What strange times we live in, where it is, as of a recent Supreme Court ruling, illegal for U.S. universities to use affirmative action to boost racial diversity, but where a professor can lose out on an American job possibility seemingly because he’d questioned the utility of diversity statements in a 2018 podcast. Psychologist Yoel Inbar, a Jewish associate professor at the University of Toronto, wasn’t even saying he opposed racial diversity as a goal—he doesn’t!—but simply questioned whether diversity statements are a helpful way to get there. This got some students at UCLA, where he was up for a partner-hire, upset enough that a letter was written.
The relationship between equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) initiatives and affirmative action is not self-evident. It might all seem like parts of the same thing, but it’s more complicated than that.
Giving an edge to applicants from historically underrepresented and oppressed racial groups, as a way of righting historical wrongs, could be done in simple terms: let people check a box on their applications. Seems simple enough, right? Wrong. The reason that’s not what U.S. colleges had been doing is because they weren’t allowed to do that. What they were permitted to do was foster diversity as a positive goal.
The holistic admissions silliness—the absurd pretense that college admissions committees are assessing applicants as whole people whom they’ve gotten to know personally—is itself the result of earlier U.S. Supreme Court efforts to curtail affirmative action. Basically, universities weren’t allowed to do quota-based preferences but could take race into account in a more complicated—and, I would argue, more troubling—way. There had to be something profound about assembling a student body along whichever artful lines. And there had to be something significant about the lived experience associated with every checked box.
The problem with “holistic” was, in part, that it effectively asked applicants to delve into the most difficult parts of their lives, yet somehow to do so in a polished admissions essay. This led—obviously! how would it not?—to persuasive, heartrending admissions essays written by tutors rich parents hired for their kids. Anyone who thought about these things for a minute would have realized that standardized tests, whatever their biases, are less biased than over-reliance on essays, but it was not chic to think this way.
Anyway, the upshot of this latest court decision is a doubling down on emphasis on admissions essays, which now must speak not only to a generic obstacles overcome narrative, but to race, specifically. The New York Times quotes University of Maryland admissions worker Shannon Gundy as follows.
“‘Right now, students write about their soccer practice, they write about their grandmother dying,’ she said, adding: ‘They don’t write about their trials and tribulations. They don’t write about the challenges that they’ve had to experience.'”
This, explains the NYT, is a way students may “tailor their admissions essays to describe how race had affected their lives.”
Can we just sit with this for a moment? A student who writes a college admissions essay about the death of a loved one has failed to write about “challenges that they’ve had to experience.” This only makes sense in a twisted context wherein “challenges” is a term that exists solely as a euphemism for so is this kid Black or not? Which is, I would think, somewhat dehumanizing for all involved, very much including the Black kid writing about the dead grandparent who was, you know, maybe close with that grandparent, but who is now meant to use their one and only personal statement as, well, a diversity statement. Gosh, why might that pose a problem?
As someone who would be 500 percent fine with U.S. colleges allowing (say) Black and Indigenous students to tick a box and get however many points added, I find all of this massively frustrating. The problem isn’t affirmative action in the abstract, but rather the weird apparatus of workarounds that effectively ask 17-year-olds to write, for perfect strangers, about extremely sensitive, personal topics. (Consider the mixed blessing of getting into medical school thanks in part to a sky-high “adversity score.”) To write essays about their highly idiosyncratic life experiences, but in a way that falls within these generalizable parameters, because suffering only counts if it can be put into a preordained box.
The place of Jews in all this—and the vast majority of American Jews are white for box-checking purposes—is an old story that I will not revisit in full here. In the early 20th century, Harvard and similar didn’t like that Jews were doing well in their admissions processes, so they retooled the assessment in favour of something called character, which was a euphemism for being not so Jewy. Edward Blum, the plaintiff in the U.S. case just now, is Jewish, and has evidently given his Jewish family history some thought.
More think-pieces than I care to link to have been written about Asians as the new Jews where admissions processes and so-called model minority status are concerned. But just as there are Asian-American supporters of affirmative action, so, too, do Jewish-American supporters exist. This isn’t some niche thing, but indeed most American Jews vote Democrat, and that’s the political party that favours the practice. Similarly, there are ‘Jewish’ reasons to be pro-EDI, anti-EDI, or EDI-ambivalent.
What the UCLA story reveals, among other things, is that the diversity statement approach has come to represent caring about the marginalized in its purest form, when what it actually is, as in what this writing genre actually came from, was a workaround from where institutions were not able to just implement diversity based on numbers. It’s understandable that this workaround arose, but we should be asking if it actually helps.
The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @bovymaltz