Tainting Diversity

Diversity, as any student will tell you, is a key word on Harvard's campus. This school prides itself on the motley crew of students and professors and on the vast spectrum of races and ethnicities and even nationalities that make up the Harvard-Radcliffe community.

Just this past week, letters were sent out to those admitted to the Class of '99, and, as The Crimson proclaimed on April 6, "Admits to Class of '99 Set Diversity Records." The accepted pool of students has a record number of women, Hispanic Americans, Puerto Ricans and Native Americans, and the number of Black students admitted was only two shy of the all-time high of 217 in the Class of '97. The record-breaking diversity is not an inexplicable fluke of admissions. It is the result of the school's active effort to target promising minority students in order to increase their representation at Harvard. Marlyn McGrath Lewis, Director of Admissions for Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, explained that the "aggressive recruitment of strong minority candidates has been a goal of the Admissions Office for the past three decades, ever since the change in national consciousness focused our attention on the under-representation of students from minority backgrounds."

Underlying the Admission Office's policy is the belief that diversity is inherently good--that the more minorities represented in the student body and faculty, the greater variety of backgrounds and experiences, the more interesting and educationally exciting Harvard will be. As McGrath Lewis said, "The mix of talents, backgrounds, and aspirations is a fundamental part of the undergraduate experience and the key to our success." She continued: "The mission [of Harvard] is to produce leaders of society from all segments of society. Unless we have classes that represent the pluralism of the United States, and, increasingly, of the world, we would not have succeeded in our mission." Even Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield '53 stated that he doesn't object to "recruiting Black and minority students" and conceded that "Blacks contribute something to the Harvard community."

Although there is little controversy among the American public on the innate value of diversity, and even less, I would venture, among the Harvard population, there exists a growing movement that is challenging not so much the goal of diversity as one of the most frequently used means that have been employed to achieve it: affirmative action. The policies of affirmative action were originally instituted to create true equality of opportunity for a community that, for generations, had been shackled by the vestiges of slavery.

However, in the past months, affirmative action has been brought under harsh attack, not only from those conservatives who have been crusading against affirmative action since its inception, but increasingly from the mainstream American public. As Mansfield noted, "the policies of affirmative action are suddenly coming into question in a remarkable way." The argument against affirmative action focuses on the claim that affirmative action is no more than a type of reverse racism. In an amazingly ironic twist, the system that was established to overcome the effects of group generalizations now more than ever looks at people solely as members of some larger ethnic community. U.S. News and World Report, in a collection of snippets under the title "PC: Almost dead, still funny" quoted a letter sent to a Hispanic Professor:

Dear Dr._____:

Thank you for your application for the assistant professor opening #279-923 in the Anthropology Board of Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Enclosed you will find an ethnic identity card that must be completed and returned...The university is an affirmative action/ equal opportunity employer.

The idea of treating an individual differently because of his or her race belies the very principles of the civil rights movement. David Horowitz, in his book Liberal Racism, writes: "Martin Luther King's dream was that his children would live in a land where they would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Thanks to affirmative action...we now judge everybody by the color of their skin." In our attempt to build a united society that would truly be color-blind, we have created a society that is wracked by painful and potentially dangerous divisions along the lines of race.

Affirmative action has produced another, less conspicuous but perhaps more pernicious, consequence. Leonard Fein, a social critic, described this unintentional legacy of affirmative action in an historical context: "James Baldwin wrote that one of the tragedies of being Black in America is never knowing why you failed. The modern corollary, [ironically enough] is that with affirmative action, you never know why you succeeded." Although the latter is admittedly less tragic, we have created a culture in which "few Blacks are sufficiently confident of themselves or their achievements." In so doing, we have undermined one of the purposes of the program; although there now exists a cadre of Blacks in hitherto unattainable positions, they are haunted by the possibility that they have succeeded only by virtue of the color of their skin.

It is time for a national reevaluation of the experiment of affirmative action. We must decide what values will shape the American community as we move into the 21st century. It is up to us to determine if a country so divided can endure--if we have given up on the possibility of a color-blind society in favor of one that is intensely aware of color and creed. We have the benefit of the experiences of the past 30 years of affirmative action--both the triumphs and the failures--to guide this process. What is essential is honest and respectful dialogue.