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Why I objected to admission of homeless girl to Harvard
(Note: This entry turns into a discussion of Harvard, liberalism, liberalism as a secularized form of Christianity, the liberal sense of “election,” and why Christianity is the most dangerous religion.)
El Ingles writes:
I felt prompted to ask what exactly was so terrible about Khadijah Williams getting into Harvard. I mean, she sounds like a pretty capable person, and she appears to have got in purely on merit. Am I missing some reference to affirmative action in the article that is more obvious to an American reader?
LA replies:
First, I don’t believe some of what the article said about her achievements. I doubt very much that her grades and scores are on par with other students admitted to Harvard. I don’t doubt that she is capable of doing college work, and is deserving of being admitted to a good college. But the admission to Harvard screams out something dishonest. I think there’s a huge act of affirmative action going on here.
Second, the fact of her being admitted, not by a good school, which would already have been a huge, dramatic leap, but by the best school, transporting her in a single bound from homelessness to Harvard, the secular Olympus of our society, is a flagrant leftist symbol by which homelessness is not only normalized but raised to the highest level. To bring the symbolic lowest, homelessness, into the symbolic highest, Harvard, is a transgressive act.
El Ingles writes:
Yes, I agree with your estimation of what has probably happened. But you are filling in gaps in a manner that may misrepresent the situation. That is your prerogative, of course. We have to make educated guesses in interpreting virtually anything we encounter in the press. but let us at least acknowledge that she may just be very smart. She certainly sounds like an impressive character.
On a lighter note, I simply adored the admissions tutor saying, “We can’t afford to let her go—she could be the next Michelle Obama!” An intellectually mediocre grievance-monger who got into wherever-it-was through affirmative action and wrote a semi-literate graduation thesis affirming her own racial tribalism. It was that, more than anything, that made me think your initial diagnosis of the situation may well be correct …
LA replies:
Doesn’t the admissions person’s comment say it all, as far as Khadijah’s qualifications are concerned? If even the admissions people are making Michelle Obama their gold standard, doesn’t that tell us all we need to know about the standards they employed, and the reasons they had, for admitting Khadijah?
- end of initial entry -
A reader writes:
Khadijah Williams can now take her place among the many white homeless girls Harvard has no doubt also devoted such energy and resources into wooing to its freshman ranks. I believe I saw a recruiter setting up at an Appalachian shanty encampment, as a matter of fact, where a number of gifted white students, sons and daughters of unemployed miners, with tongue-tripping first names that proudly celebrate—and identify them exclusively with—the all-white Gaelic culture of their distant European ancestors (just as “Khadijah” does her African roots) were filling out applications and being streamlined through Harvard’s admissions procedure.
Or not.
James P. writes:
El Ingles writes: “Let us at least acknowledge that she may just be very smart.”
Smarter than the fourteen people who were not accepted to Harvard because she got the slot? Color me very skeptical. We know that the University of California system discriminates against the “dull Asians who study, study, study” in favor of more “interesting” minorities, and it is hard to believe that Harvard does not do likewise.
She might be the next Michelle Obama? By that logic, Harvard should admit nothing else but homeless black females. There are certainly enough homeless black females to fill every slot!
Steven Warshawsky writes:
One of your readers commented on this story: “Khadijah Williams can now take her place among the many white homeless girls Harvard has no doubt also devoted such energy and resources into wooing to its freshman ranks.”
For what it’s worth—admittedly, not very much—Harvard has admitted at least one “homeless” white student. There is a public service ad posted around Manhattan (I forget for which organization) that shows a young white woman’s picture with the caption “From Homeless to Harvard.” I recall seeing her story in People magazine a few years ago. So there are many layers of self-serving political correctness to Harvard’s actions, not merely blatant affirmative action.
LA replies:
“there are many layers of self-serving political correctness to Harvard’s actions…”
“In my father’s house there are many mansions…”
Isn’t it often said that liberalism is secularized Christianity?
[I linked and discussed Mr. Zarkov’s below comment on the main page.]
A. Zarkov writes:
I don’t think the Los Angeles Times realizes a possible implication of Khadijah Williams’ admission to Harvard University. The article tells us that Khadijah exhibited signs of high intelligence at early age, and went on to succeed academically despite the worst kind of environment—in other words, nature overcame nurture. Moreover she lived among people who despise the intellect, yet she instinctively resisted that culture. The Times quotes her:
“I have felt the anger at having to catch up in school … being bullied because they knew I was poor, different, and read too much,” she wrote in her college essays. “I knew that if I wanted to become a smart, successful scholar, I should talk to other smart people.”
