Discriminating Against MIDDLE-CLASS ETHNIC AMERICANS - at the country's elite colleges

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 1999 by A. Kenneth Ciongoli

Three-quarters of Americans are underrepresented in the demographic breakdown of the student bodies of the nation's elite universities.

Some groups of the American population are severely underrepresented in the student bodies and faculties of the nation's elite universities. This hardly is news. That fact has been heard from the colleges themselves and aggrieved segments of the population for three decades. You might be surprised to learn that, if you are part of the American middle class, it is your group that has been the most underrepresented at Harvard University and its collegiate kin for the last 30 years.

Articles by Jonathan Tilove of the Newhouse News Service, syndicated columnist Patrick Buchanan, and California political activist Ronald Unz have all pointed out that America's white, mostly Christian, middle class has proportionately far less admissions to the Ivy League and comparable schools than any other section of the populace. Tilove, in his special report on "Race in America," points out that the subject is touchy and until now undebated in spite of its three-decade history. The applicable questions are: Does it matter; how did it happen; and what are the remedies?

Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, in his book, The American Business Aristocracy, indicated that 50% of the Secretaries of State from the beginning of the Republic through the 20th century have been graduates of one school--Harvard. The Business Week 1000, an annual compilation of America's top 1,000 CEOs, routinely demonstrates that about 100 of these executives are Harvard graduates, approximately 80 are from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and Finance, and 50% of the total are from just 10 elite universities. When you perform the math and discover that half the country's business leaders come from less than 0.5% of the nation's colleges, it matters. Similarly, presidential cabinets, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the judiciary as a whole are disproportionately replete with graduates of choice universities.

Buchanan believes that the current student body composition counts politically and that administrations dominated by ideological liberals understand this. He contends that the search for campus diversity has extended only to those groups that are traditionally liberal--i.e., Ivy League student bodies are about 50% Asian and Jewish, while these groups represent a mere four percent of the population. With eight percent blacks, seven percent nonwhite Hispanics, and one percent Native Americans added in, Buchanan charges, more than 65% of the available seats are occupied by about 20% of America's most politically liberal groups. Buchanan has adopted one of liberals' favorite weapons-quotas--and demanded proportional admissions for all Americans, laying claim to no less than 75% of the seats for the three-quarters of those he maintains constitute its more conservative middle class. In a testy retort, former New York Mayor Ed Koch countercharged anti-Semitism, demonstrating the lightning that this issue can generate.

Most people have little understanding of the extant rules of the college admissions process or the history of how the current dilemma evolved. In the early 1970s, Alan Bakke--a white, middle-class Euro-American applicant--was rejected for admission to the University of California-Davis Medical School. He subsequently discovered that he substantially exceeded every minority applicant who had been accepted in the objective merit criteria used in the admissions process. Bakke sued the school and declared that he was unjustly discriminated against by an arbitrary and unconstitutional affirmative action admissions policy already almost 10 years old. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that he should be admitted. Justice Lewis Powell, who cast the deciding vote in favor of Bakke's admission, argued that, while race could be a "plus factor" in the admissions criteria to enhance student body diversity, each applicant had to be considered against the entire pool and the race factor could not be decisive when an equally qualified applicant from another group could promote more educational pluralism. In his brief, Powell specifically identified Italian-Americans as the example of another group with cultural legitimacy.

For the many critics of the affirmative action policies that resulted from the Bakke decision, therein lies the rub. They charge that entrenched academic elites discovered they would not achieve their version of diversity if they adhered to the letter of Powell's deciding opinion. These elites expeditiously melded the heretofore diverse Euro-American middle class that had emerged from the post-World War II era and regarded this segment as a unified entity, commingling them with the old Protestant aristocracy.

In the zero sum game of college admissions, this lumping together positioned the middle class as those who would be set aside to accommodate academia's preferred diversity groups. Opponents argue that elite administrators turned a blind eye toward two of Powell's seminal dictates--equal credentials and the value and validity of residual cultural differences in the still diverse Euro-American community--to achieve their goals.