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.

Two Cheers for Brooks

Well, two restrained cheers for David Brooks ("If It's Trump Vs. Warren, Then What?"): He's wrong about Warren in general, but he's right that he wouldn't want to vote for her if he understood what she was up to, and he's right that, if Trump and Warren are the nominees, he should vote for her nevertheless, for reasons that I think are pretty solid:

Politics is downstream from morality and culture. Warren represents a policy wrong turn, in my view, but policies can be argued about and reversed. Trump represents a much more important and fundamental threat — to the norms, values, standards and soul of this country.

I'd like to return the favor with an inverse pledge, but it's really hard to imagine a Democrat against whom I'd vote for, say, Willard Mitt Romney or even William Weld, because Democrats don't run like Trump. If Rod Blagojevic got nominated, I'd know he has a pretty bad reputation, but he has a sense that these institutions exist outside of him. If Jared Kushner or Ivanka Trump was to run as a Democrat, I'd easily vote for Weld, but that's not going to happen either. Nor is empty-eyed cult member Tulsi Gabbard, for that matter. Nobody like that is going to get the Democratic nomination. Ever.

Everybody makes fun of Democrats for being obsessed with "electability", but it's true we always look for a candidate who only tells lies for a good reason and doesn't have a dangerous personality disorder. We're not going to nominate somebody like Blagojevic for the presidency, or even like Reagan, let alone Scrooge McAsshole and his brood of ducklings. We won't even nominate Steyer or Bloomberg. It might be interesting to ask why Republicans are so careless about electability and still exist as a party. They have such objectively horrible people at all levels, from Mitch McConnell to Matt Gaetz and Duncan Hunter, people you really wouldn't want to let in your house, and yet they carry on.

The End of Meritocracy

Architects' rendering of plans for a parking lot in Harvard Yard. Just kidding: prank picture from the Harvard Satyrical Press, March 2009, attributed to the Committee For Endowment Preservation by Any Means Necessary.

Looks like the competition for which New York Times opinionist will be first to come out in defense of the millionaires who bribed their kids into Stanford and USC has a winner, and it's not David Brooks, as I was predicting—

Can't wait for David Brooks column explaining how this is a good thing, fostering intimate connectedness among all instead of crass calculation of benefits. https://t.co/QRTXtkNZSM

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 12, 2019

—or Bari Weiss, but Harvard's finest, Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("The Scandals of Meritocracy"). Oh, he doesn't quite come out and say it, and he adds a trollish recommendation for racial quotas just to keep you confused as to whether he's joking or not, but I think that's what it is:

The “more meritocracy” argument against both legacies and racial quotas implicitly assumes that aptitude — some elixir of I.Q. and work ethic — is what our elite primarily lacks.

But is that really our upper class’s problem? What if our elite is already diligent and how-do-you-like-them-apples smaht — the average SAT score for the Harvard class of 2022 is a robust 1512 — and deficient primarily in memory and obligation, wisdom and service and patriotism?

In that case continuity and representation, as embodied by legacy admissions and racial quotas, might actually be better legitimizers for elite universities to cultivate than the spirit of talent-über-alles. It might be better if more Ivy League students thought of themselves as representatives of groups and heirs of family obligation than as Promethean Talents elevated by their own amazing native gifts.

That's extremely interesting, the view of what problem "meritocracy" is supposed to solve, the problem of practical improvement, or building an elite of higher quality.

I mean interesting to me, at least, because I've literally never thought of it before, not that it doesn't make some kind of chilly sense.

Just Deserts

A kind of poignant thing about this college admissions scandal is the way the kids themselves were protected, in many or most cases, from knowing that they were involved in a fraud:

Sitting very still and wearing a dark suit, [master criminal William Singer] described how he arranged for students’ SAT and ACT results to be falsified by sending them to take the exams in Houston or Los Angeles, where he had bribed test administrators. He described the students as believing they were taking the tests legitimately, but said that his test proctor would correct their answers afterward. Mr. Singer said he would tell the proctor the score he wanted the student to get, and he would achieve that score exactly....

Mr. McGlashan’s son was unaware of the scheme, according to court documents....

Mr. Singer told Mr. Caplan that his daughter would not know that her standardized test scores had been faked.

“Nobody knows what happens,” Mr. Singer said, according to the transcript of the call. “She feels great about herself.”

