The thought experiment posed by l’affaire Kashuv leads me to a more general question. Several commenters on the Harvard board wrote about a certain ideal in a Harvard student. That concept was expansive but it did seem to involve some idea of civic exemplariness and leadership potential. That seemed intuitively correct to me given Harvard’s history and sense of mission as often stated on this board and elsewhere. Kashuv broke that mold just too egregiously.
Chicago has, however, historically had a different educational mission and a different student ideal, one that privileged originality and even eccentricity and that gave the greatest weight of all to intellectual potential, attainment and ambition. Aristotle Schwarz was the poster boy at Chicago, threatened though he has always been by the forces of homogenization. Could one imagine such an ideal - or even such a debate - taking place anywhere but Chicago?
If there is such a thing as a Harvard ideal and such a thing as a Chicago ideal, those ideals overlap both in the qualities of individuals and in the shaping of the respective student bodies. Yet a difference remains. Regardless of where you stand on the matter of this particular rescission, don’t you have to see differing priorities and values at work that might have led to different results?
A past president of Harvard once notoriously declined to change Harvard’s admissions policy because “that would make us no different from the University of Chicago.” Doesn’t the sense linger on that these two great universities do things just a bit differently? Whether that generic difference would have made a difference in this case we can’t know, but the principles in play would not have been precisely the same.