[1653] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
[Mit-talk] merit, diversity, hahvahd, mit, etc.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jimmy Wu)
Mon Oct 24 14:38:47 2005
From: "Jimmy Wu" <jimmbswu@hotmail.com>
To: mit-talk@mit.edu
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 14:38:31 -0400
Reply-To: jimmbswu@alum.mit.edu
Errors-To: mit-talk-bounces@mit.edu
The article quoted below discusses the trajectory of the affirmative action
policy among the Ivies, going from the paid exceptions to legacies in the
1900s, to the legacy quotas in the '20s, to the "character/whole person"
preference for legacies in the '30s, to the present day "character/whole
person" preference for athletes, minorities, and legacies.
Under this analysis, the Ivies evolved their affirmative action policy to
protect their brands over time. Because the Ivy brand is the accession to
power and privilege, every step of the evolution has served to strengthen
the brand.
The questions for MIT are many. For most of us, we probably need a history
lesson in MIT admissions policy before we can debate the purported
egalitarianism in the MIT admission policy. However, one question we can
ask today is: does MIT's admission policy today serves to strengthen the
brand? What should be MIT's brand?
As many people have noted over the past 7+ years on these forums, MIT is
searching for a new brand identity. The old brand identity of the technical
research university is no longer viable due to the end of the Cold War.
Currently, MIT appears headed toward an "Ivy with technical focus" brand,
which can be seen with the increase in "All-American" admitees and the
tremendous increase in Course 15 enrollment among undergrads.
For the "Ivy with technical focus", MIT is probably using the right
affirmative action policy, with weighting toward the "all-American-ness"
needed for the brand.
However, is it the right place to go? Among many other things, Hahvahd is
also an Ivy with good technical focus. If you look only at their technical
departments, they can certainly out-compete MIT. Same thing with the other
upper-tier Ivies. Given that there is a lot of competition in this
particular talent market, MIT should look for some other brand identity. As
many of our 15ers can relate, in areas of intense competition, companies
will segment/corner the market by appearing different, or seek out a
different, distinct market, where they can utilize their "first-comer"
advantage.
In addition, the current admission policy is based on a particular
leadership paradigm. The two schools of thought in leadership development
are: leadership is learned vs. innate. By admitting a lot of "all-American"
applicants, MIT is taking the easy way out on leadership development.
Assuming that leadership is an innate quality, and that developing
leadership otherwise is expensive, MIT seeks to instead develop the
technical skills of born leaders, who have already demonstrated their
leadership abilities in various extracurricular activities. This way, MIT
skips out on the hard task of developing the un-quantifiable "leadership
skills" and instead focuses on the well-known and quantifiable task of
"technical skills".
Admittedly, MIT's focus is perhaps easier than trying to develop the
leadership skills of nerds, who may not have any in the first place.
However, this new focus risks diluting MIT's character. The whole-sale
introduction of all-Americans automatically means that there are less nerds
on campus, given the relatively fixed class size. Moreover, the boom in 15
enrollment shows that MIT is not doing very well in its self-assigned task
of developing the technical skills of all-Americans. The undergrad 15
curriculum may meet the minimum graduation requirement, but it does not
imbue its students with the finer points of linear system analysis. [see
below for more on course 15].
The bright spot is that the graduate admission system is up to the
individual courses and thus less vulnerable to MIT's brand change. However,
as professors get exposed to all-American undergrads over time, they may
change their focus in graduate admissions as well. Moreover, because MIT is
no longer viable as a technical research university [aka the Cold War
model], the courses have less research funding from their own contracts and
depend more on the MIT brand to attract funding. The strengthening of the
center vis-a-vis the periphery means that the courses are more vulnerable to
admin-dictated changes in graduate admission focus.
For MIT's sake, and for the sake of students future and present, we need to
start a public discussion on the branding of MIT.
