Harvard, Release The Data

Harvard is denying us the racial demographics for the Class of 2028.

Many of us have watched closely this past year to see the impact of the Supreme Court ruling on Affirmative Action after the Court’s decision to eliminate race-conscious admissions threw the future of access to higher education into uncertainty. And thanks to University leadership, we still don’t know the effect of the decision on our campus.

Back in December, in a major break with precedent, Harvard withheld the race and ethnicity statistics of early admits. Hiding behind legal challenges, the University claimed it would still report the data after the deadline to commit to Harvard in May. And yet, four months later, surprise, surprise, Harvard has still not coughed up the numbers.

To mount public pressure, the African and African American Resistance Organization, which I help organize, launched the “Release the Data!” campaign to expose the University’s lack of transparency. Nearly 30 AFRO members and other Harvard affiliates sent emails demanding Dean Rakesh Khurana and President Alan M. Garber ’76 release the data. They continue to leave us in the dark.

Several other Massachusetts schools’ released demographics only validate and heighten our concerns about Harvard’s potential numbers.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Black student enrollment dropped by two thirds. The number of Latino students also saw a large, nearly one-third dip. Amherst College and Tufts University have similarly reported significant declines in Black and Brown enrollment. These remarkable drops in admissions represent a reversal of gains won by generations who struggled against oppression and discrimination. If this is the reality of admissions just up the street, what is Harvard hiding?

As we challenge the erasure of Black and Brown students on campus, we need to make clear Harvard is not our friend in this fight.

In many ways, Harvard only values diversity for its financial and political capital. The University plasters our faces all over their media to maintain their own image. They underpay us as workers to maintain their profit margins. And while they claim to tolerate our basic political demands for higher wages or an end to their funding of genocide, they actively crush our right to protest.

Harvard only wants a form of diversity that maintains the status quo.

It’s also important for us to understand that diversity for diversity’s sake should not be the reason we safeguard affirmative action. The policy’s origin was never a shallow defense of multiculturalism: Affirmative action was an anti-discrimination measure. It was a set of policies designed to reverse hundreds of years of exclusion in education, housing, the job market, and other sectors of society.

Our fight for affirmative action should be reparation for those violently marginalized across U.S history.

Harvard is intimately connected to this country’s legacy of slavery, colonialism, and eugenics, as they detailed in their own report from 2022. The University has failed to take even the most minimal of steps to “reckon” with this history. Already both of the co-chairs of the Legacy of Slavery Memorial Committee and the executive director of the entire Legacy of Slavery Initiative have resigned.

If the University truly wanted to reckon with their legacy of White supremacy, they would end policies that favor generational wealth and legacy status.

If Harvard wanted to actually begin to repair, they would materially support and admit more working-class people, especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous students right down the street.

We know by the University’s actions and inactions they have no intention to implement policies working towards substantive reparation. However, once they finally release the data, the need for such policies will only become more apparent.

In order to fight for that vision of affirmative action, we must unite under a multiethnic, multinational front.

In the SFFA v. Harvard Supreme Court case, we saw first hand the model minority myth used to create rifts between Black and Asian American communities. Divide and conquer is one of the oldest tricks in the oppressor’s toolbox. We can overcome these attempts to sow division by uniting against our common enemy. Instead of misdirecting blame on one another, we need to organize against the system that serves the very few at the expense of the many.

Whether or not Harvard has the spine to release the numbers, best believe, we will not stop fighting to pry open its gates for those who built it.

Prince A. Williams ’25, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a History concentrator in Dudley House and an organizer with the African and African American Resistance Organization (AFRO)