To the Editor: We Must Challenge Hyper-Selective Admissions

The Supreme Court has just struck a devastating blow against Harvard’s best ideals of diversity and educational inclusion. And The Crimson Editorial Board has responded in just the right way, challenging Harvard to take a long look in the mirror and change all of the policies and practices that violate those ideals. I commend all of the editors’ recommendations and encourage us to go even further.

The hard truth, for all of us who have enjoyed the benefits of a Harvard education, is that Harvard’s exclusive admissions policies have always bolstered white supremacy and economic inequality. This was true in the seventeenth century, when Harvard’s leaders solicited donations for the education of indigenous people but admitted only four to the College, instead likely spending the money on the children of white settlers. It was true in the 1950s, when Harvard stubbornly kept its class sizes small even as the numbers of college students nationwide exploded. And it has been true in recent decades, when Harvard has lavished its enormous wealth on a mostly wealthy student body and equipped those students to pursue even more wealth through careers in banking and consulting. A modicum of racial diversity in Harvard’s student body cannot change the fact that Harvard’s practices exacerbate economic inequality in the United States. And economic inequality inevitably harms the Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color who are concentrated at the bottom of the wealth scale.

The path before us is clear. We can, as the editors suggest, move beyond the narrow framework of diversity and commit to genuine reparation for past and present harms. We can eliminate legacy preferences and other preferences that mostly benefit privileged white people. We can, as President Biden has proposed, extend strong preferences to applicants who have experienced adversity because of race, class, disability, and other factors. We can recruit as energetically from neighborhood high schools in poor communities as we do from prep schools, exam schools, and schools in the wealthiest suburbs.

But to truly address the harm we have caused, we must challenge the practice of hyper-selective admission itself. If Harvard’s wealth is to be a force for equality rather than inequality, we must either expand our student body or create new campuses designed to welcome all. And if we are unwilling to do that, we should encourage our alumni and donors to redirect their support to historically Black colleges and universities and other schools with a proven track record of expanding access to higher education.

Dan McKanan ’89 is the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Divinity School.