Jimmy Wu'02
[In an analysis of the technical content of 15 vs. the other courses, you
could say that 15 is no more technical than, say, 21H or 17, so why single
15 out? But the truth is, 15 is qualitatively different from the other
non-technical courses. The sales pitch of 15 to employers is that they are
getting employees well-versed in the business as well as the technical
world. The other non-technical courses do not make so strong a claim.
However, 15 undergrads plainly are not as well-versed in the technical,
industrial sectors as undergrads from the technical courses. In essence,
course 15 is selling a defective product. Merill Lynch may hire a 15er to
analyze the technical sectors, but he did not do 18.03 nor anything beyond.
Other than his MIT diploma, this theoretical 15er can lay no claim to
technical expertise.
We need to make course 15 a "complementary course", where an undergrad needs
to first have a technical course before he can double-major into 15. An
undergrad cannot have 15 as the only major he has.]
---------------------article starts below--------------------
http://slate.msn.com/id/2128377/
Ivory Tower Intrigues
The pseudo-meritocracy of the Ivy League.
By James Traub
Posted Monday, Oct. 24, 2005, at 2:35 AM PT
Thanks to Jerome Karabel, author of The Chosen, I know now a great deal more
about the circumstances surrounding my admission to Harvard in 1972 than I
ever wanted to know. I understood even then that my unimpressive academic
record would not have put me over the top had my father not attended
Harvard. But I now know that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, supposedly a
time when the admissions process had at last been freed of archaic bias,
"legacies" were two-and-a-half to three times likelier to be admitted than
was the average applicant; that admitted legacies ranked lower than average
admits on everything Harvard cared about—personal attributes,
extracurricular activities, academic achievement, recommendations, and so
forth; and that the degree of preference granted legacies was only slightly
less than that given to black candidates, who in turn received less of a
thumb on the scale than did athletes. I was, in short, an affirmative-action
baby.
Well, who among us isn't? Karabel notes that even today 40 percent of
Princeton's freshman class consists of legacies, athletes, and
under-represented minorities, the three chief beneficiaries of admissions
preference. But Karabel's larger aim in this epically scaled and
scrupulously rendered history of the admissions systems at Harvard, Yale,
and Princeton is to call into question our confident use of words like
"preference." Along with works like The Big Test, by Nicholas Lemann, and
The Shape of the River, by William Bowen and Derek Bok, The Chosen
constitutes a second-generation defense of affirmative action, undermining
the pat narrative of critics who imagine that our great universities
operated according to a consensual, unarguable definition of "merit" until
racial blackmail forced them to betray their principles.
There was never any doubt in my mind as to what Harvard was selecting for in
1972— intellectual brilliance. I knew that somewhere swam shoals of crew
jocks and legacies far more square-jawed than I, but my world was
IQ-denominated. My dorm consisted largely of ill-bred physics geniuses,
Unabombers in the making. I had one friend who could talk to the kid who
could, in turn, talk to the kid who as a freshman was said to have corrected
a computing error by Harvard's great mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre. Of
such stuff were our legends made. But of such stuff, also, are tacit
worldviews made. It took me years to figure out that life was not
IQ-denominated, and that while academic intelligence was significantly
correlated with success, the world defined "merit" far more variously than
my little corner of Harvard had.
The task Karabel sets himself in The Chosen is to trace the evolution of
tacit worldviews, each appearing fixed and immutable to its advocates, that
over the last century determined who would and would not have access to
America's finest universities. It turns out, ironically enough from the
point of view of my family trajectory, that the admissions systems at the
Big Three were built expressly to keep out people like my father—smart,
driven Jewish kids from gigantic New York City public high schools. Until
1920 or so, anyone could gain admission to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton by
passing a battery of subject-matter exams; the lunkheads from Andover who
couldn't parse a literary paragraph could be admitted with "conditions." Of
course this meant the student body was heavily salted with "the stupid sons
of rich men," in the memorably pithy phrase of Charles Eliot, Harvard's
great Victorian-era president. But for the Harvard man, or, even more, for
that paragon known as "the Yale man," intellectual brilliance was a deeply
suspect attribute, like speaking French too well. These young men had been
bred for "character" and "manliness"—that ineffable mix of deeply heritable
qualities prized by the WASP establishment, a mix that worthies like
Endicott Peabody, the founder of Groton, the greatest of the "feeder
schools," believed could best be demonstrated on the football field. They
would have considered my dorm companions less than human, not more.
