A Harvard Student Says Trump's Harvard Is A Straw Man

I'm going back to Harvard, because as usual, the media, alt, legacy, or otherwise. is playing its annual game of extending spring break into Memorial Day, at which point they can check out for summer vacation. The two big stories this week are "Who will be the next pope?" and "Is Trump trying to ease Hegseth out?" which don't have answers and don't require mental effort -- and that comes after a weekend of evergreen bromides saying nice things about Easter. Things likely won't pick up until October.

But I found a piece at the Harvard Crimson that illustrates how Ivy students are insidiously brainwashed into believing the system that's selected them is good because, after all, it selected them in a highly selective, meritoratic process. This is also at the heart of David Brooks's endorsement of the Ivies in Bobos in Paradise. The system is meritocratic because, after all, it selected David Brooks. Just look at him! The Ivy student body is a self-licking lollipop.

As a student here, the charges of pervasive antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and racial bias at Harvard seem ridiculous. But to the average consumer of conservative media, far removed from our campus, these charges are as true as the sky is blue.

. . . As a Jewish student myself, I’ve never been personally attacked for my identity. To me, it seems that this popular perception of Harvard comes mostly from a few confrontations between vocal pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protestors.

Extrapolating that an entire university is antisemitic from these moments is akin to claiming that because David E. Duke is a Trump voter, all Trump voters are racist — it just doesn’t make sense.

Last week I discussed the position of Alan Dershowitz and Jerome Karabel, which is pretty universally acknowledged, that the Ivy admissions system was developed over a few decades beginning in the early 1900s to institutionalize a Jewish quota without overtly screening for Jewish-sounding surnames or aquiline features in application photos. Instead, it established geographical diversity preferences for applicants in the Rocky Mountain and prairie regions or applicants from upper-crust private secondary schools, which were themselves socially conscious in their admissions procedures.

Preferences for legacies, the children of alumni, had an equivalent effect of creating a pre-screened sample with a limited population of Jewish applicants. A more recent group, international students, had a serendipitous quality of also not being very Jewish -- not a whole lot of Jews left in Europe, and not a whole lot of Jews outside Israel anywhere else.

All of these preferences created groups of applicants who were unlikely to be too Jewish, leaving only a limited group of public-school students from the Northeastern suburbs who were selected on meritocraic criteria, test scores, grades, extracurriculars, and general precocity. Some of these -- maybe a lot of them -- would be Jewish, but the other admissions preferences would balance them out. Oddly, Henry F Haidar, author of the Crimson piece, never mentions the admissions process that created a student body with an unspoken Jewish quota built right into it that characterizes Harvard and other prestigious universities. How can it be anti-Semitic? It admitted him, after all!

The idea that Harvard is meritocratic pervades Haidar's argument:

Finally, Republicans are up in arms over the idea that taxpayers are subsidizing massively wealthy colleges and their teaching. After all, why should Joe from Topeka, Kansas, pay for the education of entitled Hamas-Loving-Flag-Burning-Communists?

The problem with this argument is that much of Harvard’s impacted federal research funding takes the form of competitive grants: It just so happens that Harvard affiliates win many of these for their cutting-edge research.

It's all competitive! And It's Harvard! It must be good! If he's lucky, Henry Haidar will have this kicked out of him within a few years of getting his diploma, but that's not guaranteed. Dude, the race is not always to the swift, OK?

In the process of writing last week's posts, I speculated on the relative size of the unlimited-Jews applicant pool allowed in the Ivy admissions system. those from Northeastern suburban public schools. I still haven't found a specific percentage for this category, but I did find that at Harvard, the international students make up 27% of the studemt body, while applicants from upper-crust "independent schools" make up an astonishing 35%. The same source puts the percentage of legacies at 16%.

If we add up just these categories, international students, preppies, and legacies, we get 78% of the admissions pool that is not competitively selected -- but this leaves out the slots reserved for children of major donors, celebrities, and politicians, as well as athletes and DEI. This means that applicants selected exclusively on the basis of academic achievement, test scores, and extracurriculars number at best about 20% of an Ivy entering class, and almost certainly less. But this is the basis on which the Ivies claim their cachet of merit and excellence.

Thinking about this in one way or another for many years, I've kept coming back to the "battle royal" episode in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man:

The narrator . . . recalls being invited to give his high school graduation speech at a gathering of the town's leading white citizens. When he arrived, he discovered that he was to provide part of the evening's entertainment for a roomful of drunken white men as a contestant, along with nine of his classmates, in a blindfolded boxing match (a "battle royal") before giving his speech. . . . After enduring these humiliating experiences, the narrator is finally permitted to give his speech and receives his prize: a calfskin briefcase that contains a scholarship to the local college for Negroes (a term Ellison preferred over "blacks").

That night, the narrator dreams that he is at the circus with his grandfather. . . . His grandfather orders him to open the briefcase and read the message contained in an official envelope stamped with the state seal. Opening the envelope, the narrator finds that each envelope contains yet another envelope. In the last envelope, instead of the scholarship, he finds an engraved document with the message: "To Whom It May Concern: Keep This Nigger-Boy Running."

Poor Henry Haidar. It's going to be a long, strange trip if he ever starts it.