Ivy League bias in ideology, admissions: Hugh Hewitt on skewed politics in Harvard's Class of 1978

Twenty-five years after leaving Harvard College, a large slice of the Class of 1978 gathered last week for a reunion. Of the 1,600 members of the class, more than 670 filed a response to a detailed survey on their lives since graduation.

Only one quarter of the respondents regularly attend religious services; 13 and 8 percent declared themselves to be agnostics and atheists, respectively. More than 70 percent earn six figures or greater, but only about a tenth gave more than $10,000 annually to charity.

Fifty-three percent identified themselves as Democrats, 13 percent as Independents and 6 percent as Green. Only 17 percent identified themselves as Republicans and only 22 percent voted for President Bush.

Although the survey did not make this inquiry, I know of only one member of the class of 1978 with military experience. Only one member currently serves in elected office.

The vast amount of the data is interesting only to the subset of America that cares about this or similar universities and colleges. But because elites in the country are drawn disproportionately from the graduates of Harvard and similar institutions, these results present a pretty damning indictment of admissions staffs circa 1978, and raise the question as to whether the bias in such offices has gotten better or worse since then.

While a few liberals may want to argue that high-school applicant credentials are stronger among liberals than conservatives, stronger among Democrats than Republicans, and stronger among the less religious then among the more religious, it is a very safe assumption that academic achievement and potential separate themselves fairly equally across ideology, partisan affiliation and religious belief.

But these stats clearly show an enormous over-representation of liberal-Democratic unchurched admittees in the Harvard class admitted in the spring of 1974.

The ideological imbalance of the faculties of colleges and universities, as with the reporting, producing and editing staff of elite media, has been obvious and widely acknowledged for more than 20 years. I have always assumed, however, that a great deal of self-selection was at work, with the equally numerous, but more conservative graduates of elite institutions heading off to the worlds of business and the law.

In fact, this small survey of my classmates suggests that systemic bias in the admission of students based on perceived ideology or perceived political affiliation may account for overrepresentation of liberal beliefs across all the professions.

After all, if three out of four admittees to Harvard going in are left-of-center, at least 3 out of 4 graduates hit the job market with left-of-center politics. No wonder elite institutions skew left: The talent mine upon which they draw for new gold has been salted.

Now this is a hard thing to image: Would admissions staffs consciously discriminate against young men and women on the basis of perceived political leanings? Of course, that question doesn't have to be answered, because unconscious bias has long been an accepted tenet of liberal ideology.

Unconscious bias against disfavored minorities is assumed to flaw testing instruments and compensation systems, admissions processes and allegedly merit-driven promotion boards. Glass ceilings and disparate impacts are often explained not as of the results of intentionally discriminating exclusivists, but of deeply ingrained patterns of preferring the privileged and the familiar. This line of thinking needs to be turned to the question of college elites: Is the most disfavored minority a young, evangelical conservative?

Who, after all, administers these systems? In 1974, it was likely to have been a relatively young group of Ivy League graduates deeply impacted by the cultural upheavals of the '60s and by the Vietnam War. It is fairly obvious that whatever talent they brought to the table, it was not mixed with fundamental fairness toward the applicants of 1974 who might have been pro-Nixon during the impeachment spring of 1974, or pro-military in the aftermath of American involvement in Vietnam, or even simply deeply religious or deeply traditional. Because the political climate of the mid-'70s was so tepid, it is also hard to image that a trend swept the class of '78 then or since. The huge vote for Gore in 2000 from my class of 1978 was set in place long ago, and not the result of some political realignment since.

What's done is done, of course, and I can write this as one of the 22 percent of my class that somehow got through the filter of '74 and voted for W. I guess I should track down L. Fred Jewett, the Harvard dean of admissions of that long-ago era, and send him a thank you for not holding my Midwestern roots against me as a kind of marker of latent GOPism. Or perhaps I was just good at camouflage.