How does her experience square with the notion that blacks don’t succeed in school because their environment holds them back, and but for that environment they would perform the same as Asians, whites, and Jews? Of course we know how the multiculturalists would respond. They would tell us that Khadijah would have done even better without racism and an adverse environment.
I’m happy to see Khadijah succeed and I wish her well. However like Lawrence Auster, I’m somewhat suspicious of her qualifications. Note that the Los Angeles Times does not tell us her SAT scores or her ranking on the SAT. You can be sure that if that score or its associated ranking were high, we would know about it. Why hold it back? When it suits their narrative, the Times will certainly trumpet her test scores.
Khadijah was in third grade when she first realized the power of test scores, placing in the 99th percentile on a state exam. Her teachers marked the 9-year-old as gifted, a special category that Khadijah, even at that early age, vowed to keep.
Note the vague term “on a state exam.” I’m left to wonder: what state exam? What kind of reporting allows for such non-specific terminology? I also have to wonder if Khadijah was a National Merit finalist. After all this is Harvard here, the most selective university in the US. I can’t help thinking in the absence of objective data that Khadijah’s admission was mostly about her race and her homeless status.
My daughter had about a total of 1500 on the SAT, and almost a perfect “4.0” at a tough-grading private preparatory school. She had advanced placement in about 10 subjects and took hard courses in high school including chemistry, physics and calculus. She had many other qualifications I won’t go into for reasons of privacy. Nevertheless Harvard rejected her. Harvard rejected all the top performing students at her high school. One and only one student gained entranced to Harvard—a black student. That black student was not even in the top 10% of the graduating class. These top students (including my daughter) did get multiple acceptances to other Ivy League schools.
We know what Harvard is all about: inclusiveness. Of course Harvard does not want to include ideas critical of, or adverse to the reigning campus dogmas, and that’s why Harvard has speech codes. Attending an elite university these days is all about getting a credential, and having a social life. My daughter did get to attend an elite Ivy League college, but I have to say that I was disappointed in the quality of education there. I’m just old fashioned and traditional because I think college is all about the intellect. Our elite schools couldn’t disagree more. In a moment of rare candor the dean told me that—straight to my face.
Leonard D. writes:
You wrote:
“To bring the symbolic lowest, homelessness, into the symbolic highest, Harvard, is a transgressive act.”
“Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” (Matt. 20:30)
“Isn’t it often said that liberalism is secularized Christianity?”
Yes. Harvard was founded to educate Puritan ministers. Its beliefs have changed but not its function.
LA replies:
Indeed you are right. Harvard educates people to be ministers of the liberal religion. This liberal religion is a secularized form of Protestantism consisting of two phases, which for convenience we might call the “Lutheran” and the “Calvinist.”
In the “Lutheran” phase of this religion, it is not liberal “works” that save you, but “faith,” namely sincere affirmation of the liberal pieties. Believing the proper liberal things—that all races have the same abilities, that the sexes have the same abilities, that all cultures can get along swimmingly in the same society, and that the worst thing a person can do is doubt any of these things—makes you a good person, a saved person, with an inexhaustible credit in your moral account, regardless of how you actually behave in your life.
In the “Calvinist” phase of this secularized Protestantism, there is nothing you can do or affirm, neither works nor faith, that can save you, since all things, including whether you are saved or not, are predestined. Those who are the liberal elect, the “saints,” are simply the liberal saints, they carry clearly discernible marks in their behavior and manner that reveal their election and sainthood. This sense of election provides the saints with an extraordinary self-confidence, assurance, and sense of superiority, as, with undisguised disdain, they gaze out at the rest of America from their Cambridge-Boston city on a hill. (To get a feel for what I’m talking about, take a walk on Boston’s Beacon Hill and you will feel that sense of spiritual election and disdain embedded in the very stones of those 17th and 18th century houses.)
Gintas writes:
Mr. Zarkov writes:
My daughter had about a total of 1500 on the SAT, and almost a perfect “4.0” at a tough-grading private preparatory school. She had advanced placement in about 10 subjects and took hard courses in high school including chemistry, physics and calculus. She had many other qualifications I won’t go into for reasons of privacy. Nevertheless Harvard rejected her. Harvard rejected all the top performing students at her high school. One and only one student gained entranced to Harvard—a black student. That black student was not even in the top 10% of the graduating class. These top students (including my daughter) did get multiple acceptances to other Ivy League schools.
