The American Scene
Blacks in the Ivy League
On a plane out of Boston, Massachusetts, some years ago, a smiling, tweedy black in his late thirties introduced himself to me as Assistant Dean Strickland, of the admissions office at Harvard College. He was murdered the other day, and that brought our conversation, and a card he gave me, back to mind. I still had the card in my wallet. I had never taken it out. I now tore it up. "My job," Dean Strickland had told me, "is to persuade black students to come to Harvard." That startled. me. All students in the US hope to persuade Harvard to let them come to it. Only those showing the most glowing promise are encouraged by their secondary school advisers to apply. Of this remarkable handful, only one out of hundreds is accepted. Admission to Harvard guarantees (barring conviction for murder or treason) an unassailable place in our intellectual and, to a lesser but considerable degree, our financial aristocracy. "I will go anywhere," the Assistant Dean of Admissions continued, "if anyone tells me of a bright black kid. This morning I received a note from a high school principal in Detroit about such a prospect. I caught the first plane out. If that kid shows any potential at all, I can get him admitted, I can solve his financial problems, I can get him helped ,through, academically." "You lecture at two or three campuses a week. Afterwards, there is a questionand-answer period. This puts you in a unique position to help me, help black kids, and help Harvard. If any black kid in any of your audiences asks a particularly searching question, or comes up with a particularly sharp argument, give him my card. He cap call me collect and I'll arrange for him to come to see me, or I'll fly out to see him. If that kid shows anything approaching Harvard calibre, he ha § it made." I never used that magic card — that magic carpet — that could transport a youngster selected by race, and race alone, over and above the hopes and. struggles of thousands of others, equally 'deserving as human beings. A policy of making it possible for unlimited numbers of black students to get into Harvard, mainly because they were black, seemed as cruel as its former policy of barring all but a litnited quota of all minorities. Crueller, really.
A distressing number of black students, it has been found, are psychologically and academically unprepared to survive in as demanding an atmosphere as our Ivy League universities. This is squarely the fault of white American indifference in the years before the great reforms of Lyndon Johnson. And of all white America, its academic community was the MC5 inc. ,irznt When, later than labour, later than management. later even than the man on the street, they discovered they were guilty of discrimination, and, indiscriminately opened their doors to blacks, ready or not, they created a mind-blowing torment in these youngsters. Badly prepared, they wae assailed by self-doubt.
Yet our Ivy League schools not simply admitted, but literally drove, hordes of these confused youngsters into a situation that only the most brilliant, best-prepared, best-adjusted of the young of all of America's races could cope with, or benefit from.
The effect on Harvard was typical. So eager were its whites to demonstrate their solidarity with the ghettoes they assumed all blacks came from (despite the many racially-mixed and all-black middleand upper-class communities throughout the nation), Harvard Square was transformed overnight into a Hogarthian nightmare of students costumed in the shreds and tatters they were positive were typical of ghettodwellers. Harvard's blacks sensibly refused to lower their standards to those of Harvard's whites, and to this day continue to be the only bathed and presentable youngsters to be seen on Harvard Souare.
In the classroom, however, matters didn't go as well. It is admirable to beat one's breast moaning mea culpa because of the inferior preparation obtainable at the neglected black secondary schools (or, to be fair, those schools which are so high-risk that experienced teachers are unobtainable), and resolving, in future, to improve them is laudable (one method is to offer combat pay '); but it is sheer sadism to thrust their products into competition with the best prepared young minds in the nation. It is pitting rookies against seasoned sharpshooters. Harvard's whites, selected for their proven competence, were ready; its blacks, selected, with a handful of excep Spectator March 10, 1973 tions, for their blackness, were not. A heartbreakingly large number felt outclassed outside. In their wounded pride and confusion, they withdrew, socially, into ' AfroAmerican ' clubs. Academically, they demanded courses, and degrees, in ' Afrcan Studies' which it was solemnly agreed, only ' insiders ' (those inside black skins) had the gift of understanding. Militants stretched the rules beyond any hitherto permitted point, confident that the administration lacked the courage to penalise them lest it be branded as ' racist.' Few faculty members could-find it in their hearts to fail black students who couldn't make the grade, even knowing that in failing to, or fearing to, they were lowering the standards of America's top institution of higher learning.
For several years this situation festered in silence; but recently Martin Kilson, a professor in the Department of Government at Harvard, and himself a black, made this statement:
One would have thought that unfettered intellectual inquiry has been tattered enough in recent years by the onslaughts of the moralistic . . . who wish to impose their left-wing imperatives on the intellectual process . .
But we now face an equally pernicious blow from black nationalist proponents of the ' insider-outsider' doctrine; the view that persons belonging to an ethnic group possess in trinsically superior intellectual insight into that group . . .
It is pathetic how so many prominent American educators remain quiet in the face of this neo-knownothingism . . . rather than endure the 'tension associated with opposition . . .
It is the black intelligentsia that will suffer most . . . It is an open secret (at Harvard) that black students majoring in Black Studies, do as little academic preparation as possible, because they assume that being black, they have a natural grasp of the subject, that they do not require training in the techniques of sociological, economic and literary analyses. This situation, bad as it is, is compounded by the fact that many white universities, including many superior ones, allow degrees to be granted to such students.
(It occurred to me that an unearned degree granted by Harvard's Department of Black Studies is a trifle compared to one granted by its Department of Surgery.) There are few Dr Kilsons on American campuses. Most, I sorrowfully report, think like the illustrious Harvard faculty ' name ', a famed and amusing fringe-figure in liberal politics, who, a year ago, was suggested as a possible opponent to Massachusetts's Republican (and the nation's only black) senator, Edward Brooke.
The professor replied that he didn't feel he had more than an outside chance against Senator Brooke, but even if he had, he wouldn't run because he didn't want to be known as the man who defeated our only. black senator.
That reply sums up the muddle of breastbeating sanctimoniousness and bone-marrow racism which makes it more difficult for a black to achieve equality today at Harvard than in Alabama. Only when our liberals no longer patronise other Americans because of their race will a man's blackness no longer deprive him of the chance of competing, on equal terms, for public office with Harvard's white professors, or his children on equal terms with Harvard's white students.
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