefit of diversity comes from the different perspectives offered by underrepresented groups, even if these different groups don’t have different perspectives there is still an educational benefit. Even if Wyomingers think exactly like New Jerseyans (heaven forbid!) and contribute no new perspective, everyone will still learn a valuable lesson: there is no “Wyoming” way of thinking. If there is “no ‘black’ or ‘white’ way of thinking,” as Shaping the River says, “conveying [this] to one’s students is a high pedagogic goal.”
The diversity rationale works, it seems, even if it fails. Diversity is educational no matter what, whether or not there is a connection between groups and perspectives. If you think all people from Alabama look, act, and think alike, you’ll meet a Marxist from Mobile and it’ll blow your mind. Or if there is an “Alabama” way of thinking to some degree (as the admissions officers are probably betting on) then you’ll be exposed to the Alabama point of view. The high pedagogic lesson: it’s not where you come from that matters, unless it does.
To take a real world example, consider our very own blog editor Caroline Cox. I knew she was from Tennessee, so I expected to read in her bio that she was a bible-thumping conservative with a penchant for bluegrass. Imagine my shock when I learned that she, like 80 to 90 percent of the Harvard student body, is a self-identified liberal! She was “born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee,” but she is not your average Tennessean. Indeed, she has “surprising liberal leanings and distaste for country music.” More high pedagogy: Apparently, not all southerners are conservative country-music lovers!
As much as I sympathize with Caroline’s distaste for yodeling and yee-hawing, surely her presence would be even more edifying, and more challenging to our prejudices, if she were more…stereotypical. Say, if she were a founding member of Tea Party Nation who liked to rock out to her favorite banjoist while hunting quail. Or even if she were liberal and liked country music; now that would be a sight to behold! (I suppose there are the Dixie Chicks, but they don’t really count, and no one likes Willie Nelson.)
The only Harvard student I’ve met who enjoys country music, in fact, is an Indian-American liberal from New York: Vivek Viswanathan ‘08, former managing editor of the HPR. As Vivek explains on his website, his favorite song is “The Cowboy in Me.” On paper, he’s an Indian-American from Long Island. In reality, he loves listening to country singers “warble and wail.” What better way to show how poorly statistics capture genuine diversity?
Now, I don’t think what I learned from Vivek (and I learned a lot) had anything do with his ethnicity or the location of his hometown. But, Bok and Bowen might counter, that’s where the other half of the “educational benefits” combo comes into play. The “high pedagogic lesson” comes from all the harmful stereotypes my encounter with Vivek deflated. Whereas I used to think all Long Islanders and all Indian-Americans disliked country music, I’ve been cured of that execrable prejudice. It’s not where you come from or your ethnicity, I’ve learned, that matters.
Unless, of course, it does. After all, our student body hails from over 100 countries, six continents, and (according to the latest brochure) three galaxies. This has immense educational benefits. Just check out some of the coverage by our own crack team of international bloggers. What better illustration of the merits of geographic diversity?
But sadly, it seems we can’t have it both ways. In this case, far from deflating stereotypes, Harvard is surely bolstering them! By admitting the most cosmopolitan, Western-oriented students, Harvard is skewing our perceptions of what people around the world are really like. This is Davos-style diversity, for aspiring Davos men and Davos women. Are we getting the wide cross-section of students we were promised, or just the ones who subscribe to the Financial Times?
Harvard students are the cream of the global crop, but they’re all cream: the same cosmopolitan, intellectual elite. And I really mean cosmopolitan. A six-headed alien from the far reaches of the cosmos couldn’t elicit the slightest feeling of prejudice in most Harvard students. (What are we, the center of the universe? That’s earth-nocentrism! And surely six heads are better than one.) They come from different latitudes, but they have the same attitudes.
So is Harvard’s “diversity” edifying, or merely misleading? We pat ourselves on the back for the “unprecedented diversity” of each newly admitted Harvard class, but behind the veil of statistics is a surprising degree of conformity and homogeneity. Harvard would seem to have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the diversity of its applicant pool, but most people we meet – from random acquaintances to selected social circles – basically think, dress, and act alike.
My randomly assigned freshman year roommates, for instance, were Haitian, French, and Chinese (international). But with the possible exception of the international student, that had little to do with our “perspectives.” The blocking group I selected was also a model of racial, ethnic, and economic diversity, but our genuine differences – politics, religion, or general outlook on life – have little or nothing to do with these categories.
