Straining to engage in her trademark “cruel neutrality,” esteemed blogger Ann Althouse stepped up to defend MSNBC’s Joy Reid and stepped in it, as the idiom goes, in the process. Ann defended Reid, claiming that she never said or implied that she was admitted to Harvard because of affirmative action.
“I think Ramaswamy is distorting (or, less likely, not hearing and understanding),” Ann wrote in part. “…She says she got high grades and test scores in high school, but she wouldn’t have thought to try for Harvard if Harvard hadn’t come out to her small, majority-black town and recruited. She was strongly encouraged to apply. The Supreme Court hasn’t changed the power of schools to recruit in places like hers. Reid never says her scores and grades wouldn’t have been enough if she were not black.”
Uncharacteristically, Althouse didn’t do her homework. In the MSNBC segment, Reid was basically regurgitating her blog post saying the same things, and that was headlined, “I got into Harvard because of affirmative action. Some of my classmates got in for their wealth.”
That argument, implying a false equivalency, is, of course, evading the issue. There is nothing in the Constitution prohibiting favoring the wealthy or discriminating on the basis of class, and no law suit could prevail claiming there was. That’s an ethical issue: affirmative action is a legal one. Harvard has favored the offspring of the rich, powerful and famous for legitimate reasons of undeniable institutional benefit: rich families are why Harvard has the largest endowment on the planet; money is one reason Harvard has been able to excel, and famous names are part of Harvard’s successful marketing plan. Both forms of favoritism benefit the institution in concrete and demonstrable terms; vaguely defined “diversity” does not.
Moreover, when dolts, fools, and demagogues like Reid or Elie Mystal display their intellectual and ethical deficits in the national media, it hurts Harvard, which holds on to its reputation as the most selective and accomplished educational institution in the nation by pointing to the performance of its graduates. Intellectually lazy, illogical, radical, emotion-fueled racist hysterics like Reid and Mystal don’t help the brand. Harvard’s racially discriminatory affirmative action inflicted their hateful, divisive rhetoric on the public discourse. Good job, Harvard!
Reid, meanwhile, whines about how tough Harvard and its community was on her and, presumably, her fellow African-Americans. She writes, “But the minute I arrived at Harvard from my majority-Black little town of Montbello in Denver — the first week or two that I was in class — my presence was questioned by white people. I was in a big conference class where some white students stood up and said, ‘Those students, the Black students, they’re only here because of affirmative action.’ It became a huge argument that we all ended up having.”
To be blunt, I don’t believe her. That statement would have gotten a student kicked out of class and ostracized when I was at Harvard, and it was a far more conservative place then. Reid lies–constantly, routinely. That story doesn’t sound plausible.
Neither does this:
I had never had my academic credentials questioned. I had never had anyone question whether I was intelligent — until I got to Harvard. And it was a defining point of my experience there. It was one of the many reasons I was miserable during my freshman year. I felt completely out of place. People kept telling me, “You shouldn’t be here.” And yet, some of the people I went to school with were far less smart than me or the other Black folks there. They got in because their daddy and their grandaddy went there. I went to school with someone whose name was on one of the buildings, people who are third- and fourth-generation legacies, whose parents pumped money into Harvard to get them in.
Who’s the bigot? Reid presumes that “legacy” admittees are automatically “less smart” than other students. I strongly doubt that Reid hung out with sufficient numbers of legacy admittees whose status was known to her to come to that conclusion. One thing you learn very quickly as a Harvard student is that everyone is smart, and many are smarter than you. Thus levels of relative intelligence never come up, unless a genuine idiot brings them up, and in those rare cases, is quickly humiliated. I can’t imagine anyone saying “You shouldn’t be here,” to Reid or anyone else. If she was, as she claimed, constantly being told that, then she must have been rearing her shoes on the wrong foot and regularly getting lost on her way to class.
I knew several rich students from prominent families, including Mike Wallace’s kids and a Kennedy. None of them walked around with their fingers in their noses, drooling. They seemed as intelligent as anyone else.
Joy felt completely out of place, she says, accusingly; oh, put a sock in it: most students feel out of place at Harvard. I was an exception: I was right at home immediately. I had been wandering around on the campus, using the libraries, going to the football games (I was an usher one year), and watching the theatrical productions most of my life. My home in Arlington, Mass. was a short bus ride from Harvard Square. My parents met at Harvard when she was a secretary and he was a student. Mom was working in Harvard Yard as a dean’s assistant while I was living in a dorm there.
I spent a lot of time taking with white students and “students of color” trying to help them adjust. I knew all of the Hawaiian students in our class, and they had a horrible time. They felt isolated, they were suffering from culture shock, and they were homesick. Every one of them—every single one—took a year off after Freshman year, but they all came back and graduated eventually.
There were a few more blacks than Hawaiians in our class; they looked miserable, and sat together at their own table in the dining hall. I empathized with them: it’s tough being a minority, in a new environment, and one where you feel like you are going to be judged in comparison to a lot of impressive people. But nobody ever assumed that a student at Harvard, regardless of color or ethnicity, wasn’t smart and talented. Everyone knew it would be insane to go there if you weren’t smart and talented. Eventually I got to know one of the black students, and we became friends. I assumed he would be a success, and indeed he was well on his way until he died, suddenly, in his forties.
Reid’s truly fatuous blog post proves to me that Harvard wasted a spot on her, and that in her case, affirmative action kept out someone who might have benefited from the opportunity and used it to reach her full potential as a positive contributor to society. Reid didn’t even use her Harvard education to master critical thought and learn rudimentary ethics.
Ethics Alarms 
Her father was an engineer, and her mother was a college professor. Sounds like potential Harvard material to me.
Nor does she descend from slaves. She and her family are relatively recent arrivals from Nigeria.
I refuse to believe that nobody has ever questioned Joy Reid’s intelligence before she went to Harvard. Every time she opens her mouth she gives somebody good cause to do so.
Ouch. Mark Twain would approve.
jvb
I think that this situation is a mask-off moment for democrats. The reality is that Affirmative Action (and the etymology of that term is interesting, but that’s another post), is a deeply unpopular phenomenon.
The reality is that in order to be admitted to the schools mentioned in the lawsuit, the average Asian student had to score 250 points higher on the SATs than the average black student.
The reality is that the average black student fails once admitted. The black drop out rate was egregious.
This is almost like the Democrat talking point about abortion and babies – They obviously don’t give a rat’s ass about African American success – They set them up for failure and let them flounder the moment they get past the gates, wasting the space that someone could have actually used.
And this all goes to the ultimate lie of progressivism: People. Are. Not. Equal. Some people are taller. Some people have health conditions. Some people are more intelligent. Some people have penises. These things don’t always matter, but depending on the situation, they might, and plugging a middle of the road black person into a slot in elite higher education does nothing except water down their GPA when they get into an institution they can handle.
It doesn’t matter if you can explain their founderation by explaining their life trajectory, it doesn’t matter if they didn’t get the right study groups, it doesn’t matter that they didn’t take the right courses: The excuses for their failures don’t make them any less failures. Harvard does not have training wheels.
The problem, if you want to look at it that way, is the K-12 experience. Nevermind being ill prepared for the Ivy League, America is “educating” a cadre of youth that can barely spell and can’t do basic math without their cell phones. These kids are being ruined long before they make it to the university application, and that’s not higher education’s job to fix.
Well said HT. The K-12 establishment has a choice they can educate or indoctrinate. They can’t do both. Sadly the “educators “of today in many cases don’t know the difference.
Talk about obtuse, Michelle Obama is not happy:
jvb