DEI Dogma or Minority Advancement: What’ll it be, Harvard?
Ivies not interested in feeder schools for underserved black and hispanic students
Dear Readers,
It’s good to be back home, but I still have the Ivy League on my mind!
We just returned from an East Coast Trip where we screened The Coddling movie at Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton. We were also scheduled to screen at Columbia, but, well, that didn’t happen.
The trip also included non-Ivy screenings at Wake Forest, the University of Toronto, and the Angelika Film Center in New York (with the one and only Jonathan Haidt).
All the best,
Ted
Last summer the Supreme Court shot down racial preferences in college admissions, and since then universities have been looking for other ways to achieve their diversity goals.
Imagine if, during a DEI staff meeting at Harvard, someone piped up with this suggestion:
You know, if we want more black and brown students, why don’t we create some feeder high schools in poor neighborhoods? That way the kids would get a great education and we could admit them using the same standards we use for everyone else.
How do you think Harvard would respond?
Actually, we don’t have to imagine it. Someone at Harvard did make such a suggestion, and that someone is no slouch.
In fact, Roland Fryer is precisely the type of person the Eight Percenters tell us we should turn to in such matters.
The economist has amassed impressive credentials. At age 30, he became the youngest African American to be awarded tenure at Harvard. He’s received many prestigious awards including a MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal (awarded to the best economist under age 40).
He also has a compelling personal story. He was raised by his grandmother, and endured a tough childhood that included plenty of racism. For instance, the parents of some of his white friends wouldn’t allow black people in their living rooms—in the 1980s!
Moreover, Fryer made his suggestion in the Eight Percenters’ favorite newspaper, The New York Times. In an op-ed, he pointed out that colleges regard the supply of qualified minority students as fixed. They rely on existing schools to teach students how to get up to speed for the expectations they’ll face in college:
[A]nd if those schools routinely fail minority students, well, that’s a problem with the precollege pipeline.
This argument has allowed elite colleges to sidestep responsibility for far too long. They could fix the problem if they truly wanted to. Elite colleges could operate a network of, say, 100 feeder middle and high schools — academies that are open to promising students who otherwise lack access to a high-quality secondary education, in cities where such children are common because of high poverty rates and underperforming public schools. These institutions would bring their students up to the sponsoring universities’ standards so that they are ready for elite schools when they graduate.
Educating lots of students wouldn’t be cheap. Fryer estimates that putting 50,000 students through four years of high school would cost $4 billion. Usually, a figure that large would kill the conversation, but c’mon, this is the Ivy League we’re talking about!
That $4 billion figure represents only about 2 percent of the Ivy’s $200 billion endowment (a figure that is projected to grow to $1 trillion by 2048). Fundraising could offset the cost, and Fryer promised to take a year off to lead the charge.
I hesitate to call any fundraising effort “easy,” but look at what Fryer would have to work with: The Ivies are fundraising machines that have direct access to many of the wealthiest people on the planet. And he’d be asking them to support Harvard-branded schools that would help minority kids get into the Ivies. Let donors slap their own names on plaques outside the schools, and watch the money tsunami swell.
According to Fryer, the time to act is now:
If we truly believe that a lack of opportunity is what holds black and Hispanic students back — if we actually believe that and don’t just say it to signal our virtue — we should be impatient about taking matters into our own hands.
If Fryer were delivering these words during a speech, that’s the moment we’d expect the audience to jump out of their seats cheering and fumbling for their checkbooks.
But Fryer’s proposal was met, not with cheers, but with silence.
During an interview with Russ Roberts of EconTalk, the two speculated that readers might have regarded Fryer’s proposal as satire, something I find hard to believe. Fryer is a serious scholar, writing on a serious topic, in a (mostly) serious publication. He insists his op-ed was no joke.
“I can tell you this,” he said. “It is not a piece of satire. It is a 'put your endowment where your mouth is' kind of piece.
Groupthink Versus Progress
A black Harvard scholar outlines how to achieve the university’s diversity goals, and he’s (apparently) ignored. How strange.
Harvard constantly asserts its commitment to diversity, but could it be that the university and its Ivy colleagues are even more committed to other ideals?
You will be unsurprised by the fact that the Harvard faculty is overwhelmingly progressive, but the monoculture is even more pronounced among administrators. Samuel J. Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, conducted a national survey of administrators who deal directly with students. He found that “liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one.”
That makes administrators the most left-lopsided group on campus, and it explains what he observed on his campus:
[The] Office of Student Affairs, which oversees a wide array of issues including student diversity and residence life, was organizing many overtly progressive events — programs with names like “Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,” “Microaggressions” and “Understanding White Privilege” — without offering any programming that offered a meaningful ideological alternative. These events were conducted outside the classroom, in the students’ social and recreational spaces.