Some students may have been directly slipped test answers, but more of them just were given to understand that they'd succeeded in the test on their own, whether a confederate was changing their answers or simply retaking the test to replace their original scores; some participated in photo sessions where they were posed as star athletes, but they didn't necessarily know what the purpose of it was, and others were just entirely in the dark while their parents photoshopped their faces onto stock pictures of high school sports, but neither they nor the college administrations were aware that they were supposed to be star athletes, and nobody questioned why they didn't sign up for the soccer team or crew.

Brooxplaining: Postscript

Riotous students, 15th century Paris?, via Times Higher Education.

Following up on yesterday's Brooks, from a Reddit thread on "self-authoring" exponent and Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson:

The freedom of speech we're talking about here isn't freedom of speech but freedom of business:
Peterson's freedom to take home $30,000 and more for an easy afternoon's work, which the angry emotions of a bunch of scraggy college students should not be permitted to interfere with. I'll bet he could do 20 of these a year, netting up to a million dollars in addition to his book royalties. Campus speech should be regulated not in terms of the First Amendment but the interstate commerce clause.

Brooxplaining

Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros, from a 2014 production by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium of Philadelphia.

A funny thing happened to David Brooks on his voyage last month into the heart of Millenniality: he sapped himself with a blackjack, stole all his money, and left himself for dead in a gutter ("Understanding Student Mobbists").

Or, putting it another way, when he went on his

little tour in which I gather millennials for interviews and ask them what they have faith in and how they are going to lead us in the years ahead

he apparently forgot to ask them the stuff he really wanted to know, or was too shy, and decided that the best expedient was to make up his own answers. He literally admits to this fabrication:

Annals of Derp: Man to Mann

Image by shooteradolf/deviantart.

David Brooks, in spite of his faith in "the glory of democracy" ("The Glory of Democracy"), fears that democracy is on its way out:

Tribalism and authoritarianism are now on the march while the number of democracies declines. Far worse has been the degradation of democracies, especially in our own country. The Congress barely functions. We have a president who ignores facts and violates basic decency. On college campuses, according to a Brookings/UCLA survey, 50 percent of students believe that “offensive” speech should be shouted down and 20 percent believe it should be violently crushed.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that 50% of college students believe "offensive" speech should be shouted down and 20% that it should be violently crushed?

Answer: In principle, yes, but (according to Lois Beckett's report at the Guardian, which it took Dr. Google less than two minutes to locate)

Why George Will is shocked

1940s college boys, from auburn.edu via Vintage Dancer.

Over at the Frogpond on Thursday, with reference to a weird George Will column of nostalgia for the days when a conservative was always a gentleman, BooMan wrote:

The reason that, in 1950, Lionel Trilling was able to argue that liberalism is “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in mid-century America is because FDR/Truman had effectively led the country out of a depression and won a worldwide war. By 1950, even most of the business leaders who had opposed the New Deal in the 1930s had come to terms with it. The weakness for the Democrats was different in kind. They weren’t just a workers’ party and a party for the business establishment. They were also the party of white supremacy and Jim Crow.

What’s interesting about conservatism is that they didn’t tap into the wedge the way you’d expect. Instead of criticizing the Democrats for their backwardness and vulgarity, they sought to steal the segregationists away from the party and keep them for themselves. This is the course that Buckley pursued. Rather than strengthen the GOP in his home turf in the North by pointing out the Dems' allegiance with the cultural neanderthals in the party’s southern congressional leadership, Buckley chose to make white supremacy respectable among the cocktail set at the Yale Club and the New York Yacht Club.

Trigger Warning: Some of the words in this post may have been written by Bret Stephens.

Bret Stephens of the New York Times addressing the graduating class at Hampden-Sydney College (and recycling the speech into a Wednesday column):

I’ve been thinking about safe spaces a lot lately. For those of you with the good fortune never to have heard the term, a “safe space” is not, as you may suppose, a concrete-reinforced room where you can ride out a tornado. It isn’t a bulletproof car, either.

Instead, a “safe space” denotes a place, usually on campus, where like-minded people — often sharing the same race, gender, sexual orientation or political outlook — can spend time together without having to encounter the expression of any ideas or opinions that they do not endorse.

Because the seniors at an all-male Presbyterian college in rural Virginia with an African American student population of 6.8% probably can't even imagine how horrible and soul-killing it is to be in the kind of situation you can wind up in at one of those schools like Brandeis or Wesleyan, voluntarily sequestered into a groupthink environment where like-minded people, often sharing the same race, gender, sexual orientation, or political outlook can spend time together without having to encounter the expression of any ideas or opinions that they do not endorse. Preach it, Brother Bret!

