Supporting Minorities

"Before you come to Harvard, they want you to be different, but once you get here, they want to make you the same." -- a disillusioned Harvard Admissions officer

THE HARVARD OFFICIAL was quoted in a Yale senior thesis which charted the impact of affirmative action in admissions on Hispanic enrollment at Ivy League and Seven Sister schools. Three weeks ago at an annual all Ivy Chicano recruitment conference in Philadelphia, Yale senior Cathy Kisee-Sandoval shared her findings with about 75 undergraduates and administrators from 10 schools.

Sandoval, who spent last year compiling the original research and is now at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, laid out some important conclusions in her two-hour keynote address:

* although affirmative action has resulted in a dramatic jump in the number of Chicano students compared to the 1970's, enrollment at most Ivy League schools has levelled off in the past five years despite a larger applicant pool and a boom of college-age Chicanos in the national population.

* affirmative action initiatives alone, without insitutional support for minority organizations and support services at Ivy League schools, will not result in student compositions which are more reflective of the overall population.

Sandoval found, after interviewing admissions officials, College deans, Chicano students and Chicano alumni, that these trends are most noticeable at Harvard. In other words, while the College tries desperately to integrate its student body, it is jeopardizing its ability to attract and retain students of different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.

HARVARD HAS THE LARGEST CHICANO student body about 120 in the College and, not coincidentally, it launches the most vigorous recruiting effort. Begun in 1971 by a few Chicano students, the Minority Recruitment Program has grown to include Puerto Rican, American Indian, Asian and Black undergraduates. It has full financial and administrative support from the admissions office.

But two phenomena in recent years may illustrate the program's inability to attract prospective due to the quality minority student's post-matriculation experience. First, there has been a trend in decreasing numbers of Black students choosing to come to Harvard. Some Black students and admissions officers attribute this in part to negative publicity about Harvard's race relations in recent years.

A similar phenomena may have begun where Chicano students are concerned. For the previous five years Harvard had had very stable Chicano acceptance and matriculation rates. (Sandoval labeled this phenomena a "tacit quota system" to limit the number of Mexican-American students a figure respectable to other prestigious East Coast schools.) Last year saw a record number, more than half of thoseadmitted, however, choose to go elsewhere.

Harvard may have won a few points for its recruitment efforts, but it certainly lost ground among the student recruiters--who will have this ammunition when they visit high schools in the coming months. Harvard epitomizes the double standard for minorities in the Ivy League, the Admissions Office searches for ethnic and racial diversity, but College policy towards minority organizations presupposes assimilation into the campus mainstream as their goal.

The prognosis was unsurprising for the three Harvard students attending the day-long conference. But it came as a shocker for others in the audience. Undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, where there is an "intercultural center"--a building for minority organizations and special functions--could not believe minority student groups at Harvard had no automatic allocation of funding for academic and support services including freshman orientation events. At Yale there is a Hispanic officer for minority concerns under the Dean of Student Affairs. At Columbia, a Chicano from the Southwest fills the role of Dean of Students.

Sandoval's conclusion is one minority student leaders at Harvard have advocated for years: that successful recruitment and retention of minority students requires post-matirculation institutional support for ethnic and racially based student groups. Such support, furthermore, must be vocal and backed by appropriate financial resources.

The Chicano population on Ivy League campuses faces a dilemma in trying to recruit students from the Southwest to the East Coast where there is no Chicano community and where the Chicano population at most Ivies is very small. Chicano students coming to places like Harvard do so knowing they face cultural isolation. So the dilemma, from the perspective of student recruiters and others working towards increasing Harvard's minority population, centers on the competing and frequently circular goals of attracting students by building Harvard up, while chastising the University with the hope of improving support services.

THERE'S AN INHERENT CONTRADICTION: How can one ethically recruit students to Harvard knowing that the College does not support--financially or philosophically--a counseling network aimed at Chicano students? How does one convince College officials that moral, academic, social financial and other forms of support for minority organizations help students provide without "proving" that that minority students are failing? (This is especially difficult because the University does not compile with-drawal and graduation statistics by racial and ethnic breakdowns.) If minority students are struggling at a rate different from their majority counterparts, how do student recruiters argue for the admission of disadvantaged Chicano with lower than average SAT scores? How does the University attract Chicano faculty and staff who know they will be struggle with being the "first" at Harvard and face professional isolation?

At the heart of the dilemma lies one's conception of the role of ethnic and racial minorities play in the Harvard microcosm of American society. If one's view is that minorities should simply blend into the mainstream student population, suppressing their cultural differences in order to assimilate completely, Harvard is right on track. A student's race, ethnicity or disadvantaged background could be considered in the admissions process knowing fully that, in choosing to matriculate at Harvard, the student would become part and parcel of a substantively homogenous student body.

He or she may even be wood with Third World Pre-Freshman Weekend cultural nights and picnics (virtually the only occasions at which all minority groups gather to share each other's cultures). One University staffperson called the Third World Women's Brunch held every during the minority pre-freshman weekend, the ultimate hypocrisy because there is no other such event during the fall and spring semesters.

Without institutionalized support services or minority groups to foster cultural awareness or celebration, the Chicano student will soon melt into the Harvard pot. It would be silly to indict proponents of the integrationist--really, it is assimilationist--philosophy as intentionally malevolent or racist; they probably geuinely believe that such ideology and subsequent University action is in the minority students' best interest.

But ethnocentrism in self-proclaimed pluralistic societies--as both Harvard and America purport to be--however, should not be tolerated as a guiding principle. Whether through apathy or conscious choice, most Harvard students and administrators have done just this. In so doing, they have insulted minority students by denying the legitimacy of their cultures.

However obvious, it should be noted that not all Hispanic, Black, Asian, or Native American students would be offended by the usual denial of their backgrounds. That is a valid choice of idently and association which each individual must make. At Harvard, however, some students are being denied the opportunity to assert their cultural identity.

And those College officials who take the assimilationist tack present minority student recruiters and activists, with the hard choice of misleading more prospective students or seeing their group shrink and fade into the woodwork.