From my blog, "Shoots," on Substack, 06/27/2024
One of the issues I follow closely and from personal interest is what we used to call affirmative action, now called diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI. The United States Supreme Court ruled last year that colleges and universities can’t use explicitly racial criteria in admissions. At least I think that’s what the court ruled.
I was sort of an experiment or test specimen in affirmative action two-thirds of a century ago. I’m white, but that’s not as much of an anomaly as it might seem today.
I certainly don’t mean to claim membership or even distant cousinhood to the black struggle, which has always been about something far bigger and more profound than what usually passes for equity. The black struggle has been for justice and human dignity. Equity comes somewhere later on, in the details. I was a detail.
In the late 1950s, America was stunned when the Soviets beat us into space with Sputnik, the first manmade orbiting device. I remember it well. I was 11 years old.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower appeared on the tiny black and white television screen in our living room looking straight at me and said it was my fault. I could feel the eyes of my parents burning holes in the back of my head.
The consensus was that American kids were stupid and lazy, lousy at reading and even worse at math and science. It was all our fault. How else could the vodka-swilling Bolsheviks have humiliated the nation by beating us into space?
In his 2005 book, The Chosen (Houghton Miflin), Jerome Karabel explains how this terrible news was actually music to the ears of a certain element within the faculties of the nation’s elite colleges and universities, long frustrated and chafing under admissions policies skewed heavily to the old northeastern WASP elite.
It hadn’t always been that way. In 1900 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt arrived as a member of the incoming freshman class, Harvard President Charles W. Eliot greeted them with a speech bragging that 40 percent of them were products of public high schools, many of them sons of immigrants. The secondary school with the largest contingent in the new Harvard class, Eliot pointed out, was not upper crusty hockey-playing St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, which had 18 graduates in the incoming class at Harvard, but Boston Latin, a public school, with 38 incoming Harvard freshmen. There may have been some grinding of teeth among the Paulies present that day, certainly among their fathers.
Eliot’s pride in the diversity of the Harvard student body was not shared by the nation’s wealthy WASPs, whose Gilded Age fortunes had been paying the freight at Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the others for a good long while. Many of their sons weren’t getting in, crowded out by all those sons of immigrants. (People didn’t have daughters yet.)
Karabel explains how the WASPs rebelled, threatening what could have been a disastrous de-funding of the Ivies. A whole new system of admissions emerged from that period with a premium awarded to something called “the whole man.” The whole man, unsurprisingly, tended to look a lot more like an upper crusty hockey-playing Paulie than the son of an immigrant. By the late 1950s all of the Ivies were stuffed to the parapets with wealthy, well-mannered WASPs and damned few immigrants.
Some of the faculty loved having it that way, because they were of the WASP persuasion themselves. But there was always that other element. They were the professors who looked out on empty echoing lecture halls the day the Harvard junior varsity hockey team played St. Paul’s and knew they were not teaching the world’s varsity scholars.
Sputnik tipped the balance their way. With President Eisenhower on their side, they lobbied successfully for more stringent entrance protocols, and in that moment of history stringent meant diverse.
The way for the Ivies to become academically rigorous was by practicing diversity, equity and inclusion. The admissions policies returned to a tighter adherence to test scores like what had been in place during Eliot’s regime, making room for top test-takers from all social backgrounds by shutting out some of the lower scoring WASPs.
It's why I balk at descriptions of DEI now that assume the alternative is some higher level of scrutiny and performance. Not in history, anyway. In history, the alternative was always money.
And there falls my own experience. When the Ivies jacked up their admissions requirements in the late 1950s, they exerted a downward pressure on the exclusive boys boarding schools to do some of the same. The boarding schools needed to diversify their student bodies by looking for driven, insecure, envious middle and working class lads -- the type who might show up in Cambridge one Fall as freshmen and do something other than drink. Or at least in addition to drink.
I was one of those boys. I was recruited from Pontiac, Michigan by St. Paul’s in 1960.
My first (and best) novel, Pontiac, due out September 10 from Deep Vellum, is fiction, a made-up story, a pack of lies about a fictional school called St. Philip’s. None of it is true. I am not the protagonist. I had to invent a kid who was not at all me because the real me was too boring.
But it’s about all that.
A caution: The scholarship boy in my book is not the hero. In fact, watch out. You could wind up feeling sorry for the WASPs.
"Shoots," on Substack
Related Posts
Menu adds pages below