The “deflating stereotypes” half of the “educational benefits” combo is even less compelling. How much more do elite students have to learn the lesson that race (etc.) doesn’t really matter? And is this actually true, or are we merely fooling ourselves if we generalize from our narrow experience at Harvard? Is this cloistered Kremlin on the Charles the place to learn the lessons of diversity that Bok and Bowen want to teach us?
While many of us had more genuinely diverse experiences earlier in life, such as attending an ordinary public school, I worry that some of my friends are not gaining the “benefits of diversity” they so sorely need. If a Harvard student from Princeton, New Jersey really wanted to expand his horizons, I fear, he would have been better off at a community college (assuming they have those in Princeton).
Some have caught on to the lack of “real” diversity at elite universities. Many now say it’s not the color of your skin that matters, paraphrasing MLK Jr., but the size of your wallet. Admitting underrepresented income groups, they argue, would have as much or more educational benefit than racial preference itself. Maybe so. But if we’re a status society, not a rigid class hierarchy, this might not matter much. While a Nabisco executive might rake in more money than a New York Times journalist or a Harvard professor, all are likely to be from the same highly educated, high-status milieu.
Socioeconomic status, combining income and other factors, is probably a better proxy for intellectual and cultural diversity today than race or income alone. But even in this case, there’s more conformity than one might imagine. Whether you’re the son of a janitor from Tennessee or the daughter of an investment banker from Scarsdale, there’s a good chance you’ll end up working on the same block in Manhattan or Washington, D.C. after graduation. While that may be salutary for other reasons, such as social mobility, it’s hard to see what pedagogical mission it’s fulfilling (unless it’s to show that people from all backgrounds like money and power).
It’s easy to forget that diversity is not just about where you came from, but where you are going. Your destination says as much about you as your origin. The vast majority of Harvard students have the same basic ambitions and the same secular, cosmopolitan outlook on life. Whatever you want to call them — organization kids or budding Bobos – it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Harvard’s diversity doesn’t live up to the hype.
By and large, students today are much more likely to encounter the prejudices associated with the new elite (e.g. scorn for stay-at-home moms, or intolerance of religion) than the kind Derek Bok might have observed when he was an undergraduate at Stanford. Beyond that, as even liberals must acknowledge, politics has superseded other forms of identity as a basis for discrimination at elite universities and in elite locales. It’s like everyone’s favorite ad in New York: “NYC: Where People Are Openly Gay and Secretly Republican: Why Leave?”
We need not wring our hands, however, about our failure to reproduce the demographics of the general population. Lazy, unambitious, and stupid people are also underrepresented at Harvard (although we have plenty of fools with high IQ’s). An elite university will always have a certain degree of homogeneity for the very reason that it is elite. “Elite” implies a narrow slice, not a perfect cross-section. It’s unreasonable to think an institution such as Harvard can or should approach anything like a representative sample.
The problem is that we still pretend that our campus “exemplifies diversity.” This is misleading.
The charge of hypocrisy will continue to embarrass universities as long as they claim to be capable of fulfilling the “high pedagogic goal” of eliminating stereotypes through various kinds of affirmative action. More often than not, they are only replacing old stereotypes with new ones.
It’s not so much that Ivy League university presidents view their institutions as cogs in a nationwide social engineering apparatus, as conservatives complain, as that the engineering is faulty. Trumpeting our diversity is counterproductive if it makes us feel more worldly wise, tolerant, and pluralistic than we really are. If you took all the boasts from the admissions office seriously, you’d be overflowing with hubris about how diverse and open-minded you had become after four years in the ivory tower. But a tower is still a tower, even if it’s rainbow-colored.
Elite universities cannot go much further than they have if they want to remain elite. Some innovators want to go further anyway, like one student who advocates a randomized admissions “lottery” for top schools. This seems designed to take the “elite” out of elite universities, or to fill space in the pages of the Crimson (it’s never entirely clear). But until administrators start listening to social studies concentrators in Kirkland House for their ideas, this one will probably stay where it belongs – in a dumpster outside your local dining hall.
“Diversity” has been the favorite buzzword of universities for the past two decades, and the official rationale for race-based preference in admissions continues to be the “educational benefits of diversity.” Whatever the overall merits of the policy, the irony is that an elite university is not a very good place for an elite student to meet people who are genuinely not like him. There are many excellent reasons to come to a place like Harvard. To encounter real diversity is not one of them.
Alexander Sherbany ’11 is a former Managing Editor
