Harvard to Embrace an Egalitarian Admissions System

 

Cal-State professor Richard Samuelson has written a brilliant piece for the April 1, 2014 edition of Liberty Law blog.  It begins:

In a move designed to foster diversity and to create a university that “thinks like America,” Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, the President of Harvard University announced yesterday that the school will embrace egalitarian admissions. The school will no longer give priority to students with good grades, high SAT scores, and impressive extra-curricular activities. Such policies have, Dr. Faust acknowledged, created an “elitist” and “inegalitarian” atmosphere at the college. “It is unacceptable in 2014 to be favoring the intelligent over the unlearned, and the energetic over the slothful,” she proclaimed.Starting next year Harvard’s incoming class will have SAT scores ranging from six to sixteen hundred to produce, for the first time, a truly diverse freshman class. The class’ scores will resemble the distribution of scores across the United States.

This mission will extend beyond admissions: “Harvard is now dedicated to fighting ‘thinkism” in all its guises. No longer will Professors grade students based upon how ‘well’ they think or write, or solve math problems or speak French.” Instead, fairness dictates that grades will be assigned by lot–like elections in ancient Athens, the only way to ensure that students who are “better prepared” for college or “better able” to read, write, and think, will not use their time at Harvard to perpetuate their educational and intellectual privilege.

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  1. Tuck Inactive
    Tuck
    @Tuck

    Wow, Harvard’s adopting Common Core!

    • #1
  2. DocJay Inactive
    DocJay
    @DocJay

    They tried this with Obama but that was 4/1/87.

    • #2
  3. Palaeologus Inactive
    Palaeologus
    @Palaeologus

    Like.

    • #3
  4. Mark Coolidge
    Mark
    @GumbyMark

    And that’s not all!  The word is that Harvard is considering yet another daring step to address inequality.  According to US News & World Report, America’s 1,141 universities and colleges have a total endowment of approximately $370 billion.  However, 10 universities (0.9%) have more than 35% of all endowments with Harvard alone accounting for more than 8% of the total!  Harvard’s endowment is so large that it is almost 100 times the size of the average college endowment.  Sources are reporting that Harvard is planning to disband its endowment and distribute all of it to community colleges and trade schools across in the United States.  What a magnanimous gesture!

    Not to be outdone, Harvard’s rival in Cambridge, MA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is launching an initiative under the leadership of Professor Jonathan Gruber, one of the policy experts behind the creation of the Affordable Care Act.  Gruber, who has been adamant in denouncing “winners of the genetic lottery“, has decided to “walk the talk” and recently announced he is voluntarily giving up his tenured position at MIT and that the University has agreed to annually rotate in a new professor selected at random from the Boston phone book.

    • #4
  5. tabula rasa Inactive
    tabula rasa
    @tabularasa

    Way back in the 1950s, C. S. Lewis saw this coming.  In That Hideous Strength (the third volume of his science fiction trilogy), Lewis created a character, a young sociologist, to represent the product of “modern education”:

    “His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely ‘Modern.’  The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by:  and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him.  He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge . . . .” 

    This sounds a lot like the education students can expect at Harvard from now on. }

    • #5
  6. tabula rasa Inactive
    tabula rasa
    @tabularasa

    Back in the 1950s, C. S. Lewis saw all this coming.  In That Hideous Strength, the final volume of his science fiction trilogy, Lewis creates a character, a young sociologist, who represents “modern education”:

    “His education had been neither scientific nor classical–merely ‘Modern.’  The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by:  and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him.  He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge . . . .”

    Sounds like precisely the program Harvard has adopted.

    • #6
  7. flownover Inactive
    flownover
    @flownover

    I sent this to a friend who graduated from MIT and he responded with incredulity, “is that a joke ?” .
    I do like the one at Am Spec about Sebelius and the charges coming from the DOJ.

    • #7
  8. Manfred Arcane Inactive
    Manfred Arcane
    @ManfredArcane

    April Fools, Guys.  (Right?)

    • #8
  9. user_129539 Inactive
    user_129539
    @BrianClendinen

    Tim Groseclose:

    No longer will Professors grade students based upon how ‘well’ they think or write, or solve math problems or speak French.” Instead, fairness dictates that grades will be assigned by lot–like elections in ancient Athens, the only way to ensure that students who are “better prepared” for college or “better able” to read, write, and think, will not use their time at Harvard to perpetuate their educational and intellectual privilege.

    Wait this is a new policy? I thought when you went to Harvard this is what you paid for?

    • #9
  10. user_435274 Coolidge
    user_435274
    @JohnHanson

    I was forgetting this was April Fools day, it actually sounds like something true liberals would believe in.  A Harvard degree would become so much garbage, and everyone would celebrate.

    • #10
  11. profdlp Inactive
    profdlp
    @profdlp

    All of you who fell for it have forgotten:  The high ideals of Liberalism are for OTHER people, not the ones forcing them down the throats of the peons.  They really believe this crap, but will never actually apply it to themselves.  Our betters know best and we should be grateful that they are “helping” us.

    • #11
  12. Marion Evans Inactive
    Marion Evans
    @MarionEvans

    This is from the Onion, right?

    • #12
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