And then along came the Jews—lots and lots of Jews. By 1920, the Big Three
presidents were looking on in horror as Columbia, the Ivy League school
situated in the midst of the melting pot, became 40 percent Jewish. These
men shared the anti-Semitism almost universal in their class, but because
they saw themselves as custodians of ancient and indispensable institutions,
they did not simply dislike these uncouth scholars; they felt a deep
professional obligation to keep their numbers to a manageable minimum.
Karabel unearthed a letter from Harvard president Lawrence Lowell that
delineates the issue with admirable, if stomach-turning, clarity: "The
summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because
the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the
Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also." The
problem, in other words, was WASP flight.
The answer was selective admissions. In 1922, Lowell was reckless enough to
think that he could solve "the Jew problem," as he was wont to call it, with
a straightforward quota. This provoked a mighty uproar among faculty members
and outsiders with more tender consciences; instead, Lowell agreed to limit
the size of the entering class and to institute recommendation letters and
personal interviews. Yale and Princeton followed suit; and soon came the
whole panoply familiar to this day: lengthy applications, personal essays,
descriptions of extracurricular activities. This cumbersome and expensive
process served two central functions. It allowed the universities to select
for an attribute the disfavored class was thought to lack—i.e.,
"character"—and it shrouded the admissions process in impenetrable layers of
subjectivity and opacity, thus rendering it effectively impervious to
criticism. The swift drop in admission of Jews could thus be explained as
the byproduct of the application of neutral principles—just as could the
increase of minority students, 60 years later, in institutions seeking
greater "diversity."
The willingness of these universities to suffer real harms rather than admit
more Jews is astonishing. Having long distinguished itself as a "national"
and "democratic" institution, Yale by 1930 had become more insular, more
parochial, and less intellectual as a consequence of the new admissions
system. During World War II, with the size of the entering class size
seriously depleted, Yale turned away qualified Jewish students rather than
increase the proportion of Jews. "Yale judged its symbolic capital to be
even more precious than its academic capital," as Karabel dryly puts it. Or,
to put it more contemporary terms, Yale understood the imperative to protect
its brand.
We have grown accustomed to the idea that the academic, test-driven
meritocracy began to replace the old, ascriptive order in the 1940s. This is
the central theme of Lemann's The Big Test. But Karabel demonstrates that
the old order had a lot more staying power than is commonly thought. James
Bryant Conant, Harvard's midcentury president and an outspoken foe of
inherited privilege, is widely credited with democratizing Harvard's student
body. But it turns out that Jews had only slightly better chances of
admission under Conant, and the lunkheads of "St. Grottlesex," as the feeder
prep schools were collectively known, only slightly worse, than they had in
the Lowell era. This was true not so much because Conant shared Lowell's
prejudices as because he operated under his constraints: Harvard needed
"paying customers," and it needed to preserve an environment that would keep
those Brahmin scions happy. But it is also true that great WASP patriarchs
like Whitney Griswold, Yale's president in the '50s, shared the tribal
prejudice against "beetle-browed" intellectuals.
