The Trump administration harbors the warped and unreal view that the only discrimination that persists in American society afflicts white people (because of DEI efforts), girls and women who play interscholastic sports (against transgender athletes), and Jewish students (because of campus protests against the war in Gaza). An array of socioeconomic statistics showing Americans of color continue to be shut out of opportunities for prosperity slap the label “Big Lie” on the administration’s perspective
The prime local example of this distortion is the demands the administration is seeking to impose on Harvard University, including the call for “merit-based admissions” and the closure of its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices. Those demands, in particular, call into question the administration’s logic and whether it conducted even the most superficial research.
Harvard President Alan Garber has done the right thing in courageously rebuffing the administration’s attempt to dictate how the country’s oldest college admits it students, hires its faculty and manages its campus community. The blatant attempt at extortion, withholding $2 billion in federal funding, and threatening to withhold $7 billion more, is a mobster move unworthy of an elected democratic government.
The administration thinks, by sweating Harvard, it is damaging liberal Massachusetts. But much of the threatened funding goes toward biomedical research, which stands to benefit everyone, especially residents of southern states, where health status tends to be lower than the rest of the country. That region is the political base of President Trump and his Republican Party.
Consider then admissions. The administration demands they be “merit based.” Admission to Harvard is not already based on merit? Since when? Harvard is told to “cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Where’s the evidence any such “preferences” exist? Have administration officials not read the Supreme Court’s decision two years ago that unwisely banned the consideration of race in admissions to Harvard and any other college in the country? Harvard’s presumed noncompliance is, as lawyers say, “not in evidence.”
If Harvard is not supposed to consideration an applicant’s sex, is Harvard then supposed to ignore a female applicant’s athletic accomplishments as the school seeks to fill the rosters of its women’s sports teams, whose members the administration is so desperate to protect from transgender athletes?
Then there’s the whole question of what is meant by “merit-based” admissions. Harvard’s admissions officers consider the whole person who is applying, a labor-intensive evaluation that has stood as a model for other selective colleges. Is the administration suggesting Harvard admit students in rank order based on SAT scores? Grades? A combination of both?
The school’s current system combines an applicant’s SAT score, GPA and other factors like recommendations and alumni interviews to produce a rating for each applicant. So many high achieving students apply that Harvard would have go out to the fourth decimal place to admit students in rank order. In other words, it would have to distinguish between students based on 1/10,000th of a point difference between them, even though that slight difference surely does not mean one student is of a higher caliber than another.
In the past, Harvard discriminated against Jewish applicants, imposing quota limits in the early 20th century and adding interviews to the admissions process to screen them out. There is no evidence, however, that such systematic bias of the last century is present in the current one. The antisemitism reported since the Gaza protests mostly involved hostile student-to-student interactions, not administrative acts. Harvard has acknowledged it could have done better to protect Jewish students in those circumstances and has taken steps to do so in the future.
Harvard’s past discrimination against Black applicants is well documented. Founded in 1636, it took more than 200 years before it admitted its first Black undergraduate, in 1847. Richard T. Greener became the first Black graduate in 1870. Black students weren’t allowed to live on campus until the early 1900s.
The long view shows the cumulative effect of the anti-Black discrimination. David Evans, who is Black, served as an admissions officer at Harvard from 1970 until he retired in 2020. During that half century, 6,000 Black undergraduates were admitted. His wife Mercedes Evans once summed up her husband’s career this way: “He has served to admit more Black students to Harvard in 50 years than in the previous 300.”
Those Black students, admitted while Harvard (and other colleges) were allowed to consider race in selecting students, did not lack merit.
The Trump administration has no legitimate basis for demanding Harvard end alleged “preferences” based on race that haven’t existed since the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision.
The administration also demands Harvard “immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies.” It is not clear which DEI programs and policies are targeted.
Harvard College and the school’s graduate and professional schools all have an Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. The home page for the undergraduate office posts this slogan: “A place where everyone can thrive.” Now, what could be wrong with that?
The office has a hotline to receive anonymous reports of unethical or threatening behavior, the kind of behavior involved in the reported acts of antisemitism. The office is also the channel for Title IX complaints that might come from female athletes. Does the administration really want those efforts shuttered?
In these irrational and other overreaching demands, the Trump administration has taken on a formidable adversary with financial resources aplenty and institutional history that predates the United States of America. Fight on, Harvard, all the way to the Supreme Court, if need be.
Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner
