James B Conant Out The Window

I keep returning to David Brooks and his thesis in Bobos in Paradise that James B Conant's educational reforms, in particular egalitarian merit-based college admissions policies based on standardized testing, created a new, meritocratic elite made up especially of suburban Jews. Other writers like Alan Dershowitz in Chutzpah and Jerome Karabel's The Chosen have sharply challenged this view, arguing that Jewish quotas in particular persist in the Ivy League, and in any case, secretive college admissions policies allow wealthy donors, legacies, influential politicians, and others to bypass putative rules.

My guess is that the 2019 USC admissions scandal, whereby celebrities Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman pled guilty to paying as much as $500,000 in bribes to get their daughters into USC, is just the tip of the iceberg. But USC is not an Ivy; it's second-tier, so the actual cash value of an acceptance letter from Stanford, Chicago, or an Ivy can only be estimated. I would guess the amount is big enough that it can simply be legitimized as a charitable donation, but its effect is precisely the same.

But there's also a significant trend toward eliminating those SATs that David Brooks thought were such an egalitarian measure:

At least 1,785 U.S. colleges and universities will not require ACT or SAT scores from applicants seeking to enroll in fall 2022 according to an updated list released today by the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). More than 76% of all U.S. bachelor-degree granting institutions now practice test-optional or test-blind admissions, an all-time high.

“The record number of admissions offices waiving testing mandates reflects widespread satisfaction with those policies,” FairTest Executive Director Bob Schaeffer explained. “Schools that did not mandate ACT/SAT submission last year generally received more applicants, better academically qualified applicants, and a more diverse pool of applicants.”

Schaeffer continued, “Evaluating applications without regard to test scores has become the new normal in undergraduate admissions. More than half of all colleges and universities in the nation have already committed to remaining test-optional or test-blind for fall 2023 applicants. We expect the final percentage to be much higher.”

But the groups most clearly affected by such policy revisions are Asians, who are hard working and achievement oriented, but unlike Jews, are more readily identifiable on a racial basis. In addition, the secularization and assimilation of Jews over the last helf century has also made them less distinguishable, especially as WASP culture has also secularized -- though antisemitism has also recently become respectable in the academy, which may limit this trend.

As a practical matter, these shifts amount to a return of quotas and other overt forms of preference. But I'm not sure how much of this represents a real change, since as Dershowitz and Karabel argue, the Conant innovations were never more than partial, admissions criteria have never been transparent at all, and SATs were essentially a beard of respectability meant to distract attention from the nothing new.

Thus I sympathize with the Penn women's swimmer who went through one version of the Ivy admssions rat race only to find the reward snatched away just as she thought she'd gained it. She's had the ear of sympathetic media and has been quoted anonymously in numerous stories, like this one:

["]They’re just proving, once again, that they don’t actually care about their women athletes,” the swimmer said of the University of Pennsylvania. They say that they care and that they’re here for our emotions, but why do we have to be gracious losers? … Who are you to tell me that I shouldn’t want to win because I do want to win. I’m swimming. I’m dedicating more than 20 hours a week to the sport.

Obviously, I want to win. You can’t just tell me I should be happy with second place. I’m not. And these people in Penn’s administrative department who just think that women should just roll over — it’s disturbing, and it’s reminiscent of the 1970s when they were fighting for Title IX and stuff like that. They don’t actually care about women at all.

This actually reminds me of the Latin motto for USC, Palmam qui meruit ferat, "May he who earns the palm carry it", which is contradicted both in its own bribery scandal and in the wider conundrum of the Lia Thomas scandal. If Thomas were subject to an actual handicap that they had to surmount to compete, their victories would be a genuine achievement. But Thomas is a fully intact cisgendered male who functions perfectly well as a male swimmer; they just don't win male competitions. Thus it simply suits Penn to redefine Thomas as a woman for administrative convenience, which effectively abrogates the bargain under which the women swimmers applied for admission to Penn.

My own experience as an Ivy undergraduate was a disturbing sense that I began to have only weeks after arriving that something was seriously wrong. I couldn't define it; I spent some time with the dean of freshmen concerned that the admissions offfice had made a big mistake. He told me to stick with it; I suppose it was the best of various bad alternatives. But my surmise is that what I thought was wrong in 1965 is just as wrong now. I really sympathize with the Penn women's swimmers.