This sounds very much like a discussion I had at work. I had made a comment that someone mistakenly took as pro-Harvard (God forbid!), and someone told a tale of some local students, valedictorians at highly-rated private schools, all being rejected by Harvard. I suggested that was a blessing in disguise; if accepted, they’d likely be turned to the Enemy.
LA replies:
See my previous comment!
Leonard D. writes:
I certainly see the traces of Lutheranism you identify in the progressive emphasis on intentions as opposed to consequences, and of course the items of faith themselves, some of which are actually untrue or at best unknown. I don’t sharply see Calvinism in the sense of believing they are elect, and others excluded. (There is some whiff of this around the hush-hush topic of intelligence among the smarter progressives.) I do, however, see Calvinism very strongly in the focus on building a New Jerusalem, that is, the belief of the perfectibility of humanity and human institutions. And maybe a bit of total depravity still there… in human institutions, but not individuals.
LA replies:
I was writing that impressionistically. I wasn’t saying that they have a literal belief in predestination and election, I was using the notion of election to try to capture the quality of their extraordinary self-love and self-esteem, plus their contempt for others not so blessed.
June 26
Leonard replies to LA:
You wrote:
“I was using the notion of election to try to capture the quality of their extraordinary self-love and self-esteem, plus their contempt for others”
Good points; now I see what you were getting at. Smugness is a consequence of belief in one’s own specialness, true of Calvinists of old (chosen by God) and progressives now (self-chosen plusgoodthinkers). And certainly there is nothing wrong with impressionism in this case… we don’t have a science of memeplex analysis.
Progressivism is an ideological construct where I think you might agree that the idea of a meme can be helpful. Why are progressives fanatical about the siblinghood of humankind (and also possibly animals, plants, rocks, etc.)? Is it objectively true, such that humans might believe it on its merits? Clearly not. And I don’t think you can understand it from within their philosophy (such as it is). It’s axiomatic from within. To understand it, you have to go outside of progressivism, and look at where it came from. Then the lineage of the idea is clear: Jesus and John.
Of course, knowing where a progressive idea came from does not explain why it was kept when so much of Christianity was rejected. But it does, at least, offer an explanation for the existence of the idea within progressivism. I think that we must return to meme theory for an understanding of which ideas were kept and which were ejected. There are several ways in which ideas should be expected to be favored and maintained, which are unrelated to their truth. For example, an idea might be inherently appealing to our baser selves, or it might be politically advantageous. In this case, it’s the latter: If you are building a mass political party, then ceterus paribus inclusionary ideas will be favored over exclusionary ideas. [LA notes: that very impressive sounding Latin expression simply means “other things being equal.”]
LA replies:
You wrote:
“To understand it, you have to go outside of progressivism, and look at where it came from. Then the lineage of the idea is clear: Jesus and John.”
Without getting into the subject of memes, I’ll just repeat the truth that liberalism is secularized Christianity. But please understand: secularized Christianity, Christianity without God and Christ, is not Christianity. It is a false, dishonest thing. So don’t attribute the madness of liberalism to Christianity.
However, at the same time, as I have many times said, the Christian scripture very clearly contains the potential for leftist, communist, antinomian, gnostic, society-destroying beliefs. This makes it a dangerous religion, requiring the greatest wisdom on the part of mankind to maintain the balance between the spiritual claims of the religion and the needs of mundane existence. But that dangerous quality of Christianity is an inevitable result of the fact that Christianity is the truest and most highly articulated vision of reality that there is. Because it is so highly articulated, it always contains the potential for disastrous simplifications.
In this regard, Christianity is no different from man himself. Man is the most intelligent living being on earth, far more intelligent than the animals. Yet only man is capable of insane illusions, evil, destructiveness, etc., which animals are not. The very existence of a mind capable of knowing truth implies the constant possibility of believing in falsehoods. Animals never believe in falsehoods.
The higher the being, the more ways there are for it go wrong. By the same token, the higher and truer a religion, the more ways there for it to go wrong.
(That has a Nietzschean ring, doesn’t it? But it is a Nietzschean-type insight used to defend Christianity.)
Leonard D. writes:
“The higher the being, the more ways there are for it go wrong.”
Or: the more complex a thing is, the more likely that removing parts from it will cause a failure of some sort.
LA replies:
Yes. :-)
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 25, 2009 08:15 AM | Send
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