Let's Take Another Look At Trump, DEI, and the Ivies
The Trump administration is poised to block $510 million in federal grants and contracts for Brown University over the school's response to antisemitism on campus, the New York Times reported.
Following the report, Brown Provost Frank Doyle said in an email that the school couldn't substantiate the information but was aware of "troubling rumors" about federal action against its funding. The potential freeze follows similar moves by the US government against Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, Brown's Ivy League peers.
As I noted yesterday, Alan Dershowitz never believed that the Ivies ever dropped Jewish quotas, they just disguised them throughout the postwar period as geographical "diversity" admissions preferences -- if you were applying to Harvard from someplace like Kansas or Montana, you got a few extra points, not least because you probably weren't Jewish. The Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel wdnt into much more detail in his 2005 The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.Karabel's main point is that the admissions process at elite schools is almost infinitely subdivided. As one reviewer put it,
By the nineteen-sixties, Harvard's admissions system had evolved into a series of complex algorithms. The school began by lumping all applicants into one of twenty-two dockets, according to their geographical origin. (There was one docket for Exeter and Andover, another for the eight Rocky Mountain states.) Information from interviews, references, and student essays was then used to grade each applicant on a scale of 1 to 6, along four dimensions: personal, academic, extracurricular, and athletic. Competition, critically, was within each docket, not between dockets, so there was no way for, say, the graduates of Bronx Science and Stuyvesant to shut out the graduates of Andover and Exeter.
Karabel uses the term "baskets" more often than "dockets", but his point is the same. More important, there are baskets where neither academic ability nor athletic prowess nor character makes much difference -- some baskets are reserved for legacies, others for children of major donors, others for children of politicians and celebrities. A very good example is Hunter Biden: by the time he applied to Georgetown and Yale Law, he was the son of a US senator; that outweighed any other consideration on his record, even though his subsequent career manifested his utter lack of promise objectively viewed.We might still ask why Hunter didn't apply to Harvard -- the answer is that there are some legacies, some children of celebrities, politicians, or major donors, that even an Ivy can't justify. Harvard couldn't justify admitting John-John Kennedy, a lifelong underachiever, even though he was a legacy, a celebrity, and scion of a wealthy family, but he did get into Brown, arguably the least selective and least prestigious of the Ivies.
The question is how big the various baskets are relative to the others. We can grant -- even the Ivies will grant, however reluctantly, that they exist. The question is what percentage of an incoming first-year class is made up of applicants who were weighted for reasons other than academic promise or even athletic ability. The answer to this is a closely held secret, and to some extent, it's irrelevant, since the competition among applicants is within the baskets, not overall. But the point is that DEI is nothing more than a slight rejiggering of the basket system.
If DEI applicants are a new basket, that means one or more baskets are proportionally smaller -- and my bet is that the basket that loses most will be the one that gives preference to the competitive Northeastern public school, SATs, grades, and extracurriculars. The baskets that lose the least will be the legacies, prep schools, major donors, and children of politicians and celebrities baskets -- and now the DEI.
And this brings me to one of the formative events of my life -- I got into an Ivy, via a public school, Northeastern suburb, SATS-grades-and-extracurriculars basket. I'd taken German, Latin, extracurricular Greek, and other AP courses, and all my SATs were in the high 700s, with one perfect 800 in Latin. I just assumed that all my classmates would have similar qualifications. But once I arrived on campus, I found no such thing. A fair number had developed severe alcoholism by the time they turned 18. Others just didn't seem very smart. Still others had acquired experience with drugs in prep school, something that in the mid 1960s hadn't reached the public schools.
I'd read and admired Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt in junior higb school. Why did so many of my classmates remind me of George F Babbitt? And I was always trying to figure out why so many had the same surname as the names of campus buildings -- Steve Throckmorton. Why is that the same as Throckmorton Hall?
As I've noted here now and then, I went to the dean of freshmen and told him I thought somehow there'd been a major mistake. I was in the wrong place. The dean had something of a wry reacton, looked at my file, and more or less assured me that I was an intelligent young man indeed, stick it out. He was probably right that, ill-placed as I was, there was probably nowhere else for me to go, and that's probably still the case. Hillsdale College is good as far as it goes, but I'm not all that impressed with the online courses I've taken there. It's still your basic liberal arts school.
There's a fairly broad strain of opinion that says if Trump is overturning the system of tariffs, he's out to change more than just tariffs. If he's out to stop uncontrolled migration, he's out to reform more than just migration. If he's out to stop DEI and campus anti-Semitism, he's out to change more than just DEI and anti-Semitism. I certainly hope an unintended consequence of this particular program could be a more basic academic reform, maybe a scrapping of the whole basket admissions system.
