Harry V. Jaffa on Uncommon Knowledge This Week

Claremont McKenna Professor emeritus, Harry V. Jaffa, discusses the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and natural law with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution.

You might remember that I submitted some questions via Twitter. I'm informed by Adam D'Luzansky CMC '08 that Peter Robinson asked my question about religion and natural law. I'll have my full thoughts when the entire video segment is out.

Response to a Harvey Mudd Admissions Officer

A response to a Harvey Mudd admissions officer who thankfully wrote in the comments on a post below.

Dear Admissions Officer,

Thank you for your remarks, but here I must protest several of your points, as I concede several of them. If you’ll permit me, I will answer them as I go through your argument.

I thank you for your candor and please note that my criticisms are not meant to hurt the students who have been accepted, but to critically examine the process by which they were selected. I am not alone in having some of these reservations about the current practices, as many Mudd students have come forward with figures of interest. I am not in a position to reveal the sources of the girls who have told me about Mudd promising to waive (or to take a lower level of their SAT IIs), but I noticed that you omitted the point about the college flying women to the campus in the hopes that they’ll fall in love with the place. Does that mean that you admit that this took place?

Unfortunately, you’re exactly right that Mudd is not alone in boosting racial, ethnic, and gender “diversity” – it is almost never political diversity – but I find Mudd’s examples to be the most egregious because its president goes on the road promoting women in science, women in engineering, etc., giving little attention in her public persona to the needs of all Harvey Mudd students.

Left unanswered are the following questions: Why does a science and engineering college need diversity? Is there, a Jewish way of doing science or an Asian way of doing math? To suggest that diversity is a need at a place like Mudd is really offensive to all of us who depend upon the excellent work that Mudd and its graduates produce.

I try to be just as critical when the other colleges favor diversity over merit, as I was when I broke a story earlier this year about how Scripps College only accepts poor blacks and Latinas in its Questbridge program, despite the existence of equally (if not more qualified) Asians and white students. You write about “white males” fitting categories that are of interest to the admissions portfolio, as if that’s relevant or important. Should we care what the color of the students are if they do their best work?

The metrics you cite as indicative of merit are interesting, but ultimately not very revealing. If someone is the first in their family to attend college, why does it need to be Mudd for which they may not be entirely qualified to attend? If someone is the valedictorian of a not so good high school, why should they go to the front of the line over someone who went to a better high school but graduated numerically lower? Surely an admissions officer at Mudd doesn’t confuse inputs – class rank – with the more important outputs – freshmen year GPA and achievement post-college? Obsessing over those inputs might help Mudd climb in the rankings, but doesn’t necessarily mean it will produce the best students.

Stating that everyone who got into Mudd is “qualified” is an irrelevant statistics, especially given that the admissions office sets the line at which point qualified and unqualified meet. Marking some arbitrary cut off point as “qualified” and then accepting by lottery or what have you everyone north of that line doesn’t mean that you didn’t set qualified lower for the group as a whole. The real question is how qualified are the students relative to one another. Even among the best students in America, there is some gradation.

I have my doubts when it comes to any all of the students at any college practicing diversity recruiting and I’m not about to take you word for it if you haven’t provided the data.

But while I have your attention, maybe you can answer a few questions for me about the diversity recruitment that Mudd is currently undergoing. (You wouldn't have to worry about privacy because you could keep the names of the students hidden.)

• Do black, women, or Hispanic students graduate as their percentages would indicate in the top of the class?
• Is the white graduation rate in four years higher than it is for blacks, etc.?
• Is the male graduation rate in four years higher than it is for women?
• What is the average SAT II score broken down by race, gender, and socio-economic status? Does this correlate with GPA?

I have many more questions, but until you can answer them, I’m more interested in seeing the numbers than on lofty statements like the one you have left me here with:

The fact remains, every student who is admitted to Harvey Mudd earned it on their own merit, not because we have some “quota” to fill. If they weren’t qualified to be at Mudd they would not have been admitted. We are not in the business of setting up students to fail just to improve our diversity numbers. If a student doesn’t prove they can cut it here, regardless of their race/ethnicity or gender, they will not be granted admission. Period.

I wish you would release the data so that we could actually examine whether or not that statement were really true.