Actually they do have safe spaces at Hampden-Sydney. They just have different terms for them, like "fraternity", or "lacrosse team".

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Brooks goes to college

Harold Lloyd in The Freshman (1925) via Renegade Cinema.

Shorter former New York Times columnist David Brooks, "The Cuomo College Fiasco", April 14 2017:

The "free college" program of New York governor Andrew Cuomo for SUNY and CUNY is regressive, helping only with tuition and not housing, textbooks, or other expenses, and targeted to benefit only full-time students, who must maintain a decent grade point and graduate on schedule in four years, that is not the ones who need it the most, while threatening the existence of the many small colleges around the state that can't afford to give more tuition aid than they're already giving. Therefore free college is a bad idea, since students won't value it if they don't have to pay for it and besides the tuition-free universities of Germany are no good. 

Or as Yogi Berra said, nobody ever goes to German universities any more, they're too crowded:

Even in Germany, where a generous welfare state is valued, per-pupil spending has dropped by 10 percent since universities became free. Germany is an extremely successful country, but lecture classes are huge and the country’s universities are not generally ranked among the world’s best.

Keep in mind that the only time they ever charged tuition was during the Merkel government, from 2005 to 2014—it's her budget problem if they've cut spending since 2014, and one reason her party is going to lose the upcoming general election. They have nine universities in the top 100 at MastersPortal, by the way, and 21 in the top 200, and nine in the top 100 of the Times Higher Education Supplement, and Germany is the most popular non-anglophone venue for international students, or third most popular overall (after US, of course, and UK, where tuition is capped at £9,250 per year, which  comes to almost twice what CUNY charges, but still makes Oxford much cheaper than Yale).

I don't know where he plagiarized the progressive argument against the Cuomo program from—it's pretty solid, though maybe somewhat unfair (as Mayor de Blasio is saying, it's just a start). But it's funny how he lurches from there into the conservative argument he's been using since Bernie Sanders first brought up the tuition-free idea to the national stage: Cuomo's plan isn't progressive enough, so you'd better not have free college at all!

Losing their grip

Photograph by The Nation, which also has some great coverage.

A labor story that doesn't seem to be getting a lot of play outside of New York City is the epic of the contract dispute at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus, whose 400 AFT faculty members have been ordered off campus, cut off from their classrooms and email accounts, and stripped of their salaries and health insurance, as the semester begins, and students find their classes being taught, or not, by "replacement workers". Rumor had it that ballet courses would be taught by Dean David Cohen, an elderly biology professor who specialized in plant morphogenesis.

The issues are gross inequities in salary between the faculty in Brooklyn and at the school's Post campus in Brookville, Nassau County, and the treatment of adjuncts, in the new cost-cutting contract the administration offered. Alana Semuels writes in a great piece in The Atlantic:

Arthur Kimmel has been an adjunct at LIU’s Brooklyn campus for more than 20 years. Under the terms of the proposed contract, he would have his income cut by 30 to 35 percent, he said. That’s because, in addition to the $1,800 or so per course he teaches, he has received pay for having office hours and money from an adjunct-benefits trust fund to help defray the cost of health insurance. Kimmel says the university’s proposal would eliminate the adjunct- benefits trust fund and payments for office hours, among other cuts. The new proposal would also decrease the number of credit hours he could teach, and establishes a two-tier system for adjuncts so that new employees would receive less than Kimmel does.

When the faculty overwhelmingly rejected the contract on Tuesday and the faculty senate overwhelmingly voted no confidence in the president, the administration made its move.

It's not completely surprising, in these times of increasing corporatization, when academic institutions come more and more to be run by business-administration types with little or no teaching experience of their own (LIU president Kimberly Cline has "experience as a president of a multicampus institution, as a CFO of a university system and as a university attorney, bringing a rare trifecta of managerial, financial and legal expertise to her new role" but clearly hasn't taught a class since she was a grad student, Doctor in Educational Administration, at Hofstra), to see teachers treated with such contempt, though it is distressing.

