Harvard admissions should be more meritocratic, Steven A. Pinker, Contributing Opinion Writer, opines:
Thanks to its tax-exempt status, federal funding, and outsize role as a feeder school to the American elite, Harvard is something of a national institution, and its admissions policies have become everyone’s business.
Others argue that holistic admissions are necessary to avoid a class of grinds and drudges. But elite universities should be the last to perpetuate this destructive stereotype. It would be ludicrous if anyone suggested that Harvard pick its graduate students or faculty for their prowess in athletics or music or improv comedy, yet these people are certainly no shallower than our undergraduates.
In any case, the stereotype is false. The psychologists Camilla P. Benbow and David Lubinski have found that precocious adolescents with sky-high SAT scores grew up to excel not only in academia, medicine, business, and technology, but also in literature, drama, art, and music.
Instead of “holistic admissions,” I suggest using a transparent formula that is weighted toward test scores and high school grades, adjusting it by whichever other factors can be publicly justified, such as geographic and socioeconomic diversity, and allowing for human judgment in exceptional cases. (I recognize the arguments for including race, but that has been judged unconstitutional, so the issue is moot.)
Or we could accept that Harvard’s focus on D party patronage makes it a wing of the D party and treat Harvard as a youth party wing of the D party in a skinsuit college.
Instead of “holistic admissions,” I suggest using a transparent formula that is weighted toward test scores and descent from Our Posterity of whom, by whom, and for whom America was established.
“Demography,” as they say, “is destiny.”
The best remedy for Harvard’s travails isn’t a reformation of its admissions procedures, it’s a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb reducing that embarrassment to a smoking crater.
Though I suppose if we must keep it then at minimum we should shut the place down, build a high wall around it, and provide guided tours instructing the public in how rapidly evil can corrupt a seemingly innocuous and respectable institution.
Each tour group could end with free drinks, and a mandatory piss at the entrance.
Just get government money out of the equation. Then it will stand or fall on its own as a private institution. I’m not sure if I should be surprised that Steven Pinker presumes that accepting government largess in one form or another makes Harvard “everybody’s business” but I think many have that view. Thus “everything’s political,” as Perchik puts it in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF.
Jacques Ellul cogently critiques this view in his book THE POLITICAL ILLUSION. He calls politics the idolatry of the 20th century.