If what’s true of administrators in general also applies to administrators at Harvard, then it’s reasonable to assume that those who have the power to act on Fryer’s proposal are even more gripped by groupthink than the faculty.
No wonder the groupthink also trickles down to students. Fryer teaches a course on black geniuses, and in one lecture he harkens back to 1895 when W.E.B. DuBois was asked, “What should black people ask from white people?”
“And the answer was, ‘a chance to compete,’” said Fryer. “I read that passage, but don't tell [my students] it's Du Bois, and they think it's Tim Scott, [or] some other black Republican.
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Donkeys Against Elephants?
It would be easy to frame the debate as Ds-vs-Rs, but I suspect something more nuanced is at play. On the one hand, Fryer’s proposal swings into taboo territory. Public schools are sacred to many on the left, and teachers unions like the National Education Association comprise one of the mightiest blocks in the Democratic Party.
Fryer’s proposal doesn’t merely shine a light on failing public schools, it’s a form of school choice. That policy isn’t popular among prominent Democrats, and blacks and Hispanics tend to vote blue, so one might assume that Harvard administrators are locking arms with the racial groups they purport to support.
It’s an impression Harvard might like to create, but as with issues ranging from policing to microaggressions and racial preferences, minorities don’t side with progressives on school choice.
For instance, a 2023 RealClear Opinion Research poll finds widespread support for school choice among all racial groups, support that has increased considerably since 2020:
Support for School Choice (2020 vs 2023)
Hispanic: 63% -> 71% (+8 pp)
White: 64% -> 71% (+7 pp)
Black: 68% -> 73% (+5 pp)
Asian: 56% -> 70% (+14 pp)
The coalition breaks down even more because it turns out rank-and-file Democrats often disagree with movement leaders. The same poll revealed that 66% of Democrats support school choice.
Once again, the split isn’t left vs right, it’s the Eight Percenters versus the rest of us.
What Matters Most?
If Harvard and the other Ivies are serious about minority advancement, they should shed their ideological baggage and welcome ideas from across the political spectrum. They should be on the lookout for solutions that work, not just proposals that confirm their biases.
But these days academia aims to ossify thought even more.
The rise of DEI statements, where current and prospective faculty members must profess their devotion to “anti-racist” principles, would lock universities into an increasingly narrow pool of options. Push for more of the same counterproductive DEI workshops and microaggression training seminars, and you’ll likely receive plenty of support from your colleagues. But venture outside the small pool of authorized options, and you’ll probably be treated like Roland Fryer.
When it comes to the advancement of minority students, it’s difficult to take Harvard and the rest of academia seriously. They can profess fealty to DEI dogma or minority advancement, but not both.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and the new feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Stream the very first “Substack Presents” feature documentary here.
The market isn't enough. Education is like medicine in that most parents have no idea what constitutes a good school or the good educational methodology required to achieve it. Unlike medicine, educational theory doesn't insist upon falsifiability to make bold claims with no empirical basis. How many parent have even heard of Cognitive Load Theory, for example?
That being said, London as a single city seems to have largely conquered the racial attainment gap in education in the UK at a national level. A Peter Boghossian interview with Katherine Birbalsingh provides an example of one school which has confounded expectations and blasted away many of the arguments against charters, particularly those surrounding student exclusion. It's not the only example. The state-run Brampton Manor Academy consistently outperforms Eton in both 'A' Level exam results and placements to Oxbridge. These are not isolated examples. The exam results for an entire metropolitan capital speak for themselves.
I have a sneaking suspicion that, in the uneasy alliance and partisan lull which characterised the New Labour/Compassionate Conservatism era, people lost enough of their ideology to look to the failures of the progressive educational approach in Northern Ireland for inspiration. That the generally much poorer, socially deprived and, until recently, highly discriminated against, Northern Irish Catholics were consistently outperforming there more affluent leafy suburb living upper middle class North Irish Protestant counterparts in education, was becoming somewhat of a national embarrassment for the institutional educational establishment back on the UK mainland. The evidence is admittedly scant for this hypothesis. Institutional are loathe to look to the roots of their failures, or even acknowledge them, but the fact remains that a combination of the social cohesion caused by faith communities, a lower divorce rate and the generally more socially conservative scepticism of the trendy fads coming out of the progressive educational mill all combined into a living experiment where a community facing huge and seemingly insurmountable economic and social inequities resoundingly thrashed their more privileged peers.
Despite all this, there is still huge resistance on the Left to the idea of adopting an exemplary model for education more broadly. Faced with the choice between an ideology which offers the false promise of miraculous social transformation through the political coercion of 'tyranny of others' majoritarianism set against the chance of improvement of children's future prospects for an entire nation through empirically proven methods, the chance to apply political coercion to enact broad societal and economic changes is obviously more alluring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3taXF-cjLBc