Were admission to Harvard based solely on academic merit, Asian-Americans would comprise 43% of the freshman class, while African-Americans would make up less than 1%, according to an internal Harvard report discussed at a trial here Wednesday.” That’s the sobering lede of a Wall Street Journal story by Melissa Korn that ran on October 17, the third day of the trial in Boston in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The school’s admissions program is in the dock, accused of racial discrimination in violation of federal civil rights law.
The case is almost certainly going to the Supreme Court, so you’d expect timely coverage of the lawsuit, including what was in documents Harvard was forced to disclose on June 15. Yet somehow the media, minus the lonely Journal article, failed to report the “less than 1 percent” number (two-thirds of 1 percent, to be exact). Nor, during the four-month run-up to the start of the trial on October 15 and the copious coverage since then, has the number been published anywhere else in the mainstream news media. Not in the New York Times, not in the Washington Post, not on CNN or MSNBC. Other stunning numbers in the same document have also gone virtually unnoticed in the mainstream media’s coverage.
The “less than 1 percent” number happens to be highly newsworthy. It provides a virtually unprecedented window into the inner workings of a leading university’s racial-preference regime, and it dramatizes—more than any other piece of information in the history of racial preferences—how very few black high school graduates are well-qualified academically for colleges as selective as Harvard even after decades of affirmative action. Together with other revelations in the document dump, the number also indicates the need for very large racial preferences if diversity targets are to be met.
Of course, the selective schools that use preferences have long pretended, and to some extent still do (although the pretense has been repeatedly obliterated by various critics), that affirmative action is a matter of modest “tips” or a “plus” to break near-ties among kids of different races who are roughly equal in academic qualifications. But the Harvard documents give the lie to this understanding of affirmative action. Nor is it near-ties that preferences are breaking. Newsworthy? One would think so.
The melancholy fact is that selective colleges care far more about the perception that they are “diverse” and “inclusive” institutions than they do about the minority young people they claim to value. They therefore admit artificially high numbers of unprepared minority students who struggle more than they might at other institutions—what scholars have called the “mismatch” problem. University administrators would rather keep that system in place than face the problem honestly and do something about it—and the mainstream press, minus the Wall Street Journal in this case, is happy to oblige.
