Most regular decision undergraduate applicants to Ivy League schools learned their fate last week: accept, reject, or waitlist. Record numbers of applicants applied. I graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Science degree in 2007 and Harvard University with a master’s degree in public administration in 2016. I am very proud of and grateful for my education. It was transformative. However, I fear the Ivy League is reverting to its more discriminatory past. It has taken on a different form, but there are still strong elements of exclusion and suppression of free speech.
Today’s 2018 Ivy League has engaged in intellectual McCarthyism, and it can be shockingly illiberal.
In order to create a free and just society, there must be a vibrant competition of ideas, and a marketplace of debate to find the best possible solutions. Yet, I see student-led academic totalitarianism weakening my alma maters. It’s up to the accepted students, the nearly accepted students, and even those left severely disappointed by rejection letters to be the generation of scholars that listens so that they can be the student generation that actually creates change.
Students are the ones largely silencing dissenting voices and there are many examples. Certain Harvard Law students did not want conservative groups to have the ability to post flyers in their common area. Protesters at Brown University stopped NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly from speaking. The chairman of the Cornell Republicans was allegedly assaulted after President Trump’s election despite the Cornell University College Republicans endorsing Gary Johnson for president. Yale students were spit on attending a free-speech event sponsored by the William F. Buckley Program.
The problem is that we so desperately need these students to help find the solutions to society’s problems. Free speech helps to mold and shape those solutions.
Perhaps there is some merit to discussing more integrative platforms. California pushes Left, yet it claims the highest poverty rate of any state. One in five Californians live below the poverty line, one in three of welfare recipients in the country live in California, and the state is home to a significant portion of the nation’s homeless. Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” started in 1964. It redistributed $20 trillion to eradicate poverty in the United States. In 1964, the poverty rate was 14.7 percent. In 2014, 50 years later, it was 14.8 percent. Could it be that capitalism, with all of its baggage, has actually been the vehicle responsible for raising the standard of living in the world?
On the other hand, income inequality soars. The chances of mobility from the bottom deciles of earnings to the top deciles of earners is disappointingly low. The conservative-leaning state governments of Oklahoma and Kansas provide cautionary tales for the blind tax cutting enthusiast. And, Trump is president.
What are the answers? Where are the solutions? That’s the debate that needs to be happening, but it’s the debate that’s not allowed to happen.
This Way Up by American Enterprise Institute attacks poverty and approaches the human dignity deficit through the power of work and purpose. There is reference to research from Brookings that if you graduate high school, get a job, get married, and have children after 21, the chances of living in poverty in any given year are less than 2 percent. That’s worthy of discussion.
The University of Pennsylvania tackled some of these issues with a piece highlighting these so-called bourgeois values, students made it very clear that the 1950s were over. It resulted in the author, professor Amy Wax, standing accused of promoting “toxic racist, sexist, homophobic attitudes on campus.”
The key fixture here is not whether you agree or disagree with Prof. Wax. Rather, the disturbing issue is that the counterpunch came to her not in the form of rational debate, but rather in a cacophony of pejoratives. That’s not substantive discourse.
At face value, it does not necessarily bother me that 84 percent of Harvard’s faculty and 97 percent of Cornell’s faculty donate to Democratic candidates. Universities should be a marketplace for academic talent, not for quotas of any kind. I want the best person teaching the course, doing the research, and writing the literature. This is a student-led educational and community issue.
For example, in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., tragedy, students protested. Depending on your view of involving children in the political process, it could be considered profound civic action. Ivy League schools took notice and directly stated the student protesters would not be penalized in the admission process for exercising their right to a “peaceful and meaningful protest.”
That’s great! What about the students that marched in support of the Second Amendment or those who are now organizing a pro-life walkout? Are these considered the same profound civic actions? Would these students be welcomed into the community and invited to “speak their truth“?
In large part, my education at these institutions was so superb because my assumptions were challenged on a daily basis. I learned incredible things from extraordinary faculty, pushed my intellectual boundaries in every way imaginable, and made long-lasting friendships with talented and passionate individuals. Both sides can learn from one another in order to improve the educational product.
Students enroll in these universities to educate themselves and to improve society in one way or another. They should challenge issues from all angles. No one ideology holds the patent on intelligent solutions. Not one political thought alone can solve the world’s problems. But, the only way to actually solve problems is to be an open recipient to new knowledge, to listen to competing views, and to reflect rationally.
And, that’s is something all students need to accept.
