I’m filing this one under Great Moments In Self-Delusion. The London Times warns: “Harvard graduates advised to keep quiet about it.” But not for the reason you might think!
They call it “dropping the H-bomb”. For decades, graduates of Harvard have wrestled with how best to mention that they went to a university with a reputation so splendid that some alumni fear to speak of it directly with friends and colleagues lest they be dazzled.
Oh, please. I graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, a fact that as far as I know has never “dazzled” anyone. If I hadn’t turned out to be a good lawyer, it would have done me zero good. These people are seriously out of touch.
Now the graduating class of 2023 has been given some advice on this delicate subject. In an interview with a student newspaper, Rakesh Khurana, the dean of Harvard College, told students preparing to go forth into the world: “Don’t gratuitously drop the H-bomb.” If it seems odd for a college dean to urge his graduates not to talk too freely about having been there, it was an acknowledgment of the long debate over Harvard’s reputation in the outside world.
That reputation is more ambiguous than they may understand.
An early mention of the H-Bomb appeared in the Harvard Crimson newspaper in 1990, when a student named Kenneth Katz wrote about how pleased he was to be back on campus, where he no longer had to tell people he was a student at Harvard.
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Equally controversial is the question of wearing a Harvard T-shirt or tracksuit top. Bena Shah, 45, who works in business development for an investment fund, said her husband “doesn’t like it if I’m wearing something that says ‘Harvard’ on it”. She generally refrains from wearing her Harvard Business School fleece but now and then “I will flex a little bit. Sometimes you wear it to show a little muscle.”
Yeah, right. I’m sure people are deeply impressed.
But there is a point lurking here. Harvard’s reputation stems not from its antiquity, or its $50 billion endowment. To the extent that people view Harvard with respect, it is because smart kids go there. But that may be about to change. For the foreseeable future, Harvard will no longer require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores, or any standardized testing.
The university says this is part of its “whole person admissions process,” but without standardized testing, it has little to go on but high school grades. Given today’s grade inflation at all levels, Harvard will have no logical basis on which to select its freshman class other than soft factors like “community involvement,” commitment to diversity, and so on. Admission to the once-storied university will become increasingly random.
What is going on here is that Harvard anticipates that the Supreme Court is about to rule that race discrimination in college admissions violates the 14th Amendment, in the case of public universities, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, in the case of private universities that receive federal funding (like Harvard). Harvard is committed to engaging in race discrimination, and that commitment outweighs its desire to admit the smartest possible students. So from now on, Harvard will go downhill academically.
It will be interesting to see whether people will still be “dazzled” by a Harvard degree, or that mentioning the university will constitute “dropping the H-bomb,” when Harvard is indistinguishable from dozens or perhaps hundreds of other colleges that don’t require the SAT and that randomly select high school seniors with 4.0 grade averages, based largely on race and commitment to liberalism. I’m guessing the H-bomb’s days are numbered.
Before long, high school students who are actually talented and accomplished, but who may not benefit from technically-illegal but hard to prove racial preferences, will look for schools where other such talented kids congregate. Those will be the colleges and universities who still require the SAT or ACT test, and who choose their students based on merit, not race quotas and political purity tests. Are there any such colleges? Not many, but there will be a few.
Hillsdale is an obvious example. I understand that Hillsdale is in the midst of an expansion program, and I hope that is true. Because within 10 years, I expect that Hillsdale will be inundated with applications from the brightest of high school students around the country, who want their actual talents and accomplishments, not their skin color and political views, to count.
Who knows, maybe in a generation there will still be a collegiate H-bomb, but the H will be Hillsdale.
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