Harvard University recently made headlines because its number of Black students has decreased following the U.S. Supreme Court decision that determined Harvard’s affirmative action program had to come to an end. Harvard also made news when it announced that it was returning to standardized testing. More recently: Some of Harvard’s protesting professors have been denied library privileges. And what will be the effect of Donald Trump’s administration’s policies on Harvard?
If a being from outer space — or just someone from another country — based their views of American higher education solely on major news reports, they might conclude that the only schools that exist are Ivy League institutions and a few outliers such as Stanford, Duke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In short, the academic equivalent of the wealthy one percenters in the U.S.
Why is it that whenever some journalist wants to take the pulse of the nation’s higher educational system, they look toward Harvard? Diversity, students with challenges, political currents or apathy: How is that playing out at Harvard? What steps or at least hand-wringing is happening? And if a news outlet needs to interview a pundit in any field from political science to literature, the short list stops at the Ivy League. Whereas, in fact, plenty of eminent, soundbite-worthy experts work elsewhere.
I teach at Montclair State University, a large state school whose enrollment is now more than 24,000. Many of our students are first in their family to attend college. They’re often working one or more jobs to make it through. When our students graduate, they’ve learned useful skills and will do markedly better than they would have without that degree. What they’ve achieved is in some ways more noteworthy than the work of one more Ivy League graduate who has gone into high finance. We read a great deal about the upper-class schools’ attempts to admit those from the ranks of the underrepresented, but they don’t read much about ours.
I have no quarrel per se with what are billed as elite schools, i.e., those with a dramatically low acceptance rate and top-notch research facilities. I also understand that the multimillion-dollar bequests will go to those places rather than to our school. After all, we do receive state funding, though when a school such as Princeton has an endowment equal to that of a small country, it does give one pause.
Such an exalted position also makes a school oblivious to what’s outside the fabled gates, no matter how many scholarships these schools award. During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brown University launched its Healthy Brown initiative. As the university president announced, “Our success maintaining very low infection rates among students, faculty and staff, even as rates increase across the country, gives us the confidence that it is possible to safely increase density on campus.” The success included ample accommodations for quarantine and isolation and “our commitment to single rooms in residence halls and limiting in-person class sizes to 19 students.” Unmentioned was the cost — money that most schools could never raise.
Editorial: How much is tuition really? Your favorite college does not want you to know.
Of course, publicity surrounding the elite schools is part of a larger issue, just as people would rather read about celebrities than those who aren’t. Wealth and power tend to hog center stage and crowd out the supporting cast. The audience buys into that image. Particularly irksome is the behavior of families that mourn when one of their children didn’t get into Harvard, though in fact you can get an excellent education at plenty of other colleges.
But you wouldn’t know it from what’s in the news.
David Galef is a professor of English and the creative writing program director at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
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