Wooing Minorities

As high school seniors who opened up a thick envelope from Harvard last week begin to consider their various college options, the universities that they have wooed for months on end will now become the wooers.

At many colleges, this period of courtship involves special attention to minority admits, with some schools resorting to separate prefrosh weekends for particular ethnic groups. While we certainly recognize the need for specific minority outreach measures, we remain wary of those prefrosh programs that tend to divide and segregate the student population. We are glad that at Harvard, which prides itself on its inviting and diverse community of students, the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program (UMRP) is able to meet the needs of its minority students and potential matriculants without resorting to such extreme measures.

The UMRP is, at its most basic level, an outreach program catered to students who, “for reasons of history and circumstance might have considered Harvard inaccessible.” Harvard, to some degree, still retains the reputation of being an elite, white, upper-class school—a stigma that belies the true vibrancy and diversity of our student body. The UMRP actively works to redress that misperception by catering to the specific cultural concerns of minority students. Unlike general concerns about social or academic life at Harvard, minority students must often consider issues particular to their racial or ethnic background—fears of prejudice, stereotyping, and cultural isolation.

Those concerns are best addressed by students with shared experiences and cultural backgrounds. Hence the need for personal phone calls from current students or specific pairings at prefrosh weekend; these students can act as both resources and liaisons to the cultural communities on campus. With these measures and additional pamphlets, the UMRP commendably balances its interests in giving students information about and access to various ethnic groups, while neither giving a false impression of our campus nor artificially herding minority students into a separate community, as a separate prefrosh weekend might do.

These weekends, which are used by several of Harvard’s peer institutions, are not only too extreme a measure, but also undermine the ultimate goal of such initiatives. Our endorsement of the UMRP’s efforts stems from the belief that Harvard is strengthened by having a diverse and integrated student body. As such, we object to any program that creates or tacitly endorses divisions within the student body. Separate prefrosh weekends tacitly endorse, if not create, division within the student body and mislead incoming students about the nature of the broader community. They falsely assume that minority students will feel comfortable only in their ethnic communities.

Ultimately, we hope that all of Harvard’s prefrosh—both minorities and non-minorities alike—feel personally welcomed into the Harvard community. As such, we encourage the Admissions Office to continue to invite minority admits into chat rooms, host targeted receptions, and provide community-wide events at Harvard’s inclusive prefrosh weekend. But we also encourage it to provide information about cultural groups to all prospective students, not just to those of the relevant ethnic background, emphasizing the University’s commitment to welcoming all students with enthusiasm.

In an ideal world, the University would be able to act upon that commitment, providing a personal phone call to each and every student, regardless of his or her ethnic background. But recognizing the finite nature of its resources, the University is appropriately focusing its effort on low-yield demographic groups for whom outreach efforts may assuage specific cultural concerns about their future Harvard experiences. Ultimately, the Harvard experience is profoundly shaped by the diversity and personality of our classmates; as such, we applaud the UMRP for making a concerted effort to retain talented and diverse admits in our campus community.