Harvard: Stop Pretending!
1st November 2018
The problem is with who’s left standing. They are a very large group. Parents have been known to complain. The deans are ready for them: yes, her scores were great, but other people’s scores were even better.
But what if they weren’t? We have a system of college admission that proclaims—shouts—that it is based almost wholly on merit. Yes, it is admitted, there are legacies and athletes and diversity as well, but those who benefit from those categories must also have met very high standards of measured academic ability. Their threshold is also pretty daunting. At our most prestigious schools, this is often true.
And Harvard is at the very least one of our top schools. So what is that lawsuit all about?
As an undergraduate at Yale in the mid-1970s, I was in a seminar taught by Jack Hexter, whom I encourage you to look up, devoted to the writing of history. One of the participants was a Yale Law student, who happened to be black, and we undergraduate were all stunned by how (a) ignorant and (b) incompetent he was. He knew very little history and could barely write a coherent sentence.