Vol. 28: ‘When real growth begins’

The blessings of diversity, vs. the curse of ‘Dudley’s Folly’

         What’s that you say? You don’t know the difference between “affirmative action” and “diversity”? What’s more, you don’t care? Your eyes glaze over at the mere mention of such officious terms?
         The good news is: You’re in good company. During the run-up to the Supreme Court’s recent decision effectively ending race-conscious admissions in higher education, even sophisticated publications like the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books have muddled the distinctions between the two. Even Justice Clarence Thomas remarked, during oral arguments, “I’ve heard the word ‘diversity’ quite a few times, and I don’t have a clue what it means. It seems to mean everything for everyone.”
         The bad news is: This distinction matters, and it’s really not complicated. Affirmative action seeks to redress past racial discrimination. Diversity, on the other hand, is a critical educational tool for all students everywhere— college, high school, you name it.
         Over the past two generations, educators have concluded that students learn as much from their peers as from their professors or their books— that the most transformational academic experiences often occur not in classrooms but in spontaneous interactions with people unlike themselves.
        Numerous studies have reinforced that conclusion. Even in dry, fact-based subjects like math or science, student performance improves when they’re with diverse classmates— presumably because you’re more likely to exercise your brain among people unlike yourself.  In other words, diversity makes you brighter.
        This is why the most selective colleges now encourage, or even require, undergraduates to spend at least a semester abroad. That is also why, when it comes to college admissions these days, diversity matters more than grades or test scores. “We’re looking for a well-rounded class, not well-rounded students,” I’ve heard admissions officers say.
         The key question for college applicants, then, is not how bright or accomplished they are, but what unique qualities or talents they will bring to their classmates.

A model Asian student, but….

         On this question, I speak from personal experience. In the early ’50s, I spent three summers at an international camp in the French Alps that was deliberately structured so that its population was half American and half European. It was a transforming educational experience, but its value would have been negligible had all the campers been Americans, or Europeans, no matter how gifted they were, and regardless of the camp’s programs and staff.
         The recently decided Supreme Court case originated with a Californian named Michael Wang, a model student who ranked second out of 1,002 kids in his high school. His American College Testing score was 36, the maximum possible; he sang at Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2013; he finished in the top 150 in a national math competition; and he reached the finals of several national debating competitions. Yet Michael Wang was rejected by six of the seven Ivy League colleges to which he applied.
        “What more could I have done to get into your college?” Michael wrote angrily to the universities that turned him down. “Was it based on race, or what was it based on?” When he received only vague responses, or no response at all, Michael complained to the U.S. Department of Education, again without satisfaction. So in May 2015, Michael Wang joined 64 Asian-American organizations that filed a joint complaint to the Department of Education, alleging racial discrimination by Harvard. That claim was rejected, but Asian American groups subsequently filed similar lawsuits against Harvard, the University of North Carolina, and nine other universities. Last month the Supreme Court ruled in their favor.

‘IBM machines with testicles’

         Had I been chosen to defend those elite universities, I would have cited one of the most ludicrous experiments in admissions fairness: Columbia University’s Class of 1964, aka “Dudley’s Folly.” In 1959, (when I was myself a high school senior), Columbia hired an idealistic admissions director named David A. Dudley, who declared that henceforth Columbia would eliminate all forms of bigotry (against, say, Jews, Blacks, Latinos, and the poor) and favoritism (toward, say, alumni, the rich, and jocks). Instead, Columbia’s freshman class would be chosen solely on the basis of grades and test scores.
         You can imagine what happened. Dudley’s policy produced a class of “IBM machines with testicles,” as they called themselves. Some 85 percent of the men in that class (Columbia was all-male at the time) were white Jews from New York. In a class of some 700, only 25 had been a captain of any high school sports team.
         The unfortunate members of that class — some of whom were my friends— received a rigorous exposure to books and professors but little exposure to the real world. I’ve long felt that the guys in that class would have been justified in filing a class-action suit against Columbia, much as Michael Wang and his fellow Asians sued Harvard, but for the opposite reason: for depriving them of an essential educational experience.

Princeton’s ‘concerned alumni’

         Princeton University, similarly, functioned as an upper-class WASP male country club for most of its long history. Its legacy conferred social prestige upon its graduates but left them narrowly parochial in other respects. Today Princeton has made up for lost time: Women now comprise about half of its undergraduate student body, and Blacks, Jews, Catholics, Asians, and Hispanics are no longer endangered species on campus (though their ratios still trail other Ivy League schools). Not coincidentally, over the past generation Princeton has been repeatedly recognized for offering one of the best undergraduate educations in the world.
        These advances, incidentally, were bitterly resisted at first by Princeton alums. The Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a group founded in 1972, decried Princeton’s efforts to admit women and minority students and lobbied instead for favoring men from alumni families. In the group’s magazine, Prospect, one of its founders fondly recalled the days when Princeton was “a body of men, relatively homogenous in backgrounds and interests.”
         Among its members was the current U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Class of ’72, who graduated with Princeton’s last all-male class. Like his fellow Concerned Alumni, Alito possessed strong opinions about education but no educational credentials. Of course, the same could be said for today’s crop of would-be educational reformers, like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and the Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, not to mention such grandiloquently named organizations as Moms For Liberty, Students For Fair Admissions, and— my favorite— the Yass Prize for Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding and Permissionless Education. I mean, who could oppose that, much less understand it?

‘Put yourself in my shoes….’

         America’s selective universities, which failed to persuade the Supreme Court to sustain affirmative action, have also failed to persuade the public about the educational value of diversity. It’s a shining example of Rottenberg’s Law as to Why the World Is So Screwed Up, to wit: People with knowledge (such as academicians) can’t communicate, and communicators (such as journalists) don’t know anything.
        So, what should Harvard’s admissions director have replied to Michael Wang when he first complained back in 2015? Maybe something like this:
         “Your credentials are indeed impressive. But that’s true for every application we receive here at Harvard. So the question is not how wonderful you are but how different you are. What unique qualities will you bring to this class? Put yourself in my shoes. If diversity is my primary goal, do I really need another overachieving Asian American from California? But if, say, you played the bassoon or helped reconstruct a bridge in Ukraine, I might look at you differently.
         “Here’s the great college admissions conundrum: In order to provide the best possible undergraduate experience to Asian Americans like you, I must reject many Asian Americans like you. If I admitted freshmen solely on the basis of grades and test scores, our entering class might be 80 percent Asian. You’d all wind up talking to each other, just like those Jewish New Yorkers in Columbia’s Class of ’64.”
         During Amy Gutmann’s recently concluded presidency at the University of Pennsylvania (2004-2022), she occasionally dazzled Penn alumni with programs showcasing brilliant Penn students and professors. In 2015, the participants included a Black Penn undergraduate named Kaleb Germinaro, who was simultaneously majoring in economics and philosophy while also taking graduate courses and playing varsity football. In the course of his presentation that night, Germinaro remarked, “The moment you realize that other people don’t think the way you do, that’s when real growth begins.” In one single succinct sentence, that Penn student said all you need to know about the value of diversity in education.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com