The contempt for the customers, fee-paying students, on the other hand, and their parents, as the academic year begins and the administration refuses them the education they've paid for (tuition is $34,000 a year), is just astonishing and anything but corporate. It's people who are supposed to be hard-headed and focused on the bottom line succumbing to emotionalism, dominated by rage and spite, against its own economic interests. It shows, I think, a CEO class that is losing its grip, in much the way the Donald Trump phenomenon does, doing terrible damage as it thrashes and fails.

Wrote this up partly because I didn't notice that Erik Loomis had done so, but he has. Loomis also notes how you can donate to the LIU Lockout Solidarity Fund.

David Brooks penetrates the student movement. Well, not quite.

Image via Amazon Fashion.

David Brooks is jumping today ("Inside Student Radicalism") into the rightwing crowd howling around Nathan Heller's "Letter from Oberlin" on the perils of intersectionality in the little to medium-sized private liberal arts college, in the current New Yorker, which offers many hilarious examples of campus excess, the student who wanted trigger warnings posted for Sophocles's Antigone (students could be affected by the heroine's argument in favor of suicide), or the theater professor who slipped on a Groucho Marx nose or something like it ("a rubber nose and glasses") during an interview, while Heller wasn't looking ("a grown man, having a meeting with a reporter from The New Yorker, behaving that way", shrieks Rod Dreher, who will certainly behave with the utmost sobriety if a New Yorker reporter ever interviews him), or the president who likes to talk over issues with students over ice cream, because "There is nothing like ice cream to bring people together".

(For Dreher, that function is better filled by "a salade gourmande, which was a green salad with haricots verts (those matchstick-thin French green beans), fresh mushrooms, in a mustard vinaigrette, with a side slab of pâte de foie gras" to start, followed by chicken in a creamy sauce with fresh morels. It's astonishing, by the way, what a timid Anglo eater Dreher is, considering how sophisticated he thinks he is, ordering the chicken in Lyon where he's afraid to try tripe, andouillettes—the man is from Louisiana!—or even the house specialty of pike quenelles. And he believes tripe [stomach lining] and chitlins [small intestine] are the same thing, the ignoramus.)

Nick gives himself a sad

H/t PJ for the idea.

Buster Keaton and Roscoe Arbuckle in Oh, Doctor! (1917), via SilentWeeks.

Shorter Nicholas Kristof, "A Confession of Liberal Intolerance", New York Times, May 7 2016:

Golly, folks, we progressives are supposed to be so open and accepting, so how come conservative intellectuals in our academic institutions are forced to use separate drinking fountains and bathrooms and summer camps? I've been thinking about this because I wrote about it on Facebook. 

That last bit is practically verbatim:

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.

He tried saying something about it without thinking, and that didn't work out, so now he's looking at this alternative approach. What strikes me here is something I've never noticed about Kristof, which is that he's really not very good at thinking; his idea of thinking is to assert that something is bad, enumerate many examples of its badness, and declare that something needs to be done about it, for which he may or may not have some specific suggestions which may or may not be of some use; there's no dialectic between, for instance, different ways of approaching the problem.

Autogooglotic asphyxiation

Today's Brooks ("The Big University") starts out looking pretty deadly ("Not that one again!"), but it does have its funny side, which I discovered more or less by accident.

Many American universities were founded as religious institutions, explicitly designed to cultivate their students’ spiritual and moral natures. But over the course of the 20th century they became officially or effectively secular.

Religious rituals like mandatory chapel services were dropped. Academic research and teaching replaced character formation at the core of the university’s mission.

Administrators and professors dropped spiritual language and moral prescription either because they didn’t know what to say or because they didn’t want to alienate any part of their diversifying constituencies. The humanities departments became less important...

I'm thinking yeah, if you mean Harvard and Yale and so on, because they were founded as divinity schools, to prepare preachers, and cultivating spiritual and moral natures was part of the job description. It was when they started putting out doctors and lawyers and congressmen that things began to change, right?

Isn't it romantic? *spoiler alert*

No. It isn't.

Image by The Frumanista.

Shorter David Brooks, "The New Romantics in the Computer Age", September 4 2015:

Isn't it romantic? After all these years of anxious materialism, young people will soon start deciding they'd rather be like me. Or Dorothy Day, you know, whichever works better.

Or, verbatim:

Commencement is only the beginning

Margarete Schön in Kriemhilds Rache by Fritz Lang (1924).

