The Harvard University president, vice president, provost, and 15 deans signed an email reaffirming the institution’s commitment to diversity after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action on Thursday.
The Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious admissions policies practiced by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The email states that “diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence” and “to prepare leaders for a complex world, Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience.”
Whatever that means. But what does race have to do with it? Why is race the deciding factor?
I think it would be easy to find a young black person and a young white person who’ve lived very similar lives. Or to find two young white people who’ve led very different lives. Or two young black people who’ve led very different lives. You agree?
And on the subject of “diversity,” I’d say Harvard has a very narrow definition. In 2023, the Harvard Crimson annual survey of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences found that more than 77 percent of surveyed faculty identified as either “very liberal” or “liberal,” while 2.5 percent identified as “conservative” and less than 1 percent as “very conservative.”
Diversity = people of many different colors who all think exactly alike.