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Who ‘Deserves’ to Go to Harvard
CU123
3717 replies77 threads Senior Member
An opinion piece from the WSJ on a Harvard dean’s speech to graduates.
It’s college graduation season, when high-profile commencement speakers are scrutinized as barometers of academia’s ideological leanings. A speech by Harvard College’s dean this year suggests you learn more when a school bureaucrat articulates the worldview that shapes campus culture than when a celebrity jets in, collects an honorarium and leaves.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-deserves-to-go-to-harvard-11560464201
12 repliesIt’s college graduation season, when high-profile commencement speakers are scrutinized as barometers of academia’s ideological leanings. A speech by Harvard College’s dean this year suggests you learn more when a school bureaucrat articulates the worldview that shapes campus culture than when a celebrity jets in, collects an honorarium and leaves.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-deserves-to-go-to-harvard-11560464201
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Replies to: Who ‘Deserves’ to Go to Harvard
Harvard, a private university that constantly seeks to do more and more of what it does (teaching and research), and expand its reach and power as much as it can, admits - as is its right - about 2,000 students to Harvard College every year in the belief that this is the group best-placed to help Harvard achieve these goals by virtue of each individual’s attributes, which may include brilliance, special talent such as the ability to throw a ball well, your family’s wealth, the state in which you reside, your racial/ethnic background and a thousand other things.
Just because you’re “qualified” to go to Harvard (which means you’d be able to graduate) doesn’t mean you “deserve” to be admitted. If Harvard offered you a spot, you “deserve” it, insofar as the term is applicable. If they didn’t, you don’t (even if Harvard made a mistake and it would have been better for them to have admitted you than someone else who got a spot).
Dean Khurana fully understands this, of course, but can’t say it out loud. It suits him to throw it back on the students and tell them, in effect, to check their privilege, rather than acknowledge his important role in perpetuating a system that anoints ~2,000 kids each year for the purpose of advancing the institutional goals of Harvard. It’s worth noting that even though those goals produce positive effects by increasing human knowledge and promoting teaching, they also benefit Harvard and its stakeholders monetarily and otherwise.
Instead of telling these students that a lot of what they’ve achieved is due to luck and they should be more humble, and leaving it at that, it might have been instructive for Dean Khurana to add that he, and Harvard, are also very fortunate for many reasons, including the ability to pick and choose each year the group of students that will be most useful as tools to make him and Harvard, the richest and most powerful university in the world, even richer and more powerful.
Acceptance to a selective college is not a prize that a kid gets for doing well in high school. Admission to a selective private college is not an inalienable right of every high school graduate who has high grades and high SAT scores.
Everybody deserves to be accepted to Harvard as much as everybody else, because nobody actually "deserves" to go to a private college. Harvard university does not "owe" acceptance to any applicant out there for any reason.
@Riversider Out of interest, why do you use the term "scholars" only for middle class Asian high school graduates? Why don't you consider URM applicants to be "scholars"?
There is certainly “rhyme or reason” to Harvard’s admissions process, which it’s pretty straightforward to determine if you look carefully enough (various people on CC understand it to a greater or lesser degree, for example).
And it didn't help the message when these kids can pick whoever celebrities they feel like inviting and get them to show up for commencement address too.
"Statistically more applicants from Asian applicant pool have stronger academic profiles, higher achievements and average/median stats are much higher."
It shouldn't surprise anyone that it's more than stats and higher achievements. You make this sound hierarchical, when it's holistic. And, includes institutional needs like balancing geo areas and majors.
Is this thread really about Asian Americans?
Gore entered over 50 years ago. Things were different.
Those institutional needs can change over time, as society and the law change, but at any given point in time, Harvard has a view as to which kids will deliver the most advantages for Harvard, and that's who gets in.