David Brooks writes ("How Adulthood Happens", June 12 2015):

The most important rite of passage from youth to adulthood in our society has gone largely unnoticed, largely I guess because it has no ritual aspects, with no name, no theological underpinnings, and no ceremonies. It takes about eight years to complete, and the people who are performing it and their families have no idea it's going on. Or, putting it more simply, it isn't a rite. Why am I calling it a rite of passage? As a Friedmanesque paradoxical attention grabber, and to underscore my anthropological street cred with people who know even less about the subject than I do. They call me David Brooks.

Liberty, Fraternity, and Sorority

Harold Lloyd, The Freshman (1925).

Shorter David Brooks, "Becoming a real person", New York Times, September 9 2014:

According to William Deresiewicz, our elite colleges no longer help their elite students develop their souls and become elite real persons like me. Instead they're turning them into elite sheep. Just like ordinary people, only with bigger apartments and nicer cars. It's like a tragedy.

Catch me if you can

Buster Keaton, College (1927). Images from WiffleGif.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Streamlined Life", New York Times, May 6 2014:

Big data! Annual surveys of the UCLA freshman class done since 1966 show that human nature has not changed but high school is easier than it used to be, students are more worried about the cost of college and the question of whether they'll ever get jobs or not, and they're reporting themselves as less empathetic. I was totally going to explain how this has nothing to do with 40 years of pulling back government funding from higher education and tax policy dividing the economy into the 95% living paycheck to paycheck and 5% rentiers but is rather caused by our spiritual decay but oops I just ran out of space.

Buster Keaton, I think from Cops (1922).

Education, higher and lower

Welcome to your New York City Education Department, where they are developing what you might call political correctness for clowns:

In an effort to eliminate potential "unpleasant emotions" among students, the New York Department of Education has placed a ban on mentions of "birthdays," "dinosaurs," "Halloween," and "dancing," in city-issued tests, the New York Post reports. (h/t Huffington Post)

Relief of School Scene, late 2nd c. CE. Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Trier.

This isn't your idea of eliminating test bias in favor of well-off white students, alas. This is just idiocy;

the mandate is meant to curb fear that references to those topics might stir controversy among students. Dinosaurs, officials said, could bring up evolution, Halloween could suggest paganism, and birthdays might create animosity among students who are Jehovah's witnesses, since they don't celebrate them.

CBS New York reports the word "poverty" is also not allowed, as "words that suggest wealth" might cause some students to feel excluded.... The department is also banning mentions of "divorce" and "disease," in case students have loved ones who are separated or suffering from an illness. "Slavery" is also flagged and "terrorism" is considered too scary.

And in tertiary education news, remember the ransom extracted from college students by the House Republicans last summer in return for allowing the national debt ceiling to be raised? Eliminating subsidized loans for graduate and professional students, and eliminating incentive programs for graduates to pay their loans back on time?

Remember that they decided to change the calculation of eligibility for Pell grants so you only qualify for maximum aid with a family income of $23,000 or less, instead of $32,000? And so on up the line, disqualifying hundreds of thousands of students altogether? A-and a cap of 12 semesters per student? Remember the fixed rate on Stafford loans, 3.4% since 2007, is scheduled to go back up to 6.8% on July 1 if Congress doesn't do something.

Hey, remember Occupy?

All these disastrous changes are effective in July (h/t jonnym at Kos). Obama has always had great ideas for federal student loan programs, but they mostly depend on a congress that doesn't respond; meanwhile, though, Bloomberg informs us today that

With $67 billion of student loans in default, the Education Department is turning to an army of private debt-collection companies to put the squeeze on borrowers. Working on commissions that totaled about $1 billion last year, these government contractors face growing complaints that they are violating federal laws by insisting on stiff payments, even when borrowers’ incomes make them eligible for leniency.

This information needs to spread around. I can't believe Obama and most House members of both parties want to go into the election without doing something about this, but I guess the Tea Party caucus, now apparently the Santorum caucus, represents voters who don't think people ought to go to college.

Remember this?

Back when I was obsessed with John Boehner, and his inability to do his job, I meant to say but never did that what Obama really needs to do is find some procedural way of not needing him—like naming a Republican prime minister who could call on support for some modest legislation from Democrats and those Republicans susceptible to the idea of being sane—I bet Eric Cantor would gladly take the job, he's greedy and dishonest enough, but I'm imagining somebody kind of like Boehner but capable of keeping his word, one of those old Rotary Club–type Republicans, lovers of earmarks and little constituent favors and whiskey, who still believe in voters, conservative or whatever. You mean there aren't any?