The idea of merit-as-brains is really a product of the 1960s. Karabel
attributes this in part to the growing power of the professoriat, whose
deepest loyalties were to knowledge rather than to the institutions with
which they were affiliated. Changes in the economy and Cold War competition
also turned brain-power into a precious resource, thus changing the social
definition of merit. And the egalitarianism of the 1960s, along with the
enfeeblement of the WASP elite, made the old association of character with
"breeding"—indeed, the very idea of character as a fixable commodity—seem
ludicrous. As blacks, Jews, and women clambered over the ramparts, the one
interest group that clung to the ancient ideals—the alumni—took up arms in
defense of the walled ethnic garden of yesteryear. They were fossils, of
course; but many of them were rich fossils. Karabel quotes the humiliating
1973 recantation of Yale president Kingman Brewster after many an Old Eli
had committed rebellion-by-checkbook: "If Yale is going to expect her alumni
to care about Yale, then she must convince her alumni that Yale cares about
them." And that helps explain why you-know-who was able to enroll
you-know-where.
By the time the reader arrives at Page 374 of The Chosen, where the book's
affirmative action exegesis begins, he is fully persuaded of the folly of
objectifying "merit" or "preference," of piercing the veil of opacity, or in
any case of preventing the great private universities from doing anything
they deem in their self-interest. Are the same smokescreens that were once
used to exclude the underprivileged now to be used to include them? Let it
be. Karabel, whose role in redesigning Berkeley's admissions policy in the
late '80s in order to pass constitutional muster is described in The Big
Test, and who remains one of the most thoughtful advocates of affirmative
action, candidly concedes that the Big Three ramped up the admission of
black students almost overnight owing not to some midnight conversion but to
terror at the rising tide of black anger and violence—owing, that is, to
racial blackmail. And because the elite universities began admitting large
numbers of black students with sub-par academic records at precisely the
moment they were becoming more "meritocratic"—i.e, more academically
selective—affirmative action felt more like a violation of meritocratic
principle than a recalibration of it. This painful fact continues to haunt
affirmative action and is why even some advocates, like the Harvard
sociologist Orlando Patterson, have called for such programs to be phased
out over time. But this is unlikely ever to happen, because universities now
define "diversity" as a central virtue.
Karabel's ultimate goal in deconstructing merit is not, however, to
vindicate affirmative action but to expose the hollowness of the central
American myth of equal opportunity. The selection process at elite
universities is widely understood as the outward symbol, and in many ways
the foundation, of our society's distribution of opportunities and rewards.
It thus "legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability and
hard work over the prerogatives of birth." But the truth, Karabel argues, is
very nearly the opposite: Social mobility is diminishing, privilege is
increasingly reproducing itself, and the system of higher education has
become the chief means whereby well-situated parents pass on the "cultural
capital" indispensable to success. "Merit" is always a political tool,
always "bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger
society." When merit was defined according to character attributes
associated with the upper class, that imprint was plain for all to see, and
to attack, but now that elite universities reward academic skills
theoretically attainable by all, but in practice concentrated among the
children of the well-to-do and the well-educated, the mark of power is, like
the admissions process itself, "veiled." And it is precisely this appearance
of equal opportunity that makes current-day admissions systems so effective
a legitimating device.
What, then, to do? Karabel proposes that colleges extend affirmative action
from race to class, as some have tentatively begun to do, and end
preferences for legacies and athletes. I am on record elsewhere as having
renounced the legacy privilege on behalf of my son—not that I asked him at
the time—but Karabel's own narrative has persuaded me that the elite
universities are unlikely to end affirmative action for the overprivileged.
If anything, The Chosen demonstrates the danger of imagining great
universities as miniature replicas of the social order, and their admissions
policies as simulacra of the national reward system. Yes, Harvard, Yale, and
Princeton are plainly open to, and in many ways driven by, our animating
national ideals; but Karabel shows us that their admissions choices are
profoundly shaped by cultural, political, and economic considerations that
can not be wished away. If we care about equality of opportunity, perhaps we
would do better to focus our attention on the public schools, on the tax
system, on such social goods as housing and health care. I don't think we
can prevent meritocratic privilege from reproducing itself; we can, however,
increase the supply of meritocrats.
James Traub is at work on a book about Kofi Annan and the United Nations.
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