While other institutions practicing Harvard’s brand of diversity and inclusion must worry about the costs of wokeness, Harvard has the resources and the prestige to bear them.
While other institutions practicing Harvard’s brand of diversity and inclusion must worry about the costs of wokeness, Harvard has the resources and the prestige to bear them.
T oday’s progressive elite broadcasts its virtue through devotion to causes such as Black Lives Matter; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and anti-racist efforts in the classroom and in corporate culture. Popular culture has called the collective sum of these efforts “wokeness,” which is a neologism used to describe various efforts to sound progressive and hip on social and racial issues. Yet we now know the costs of woke policies, including racial preferences, anti-racist trainings, and defunding the police. Racial preferences cost the California taxpayer an estimated 10 percent increase in expenses for public-construction contracts because of requirements that minority-owned businesses be given a relative discount compared with non-minority-owned businesses. (When minority-owned businesses submit a bid for a contract, that price is read as 10 percent lower than it actually is, although the payout is the same.) Ethnic-studies trainings in public schools can cost taxpayers $1,500 an hour. Reducing police presence has a strong correlation to increased crime, property damage, and therefore increases costs and expends resources to bear these burdens.
With these costs, not many institutions can truly afford wokeness. But one can. Unsurprisingly, it is also the richest academic institution in the entire world (endowment: $42 billion): Harvard University.
Harvard has practiced woke policies in the form of racial preferences in admissions for the better part of the 20th century, preferring blacks and Hispanics over whites and especially Asian Americans. Between 1996 and 2011, Asian Americans were kept to between 15 and 18 percent of Harvard’s student body, despite Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Analysis noting that, under a strictly academics-based process, Asians would be 43 percent of the student body. An Asian American was found to have to score 450 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance of admission to Harvard as a black American and about 140 points higher than a white American. A group of Asian Americans called Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard for racial discrimination, a case that will be presented in front of the Supreme Court as early as next term.
Edward Blum, the head of Students for Fair Admissions, recounted to me in my new book on the case, An Inconvenient Minority, that Harvard has spent an estimated $40 million defending its race-based admissions policies. Even a place as wealthy as Harvard could have done a lot with that much money. Instead, Harvard hired William F. Lee, a partner at Wilmer & Hale, for its defense. And it commissioned David Card, the noted UC-Berkeley economist famous in academic circles for his work on minimum-wage and labor laws, at the rate of $750 an hour to do a study to show that the college was not violating constitutional muster in its treatment of Asians.
Why would Harvard go out of its way just to convince courts to let it continue racial preferences in admissions that skew against Asian Americans? The best answer I’ve found is that Harvard wants to assert its dominance in the virtue-signaling hierarchy. Rob Henderson, a Yale graduate who grew up in foster care, has written about “luxury beliefs” — beliefs that those of a certain upper caste hold because they mark the adherent as sophisticated and hip, while the true effects of those beliefs do not affect them negatively in the same way that they affect the poor and middle class.
One example is a belief in the uniform goodness of diversity. Harvard believes very strongly that “diversity” of background, specifically racial background, is a good thing in a classroom. Hence the need to racially balance a class in a way that disadvantages Asian Americans. In interviews with Harvard students, the full content of which I have released on YouTube, I encountered the common refrain that “the aspect of diversity is important” to the student body. Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana says that “a diverse residential environment” helps to fulfill Harvard’s goals of “educating the citizenry and citizen leaders for our society.” David Card, the economist hired as part of Harvard’s defense, has himself noticed that “one form of diversity that Harvard seeks is racial diversity.” Racial diversity in this sense means that Harvard would want to reduce overrepresented populations such as Asian Americans in favor of “underrepresented” minorities such as blacks and Hispanics.
But diversity shouldn’t be seen as the sole or the overriding imperative — especially when it comes at the expense of admitting the most qualified candidate. For Harvard, the point of racial diversity is cosmetic. It allows Harvard to sell to its donors and to itself the perception of being a place where “the leaders of the world” congregate. The multicolored fabric of students gives Harvard the virtuous justification of being able to assert to the world that it is a university that truly reflects the aspirations of the world and therefore deserves the social lathering and monetary privilege ($40 billion endowment) that world bestows upon it. Ivy Leaguers believe they live in a charmed, world-wise place, where you can have diversity without conflict or tradeoffs, sparking their demand for campuses to reflect what the “world” looks like.
And at a place like Harvard, you can have it all, or at least mask the costs of diversity to some extent. Harvard’s very prestige gives it the unique ability to institute a race-based admissions process without having to bear as severe costs in the decline in overall student quality for it. For example, the Brookings Institution estimated that, at most, 2,200 black Americans nationwide scored higher than 700 on the math SAT in 2016, compared with 48,000 whites and 52,800 Asians, a sobering fact that has much to do with the failures in public-school education over the past 50 years. However, first-tier universities such as Harvard are able to scoop up the majority of the highly qualified black Americans, leaving second- and third-tier universities that also practice affirmative action to pick up black applicants who mostly score between 500 and 700 in math. This is not to say that many of these applicants don’t have strengths beyond what tests can evaluate — however, SAT scores have predictive value in the ability of students to succeed in their first year of college. Affirmative action specifically for black Americans has less of an effect at Harvard than it does at a second-tier university — a phenomenon that economist Richard Sander calls the “cascade effect” — because Harvard can attract the top black Americans with SAT evaluations comparable with top whites and top Asians. The vast majority of universities don’t have this luxury.
If there is a more privileged place on earth than Harvard, it would be hard to find. Because of its wealth and resources, Harvard can institute, defend, and somewhat mitigate the costs of wokeness. It can perhaps even create a “diverse” environment that students and donors find attractive, one that resembles Harvard’s “anointed” view of itself. Seen in this light, Harvard’s discrimination against Asian Americans is not about deconstructing privilege, but protecting this cosmetic “diversity” ideal. While other universities and companies practicing Harvard’s brand of diversity and inclusion will have to worry about the costs, Harvard has the resources and the prestige to bear them. It truly is a privileged place.