Ending centuries of Harvard bigotry

When Harvard admitted Beverly Garnett Williams in 1847, riots broke out. Students threatened to shut down the college and leave. Richard Newman wrote, “Williams was enrolled in the Hopkins School in Cambridge, a private academy designed to prepare young men for Harvard College.

“Williams excelled at Hopkins. In fact, he was so good in Latin and Greek (particularly irregular verbs), he tutored the other boys, including the son of President Edward Everett of Harvard. Everett’s own field was Greek, and his own specialization was in irregular Greek verbs.”

Williams was 17 when admitted.

He was black.

The arguments against admitting Williams by protesting students and faculty alike were as hollow as today’s protests over pronouns. Everett did not suffer these fools and said, “The admission to Harvard College depends upon examination, and if this boy passes the examinations, he will be admitted, and if the white students choose to withdraw, all the income of this college will be devoted to his education.”

Everett’s presidency ended the next year as he clashed with Harvard’s board. The admission of Williams did not help him. His eulogy for abolitionist and former president John Quincy Adams also was unhelpful.

(Everett was an excellent speaker and was the featured speaker at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg in 1863. He spoke for two hours. Lincoln’s 240-word speech is remembered, which makes the case for brevity.)

Williams died of consumption — tuberculosis — before the school year began. It would be 20 years before Harvard admitted another black man. That came only after a civil war that led to the addition of three constitutional amendments that ended slavery, gave equal rights to people of all races, and allowed former slaves to vote. While Harvard students and graduates bravely fought in the civil war with eight earning the Medal of Honor, the unwillingness of Harvard to erase the color line before the war showed the cowardice in America that necessitated a civil war to abolish slavery.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, we will not need another civil war to end racial discrimination at Harvard and other academic institutions. This is not an exaggeration because the court’s denial of citizenship to black Americans in Dred Scott vs. Sandford led Lincoln to return to politics, which led to secession and the civil war.

AP whined, “A divided Supreme Court on Thursday struck down affirmative action in college admissions, declaring race cannot be a factor and forcing institutions of higher education to look for new ways to achieve diverse student bodies.”

The court told Harvard to quit discriminating against Asian Americans who, like Beverly Garnett Williams, excelled in high school. Their hard work too often is rewarded with a rejection letter while Harvard welcomes far less qualified black applicants.

I cannot imagine the AP encouraging Democrat governors to figure a way around the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which integrated public schools. But that is what AP is doing with Harvard now as 20th century thinking has given way to 21st century ignorance in which not only can Johnny not read but he doesn’t know if he is a boy or a girl.

Harvard has a long history of discrimination, which is peculiar considering it markets itself as the nation’s premier university. Beginning in the 1920s, it limited the number of Jews it would accept as students. Only a century later do Harvard grads and the like admit it.

The victim today is the Asian American. Harvard’s supporters are in denial.

Jerome Karabel wrote, “One central argument that came up again and again in oral arguments is that just as Harvard imposed quotas in the 1920s to limit the number of academically talented Jewish students, it is now imposing quotas to limit the number of academically talented Asian American students.

“The comparison is superficially compelling. A longstanding body of scholarship—by Stephen Steinberg, Marcia Graham Synnott, myself, and others—does in fact establish that Harvard, threatened by an influx of high-achieving Jewish students, did impose quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s, using elusive nonacademic qualities such as character and personality to limit their numbers. And in recent years, Harvard and other elite institutions have faced a surge in applications from Asian Americans with outstanding academic records, and they, too, have often been plagued by lower scores on personality assessments. Over the past decade, the portrayal of Asian Americans as the New Jews has gained traction, appearing everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, from the Atlantic to the Times of London.”

The idea gained traction because Asian Americans really face the same discrimination that Jews faced. Rationalizing racism because the quotas reflect the population is wrong because we have individual rights, not group ones.

The Supreme Court decision was 6-3 and readers can figure out who the three are. Hint: they were all Democrat appointees confirmed by Democrat Senates. The University of North Carolina was a co-defendant.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the decision. He said, “the Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”

He also threw an elbow at reparations, writing, “A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.”

Affirmative action was the reparation in the 1970s because the argument was that ending 100 years of racial discrimination wasn’t enough to make blacks equal to white. That was 50 years ago. Throw the crutch away.

In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, “Simply put, the race-blind admissions stance the Court mandates from this day forward is unmoored from critical real-life circumstances.”

But the court is not moored to nothing but the Constitution. Decades of ignoring the Constitution in cases such as Roe, Obergefell and Kelo have led to the deaths of 60 million babies, forced Christians to accept gay marriage and allowed cities to force owners to sell homes to developers in the name of increasing tax revenues. In the case of Kelo, the development never developed and the town lost the property taxes Kelo and other homeowners had paid annually.

The Constitution has an uncanny power. When you follow it, things go well. When you don’t things go wrong.

And yet, Biden wants to ignore the decision and the Constitution again. He told reporters, “We cannot let this decision be the last word. The court can render a decision but it cannot change what America stands for.”

Maybe Biden can stand in front of the door to the admissions office at Harvard when classes resume.

Glenn Reynolds made another point about the decision.

He wrote, “I want to mark one important point: This ruling represents a drastic retreat in the social position of higher education. Though the ruling itself is not so much the cause as a symptom.

“Media accounts I’ve seen have tended to suggest that the Supreme Court had found that diversity is a compelling interest, sufficient to justify overriding the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination. For example, the Wall Street Journal’s report stated: ‘For 45 years, the Supreme Court has recognized a limited exception to that rule for university admissions, one based on the schools’ academic freedom to assemble classes that support their educational mission. Diversity was a compelling interest, the court had found.’

“But the Supreme Court did not itself find that diversity was a compelling interest. Rather, it deferred to universities’ claims that diversity was a compelling interest.”

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Having the Supreme Court — an entire branch of government — defer to colleges was an enormous power for the higher education industry. But power corrupts and over time that corruption cost colleges that power. That’s just as well because colleges are just as likely to be run by bigots and racists as any other institution.

Beverly Garnett Williams proved that in 1847.