Months after the demise of affirmative action, various institutions of American higher education are rolling out Super Innovative Plans to combat their newfound inability to colorize meritocracy. In August, the most prominent university in the affirmative action debate released its...
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Months after the demise of affirmative action, various institutions of American higher education are rolling out Super Innovative Plans to combat their newfound inability to colorize meritocracy. In August, the most prominent university in the affirmative action debate released its new strategy: Harvard has entered its post-affirmative action era. Or has it?
The university has revamped its application process, according to sources at the Harvard Crimson. Prospective students will answer “questions about applicants’ life experience, intellectual interests, extracurricular activities, how they hope to use their Harvard education in the future, and the top three things that they want their roommate to know about them.”
Okay, fine. But it’s the following phrase in the Crimson’s reporting that stands out: “The new short essays draw directly from prompts in the old College application.” In a sense, Harvard’s new strategy isn’t new — it’s a “back to basics” approach. But are the basics what America’s college students, particularly students of color, need?
Let’s be honest: Race shouldn’t matter in college admissions. In an ideal world, someone’s race would not affect the statistical chance of undergoing less-than-ideal life experiences, including poverty, growing up in a single-parent household, and becoming a single parent. Yet, it does: Generational wealth has not accrued equally across racial groups, and single parenthood occurs disproportionately among black Americans. It’s a sad but as-of-yet irrefutable reality: Americans of color, often through no fault of their own, are overrepresented in many of our nation’s most tragic life stories.
And now it’s time for American universities to let them redeem those stories the right way. (READ MORE: McConnell, It’s Time to Resign)
Recently, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk went after Johns Hopkins University’s application process, claiming that the university has “a new mandatory essay asking applicants to talk about their race” and further asserting that the application requirement was aimed at “evad[ing] the Supreme Court’s new ban on racial discrimination in admissions.” A reading of the requirement, however, reveals that Johns Hopkins asked applicants to discuss an aspect of their identity, including religion, community, or race. It was a mandatory essay — but no one was being forced to discuss race.
Whether this snafu was intentional or mere verbal imprecision, it illustrates the importance of accuracy. In the post-affirmative-action era, we are not trying to stop college applicants from talking about their race; on the contrary, applicants should be able to explain what role, if any, their race has played in shaping them into a better addition to a campus community.
In the post-racial society we should strive for, race wouldn’t be a factor. Yet it can and often does affect experience in areas ranging from home life to college. Just ask Asian-American college applications for whom race has played an all-too-significant role in which academic institutions — *cough* Harvard *cough* — are willing to acknowledge their talent and accomplishments. Or black college applicants, the very ones diversity initiatives claim to help the most, who often experience more significant social and academic struggles due to the educational mismatch caused by prioritizing skin color over institutional fitness. Affirmative-action programs have doomed students of color to a life of unearned paranoia over their own legitimacy — many, myself included, will forever grapple with the question of whether our academic and corporate accomplishments are perceived as earned, as opposed to the calculated result of a cleverly considered DEI initiative. (READ MORE: Republicans, Stop the Self-Defeating Victimology)
The racializing of American society has affected many different people in many different ways, and rarely for the better; college administrators should be treating race as the varyingly relevant factor it is, as opposed to the determining factor race-based affirmative action treats it as.
That said, practical application is every bit as important as theoretical soundness. Is it possible this is a clever trick designed to evaluate race more subtly? Yes — quite. It’s more than probable this will become a system where applicant essays are screened for racial buzzwords and phrases, rendering this nothing more than affirmative action with an extra Ctrl+F step.
Harvard’s renewed focus on holistic lived experience is a rhetorical rebut to the limiting principles of affirmative action. An admissions system that truly prioritizes race disservices students of color by treating their race as tantamount to lived experience and even character. In a world where affirmative action is unconstitutional, universities must confront a much less neat and tidy truth about race in America: it affects each student differently — there is no box to check when each of us is a unique creation.
Conservatives talk all the time about telling stories, as we should. They’re the outworking of our humanity, and compelling stories are a key facet in understanding just how shared our humanity is. To that end, affirmative action has prevented countless students of color from telling their stories properly. The answer to overemphasizing race isn’t ignoring race but grappling with the messy, variable role it plays in the lives of America’s future students. It’s understanding people as individuals — how we were always supposed to.
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