For the record: The Secret History of Diversity in US Higher Education

 

He doesn't look like an African explorer called Dr. Spaulding. He looks like a Commie from the Lower East Side. Duck Soup, 1933.

There's a story about the evolution of US higher education that involves "meritocracy" at a time the word would never have been used other than in its original satirical sense: The development of rigorous competitive academic standards for admission after World War II was part of an effort...

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 8:56 AM

specifically to overcome anti-Jewish quotas at elite schools that excluded the "wrong kind" of Jews, from immigrant families and public high schools and not wealthy or athletic--and the point was *in favor* of diversifying the comfortable mediocrity of the WASP ruling class...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:01 AM

in the atmosphere of competition among schools to become "centers of excellence" in the era between the Manhattan Project and the Sputnik. But other kinds of excellence than very high SAT scores and other kinds of diversity didn't get the same kind of attention (sports helped overcome...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:09 AM

resistance against recruiting Black students but not in such big numbers--you don't need as many football and basketball and track stars as you do science students). But the effort to increase diversity was always understood as an effort to increase excellence of schools as a whole...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:13 AM

until the rightwing revolt we know from cases like Bakke turned the idea upside down with ideas of "reverse discrimination", meant to restore the mediocre WASP ascendancy. You can read some of this between the lines here www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09...

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:16 AM

And of course the push to recruit Jewish science students and Black athletes also recruited a lot of Jewish and Black humanities and social science students and radical activists, and the ruling class didn't like that one little bit.

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:23 AM

They combated it with a strategy of divide and conquer, welcoming (or feigning to welcome) Jewish students, as they now welcome Asian Americans, as "meritorious" allies.

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:28 AM

And that's where we are.