March 10, 1999
Where are the Baptists at Harvard?
___By Jonathan Tilove
___Religion News Service
___CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (RNS)--While Ivy League schools have made their mark around the rallying cry of diversity, their own enrollment reflects a lack of diversity.
___In short, students at schools like Harvard are far more likely to be Jewish or Asian than to be Southern Baptists, conservative evangelical Christ-ians or Italian-Americans.
___Right now at Harvard, America's most elite school, anestimated 20 percent of undergraduate students are Jewish, and almost the same percentage are Asian. Although Jews and Asians together account for only 5 percent of the United States population, they make up nearly 40 percent of Harvard's enrollment.
TEXAS BAPTIST Olivia Hunt, a junior from San Antonio, heads the Baptist Campus Ministry at Harvard. Her journey from Texas to an Ivy League school is a rarity; she notes that only four out of the 600 students in her graduating class from Winston Churchill High School went to Ivy League schools. (RNS photo by Julia Malakie)
___That's about the same percentage of Harvard students who are non-Jewish whites, a group that makes up more than 70 percent of the U.S. population. Christian whites are far more under-represented at Harvard, relative to their numbers in the general population, than even blacks and Hispanics.
___In rough terms, the combined Jewish and Asian representation in Dartmouth's student body is about 18 percent; at Princeton, about 25 percent; at Duke, Cornell and Brown, somewhere in the 30 percent range; at Yale, about 45 percent; and at Columbia and the Univer-sity of Pennsylvania, about half.
___In each case, non-Jewish whites are equally under-represented at the other end of the spectrum.
___Not all white Christians are underrepresented in the Ivy League. The old white elite--Episcopalians, for example--are bearing up well, abetted a bit by the admissions preference for children of alumni. But it appears that groups like Italian-Americans and Southern Baptists do not fare so well.
___"True diversity would look entirely different than it does today," said Brian Burt, who graduated from Harvard Law School last spring after three years as a lonely Christian conservative activist.
___This hasn't escaped the notice of conservatives like commentator Patrick Buchanan, who wrote in a January column: "Let's make the Ivy Leagues look more like America."
___The stakes are high because Ivy League schools are the gateway to America's power elite. How these schools define diversity will help determine the diversity of that elite.
___Bill Clinton, a poor Baptist boy from Hope, Ark., became president, but only after having his ticket punched at Georgetown, Yale and Oxford. Likewise, there is nothing diverse in the law school backgrounds of the nine justices of the Supreme Court--five Harvards, two Stanfords, a Yale and a Northwestern.
___Yet Harvard's admissions director, Marlyn McGrath Lewis, says she has little patience with complaints about representation.
___"Whatever you are, you feel there are not enough of you," she said. "The Italians are after us. I'm sure the Irish may be too. I'm one. The evangelicals are not ones I think have a bone to pick. They are a growth industry in the country, and that's reflected in what's happening here."
___But more than that, she said, it is a "foolish notion" even to look at the question of college admissions--and the ambition to assemble a class of diverse backgrounds, intellects and talents--through the prism of group representation.
___The constitutional limits placed on college admissions decisions were outlined in the Supreme Court's 1978 Bakke decision. The court agreed that race could be a "plus factor" in admissions decisions, so far as it contributes to the school's diversity.
___But, as Justice Lewis Powell wrote then, "The file of a particular black applicant may be examined for his potential contribution to diversity without the factor of race being decisive when compared, for example, with that of an applicant identified as an Italian-American if the latter is thought to exhibit qualities more likely to promote beneficial educational pluralism."
___According to a UCLA survey of elite schools, the more selective the school, the more affluent the students are and the more liberal they are. They also tend to be less religious and decidedly less likely to be "born-again" Christians.
___In other words, if diversity is what these schools want, they ought to be searching out more Christian conservatives.
___To Queens College sociologist Stephen Steinberg, this is the bind that many defenders of affirmative action find themselves in for resting their case on diversity rather than what he considers the more compelling moral logic of reparations for the history of slavery, Jim Crow and continued discrimination.
___"As soon as you take this argument outside history, you lose. Only history provides the logic and justification for breaking the ordinary rules of admission and access," said Steinberg, the author of "Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy."
___The diversity argument may have seemed more politically and legally palatable but it is ill-prepared to defend itself against the advances of newly "underrepresented" groups staking their own claims to diversity's mantle, he said. "The whole thing begins to look like pork barrel."
___Kamil Redmond, a Harvard junior from Philadelphia who was just elected vice president of the undergraduate council, says she recoils when she hears conservatives on campus describe themselves as Harvard's true minority.
___As a black woman at Harvard, "I find that so disturbing. The appropriation of the term 'minority' is so powerful." Groups like Christian conservatives are only playing at a victimhood they have not earned, she said.
___ Part of the problem may be a reluctance among Southern Baptists, Christian conservatives and Italian-Americans to go far from home for college.
___ Olivia Hunt, a junior from San Antonio who heads the Baptist Campus Ministry at Harvard, said only four of the 600 students in her graduating class from Winston Churchill High School went to Ivy League schools, and few others left Texas. Most folks back home don't understand why her family would want to spend all that money when she could get a good education for less and never have to leave Texas, she said.
___Over-representation is not new in the Ivy League, of course. For most of Harvard's history, the over-represented were white, male and Protestant. In 1870, Harvard's student body included seven Roman Catholics, three Jews and no blacks.
___But now, the combined Jewish and Asian presence on Ivy League campuses has become "just too big to ignore," according to Arthur Hu, a Kirkland, Wash., software engineer and writer who has become a sort of Internet pamphleteer on issues of diversity and representation.
___"This huge sleeping monster, the Christian right, is the most underrepresented group and they don't know it," he said. But, Hu added, it is now only a matter of time until the least represented begin sounding the mantra of diversity.Frontpage / Contents/ Masthead / Why We're Here / Links / Archive / E-mail us/ SUBSCRIBE!