Morning John. My son just graduated from a Roman Catholic all male high school in New Jersey. An excellent place. Out of his class, the top twenty boys were outstanding. Among the top five, there were two with perfect 1600's on their SAT's. They had GPA's over 100% (weighted due to honors courses). They were good athletes and they had outstanding extracurriculars, including community service. Only one, the valedictorian, and a Jewish young man as a point of interest, was even wait-listed at Harvard. The whisper at guidance is, these boys are discriminated against because they are Catholic and overwhelmingly white males. But principally because the are Catholic Christians. Now, in my local public school, kids with less credentials have made it into Princeton and Harvard. The bias now is skewing towards the public schools. Of course at my son's school his peers made it into Georgetown, Holy Cross, Boston College, Amherst (outrageously hard to get into nowadays) Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, and Rice to name some. Frankly, I think schools like Rice are going to ultimately topple Harvard from their unique position. Although Harvard will perennially have a certain cache. Like Tiffany, Disney, and
Kleenex, Harvard has incredible branding but the style may outlast the substance. V's wife.

My brother (Harvard '78), was at this reunion and I've emailed this article to him.

He was the guy that flew the Texas flag outside his Elliot House dorm (FDR's old crib) for four years and drove that beatup red pickup truck.

He is credited with introducing Pace Picante Sauce and tortillas to those Eastern dudes and regaling them with fictious tall tales about Texas that they ate up almost as fast as their nachos.

One major downside of his stay at Harvard that I've had to deal with is a picture of him wearing a bowtie and white shoes at some function.

Here is my favorite Hahvahd story, even if it is NOT true. :o)

From http://www.harvard.edu/siteguide/faqs/fable.html:

The Harvard/Stanford Urban Legend

A lady in a faded gingham dress and her husband, dressed in a homespun threadbare suit, stepped off the train in Boston, and walked timidly without an appointment into the Harvard University president's outer office.
The secretary could tell in a moment that such backwoods, country hicks had no business at Harvard and probably didn't even deserve to be in Cambridge. She frowned.
"We want to see the president," the man said softly.
"He'll be busy all day," the secretary snapped.
"We'll wait," the lady replied.
For hours, the secretary ignored them, hoping that the couple would finally become discouraged and go away. They didn't. And the secretary grew frustrated and finally decided to disturb the president, even though it was a chore she always regretted to do. "Maybe if they just saw you for a few minutes, then they would leave. So in exasperation he nodded. Someone of his importance obviously didn't have the time to spend with them, but he detested gingham dresses and homespun suits cluttering up his outer office. The president, stern-faced with dignity, strutted toward the couple.
The lady told him, "We had a son that attended Harvard for one year. He loved Harvard. He was happy here. But about a year ago, he was accidentally killed. My husband and I would like to erect a memorial to him, somewhere on campus."
The president wasn't touched; he was shocked. "Madam," he said gruffy, "We can't put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard and died. If we did, this place would look like a cemetery,"
"Oh, no," the lady explained quickly, "We don't want to erect a statue. We thought we would like to give a building to Harvard." The president rolled his eyes. He glanced at the gingham dress and homespun suit, then exclaimed, "A building! Do you have any earthly idea how much a building costs? We have over seven and a half million dollars in the physical plant at Harvard."
For a moment the lady was silent.
The president was pleased. He could get rid of them now. The lady turned to her husband and said quietly, "Is that all it costs to start a University? Why don't we just start our own?" Her husband nodded. The president's face wilted in confusion and bewilderment. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford walked away, traveling to Palo Alto, California where they established the University that bears their name, a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about.

Back to Harvard/Stanford urban legend page

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Ivy League bias in ideology, admissions...
From http://etc.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Companion/ivy_league.html:

Ivy League
Ivy League is the name generally applied to eight universities (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale) that over the years have had common interests in scholarship as well as in athletics. Stanley Woodward, New York Herald Tribune sports writer, coined the phrase in the early thirties.
In 1936 the undergraduate newspapers of these universities simultaneously ran an editorial advocating the formation of an "Ivy League," but the first move toward this end was not taken until 1945...

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