A Balance of the Maps

GREAT FALLS, Mont.—The ostensible reason for affirmative action at Harvard has always been two-fold: 1) to put on a more even playing field individuals in disadvantaged conditions who have lots of potential and 2) to enrich the Harvard community by bringing together different cultures, which are best embodied in categories of race. The first element of affirmative action has been hashed out by ideologues for decades, and has remained essentially the same for the last 30 years or so. But the second element, which asks which people should be incorporated and to what benefit of the whole community, has gone unchallenged. Many Harvard students have grumbled that it makes more sense to implement affirmative action along socio-economic lines. They argue that there are a great number of mid- and high-income blacks who would receive a race benefit above a more “disadvantaged” white. True enough. But the element of adding to diversity is a more elaborate one, and one where ethnicity does not always apply.

In the case of one Harvard applicant I met while on vacation in Montana, trying to impose the affirmative action model is absurd. I arrive at our meeting wearing a herringbone grey jacket from Brooks Brothers and accompanying dress slacks (Harvard taking its toll?) and he in a flannel jacket, a Wrangler button-clasp shirt and tight boot-cut jeans. The applicant comes from a ranch in the outlying area; his family raises Angus steers, and we talk for a little while about mad cow disease, about which he is extremely well-informed. Even with the mad cow scourge (which is really more of a whimper, he tells me), livestock sales shouldn’t decline much. (At this point, he holds a can of Copenhagen my way; I wave it off, while he takes a dip.) He’s a guy who certainly deserves to get into Harvard on his various merits—a student leader in Future Farmers of America, good GPA, rather high SATs, and an amazing conversational knowledge of everything I’d brought up in our chat.

Yet he is white and his parents are rather wealthy. He’s not known “hardship,” in economic and (so far) cultural terms, but he’s a candidate whose admission would not only bring him into a system which lacks people like him (only 2.1 percent of the Class of 2007 hail from the Rocky Mountain states), benefiting him, but it would make Harvard mirror the real world.

If Fox’s banal “The Simple Life” has contributed anything to society, it’s making clear in a blunt way that a cultural divide exists between East Coast types and the “simple” folks of the West, Appalachia, Deep South and so on.

Even apart from the images of the Rocky Mountain states which are likely to alienate East Coast dwellers—those of bumpkin right-wingers who are to the right of Barry Goldwater—it is undeniable that the vast majority of people here do not share a culture with the East Coast. My own freelanced education was something grossly different than a St. Albans one—characterized by reading books outside of the classroom and dabbling in local politics. Other Montanans who didn’t have the luxury of living in “the city” (the metropolis of Great Falls, Montana’s second-largest “city,” is about 50,000 people large) experienced even rougher hands-on education: taking time off of school to sit in a combine, a harvester machine as large as a monster truck.

Attending a school obsessed with diversity, it’s odd that Harvard officially denies giving an advantage based on geography. Geographical location, in the case of under-represented sections of the country like the South and Rocky Mountain states, is a good indicator of cultural differences—as much so as ethnicity.

It is implausible to argue that the typical suburb of Chicago is radically different from one of Philadelphia’s suburbs, and that someone should be privileged merely by living in the Midwest. Yet growing up in a declining coal town in West Virginia or in rural Alabama necessarily presents high school students with institutional hurdles generally associated with those of the inner city. And while a vast majority might think that students of this pedigree would benefit from umbrella affirmative action programs with diversity as their goal, the appreciable difference between an African American high schooler from Harlem and the average student boarding at St. Paul’s is not ethnic, but socio-economic or geographic.

The typical geographic “disadvantage,” in the lingo of affirmative action, is bald-faced. Montana, for instance, still has about 100 one-room schoolhouses where the educator is a teacher, counselor and principal all-in-one. These schools struggle to meet basic accreditation standards, much less offer “AP courses,” or a full regiment of math and science. And SATs? Pretty much out of the question without a 100-mile drive.

Realistically, Harvard might well admit the aspirant student I met here on his test scores, GPA and leadership roles. Yet his cultural background will not overtly receive the same pluses that await other minorities. Of course, an 18-year-old who has managed to work 80-hour harvest weeks, while doing make-up schoolwork and teaching himself Latin is usually preferable to yet another Stuyvesant grad in the eyes of Harvard admissions. Then again, anyone who has raised himself out of the gang culture of an inner city to get a 1500 SAT score would likely gain admission to Harvard, too. Both applicants would fulfill that goal of affirmative action, benefiting from the diversity Harvard provides and adding to it, but the scenario makes brutally clear that affirmative action’s current incarnation, race-based admissions, is one at least partially incompatible with its goal.

Travis R. Kavulla ’06 is a history concentrator in Mather House. His column appears regularly.