Admissions Can’t Be a Dirty Word

To fight for diversity on campus, we students have to talk about admissions.

Behind every movement lies discourse. Only by the free exchange of ideas can we diagnose issues as worthy of action, identify solutions, and convince others to join us.

That’s why the thing that unsettles me most about today’s decision is that admissions remains a dirty word on Harvard’s campus. There exists a politics of politeness that proscribes honest discussion about Harvard College’s admissions practices. This reluctance has long held back reform; now, it could restrain the student response to the fall of affirmative action too.

This hush does not result from a shortage of worthy topics. Harvard College gives significant admissions advantages to legacies, recruited athletes, the children of faculty, and the children of donors, a group that is collectively much whiter and wealthier than the rest of the student body. It holds open a backdoor for the kids of the rich and powerful in the form of the “Z-list.” And it slams the front door in the face of low-income students, with just 4.5 percent of undergraduates coming from the bottom quintile of the income distribution.

In short, admissions at Harvard is perhaps more nakedly unfair than anywhere else in the nation. But, in my experience at least, you’ll hardly hear a word about admissions outside of affirmative action.

Mostly, you’ll just find silence.

This worries me, because if history is any guide, students have an essential role to play in holding the College accountable for reforming admissions practices to uphold diversity.

From the anti-war protests of the 1960s, to the anti-Apartheid campaign of the 1980s, to the divestment campaigns of the 2010s, it is students that drive change on college campuses — and often, from there, in the wider world. And, indeed, my peers have fought the good fight for a racially diverse Harvard.

Why, then, are we keeping mum about everything else wrong with admissions? The short answer is that we’re worried about being impolite.

The essential problem with admissions discourse at Harvard is hidden in plain sight: We are the ones who got in. To talk about admissions is inescapably to talk about our own admission, and the admission of many of the people we love. As a result, criticizing the system feels needlessly indecent, like it questions whether any of us truly belong.

So many of us stay quiet about our admissions hang-ups, or convince ourselves that they aren’t well-founded. “I know so many wonderful people admitted this way,” the logic goes, or “Admissions is arbitrary anyway.”

I can appreciate this instinct to be circumspect. Kindness, respect, and humility matter greatly.

But then I remember getting into Harvard, the first in my family to do anything like this. I remember the chest-emptying, body-shaking sobs from my mom. I remember the way my back crunched when my dad, blind with excitement, crushed me into a bear hug. I remember how my grandmother’s voice broke when she heard that I would attend the famous American university her husband, an immigrant from backwater Sicily, had always revered but would not live to see me enter. It was the raw, impolite joy of a family achieving a dream.

These best of memories linger like ghosts when I think about all the people for whom Harvard is unjustly put out of reach. They are what makes my blood boil when peers have dissuaded me from talking about admissions (“I just think it’s better not to say anything,” or “I think that makes people uncomfortable”).

The College’s admissions practices deny life-changing opportunities to the low-income people who have historically had them least and needed them most. Unless Harvard responds decisively to today’s decision, they could again do that for people of color.

A response that maintains or improves diversity on campus fundamentally requires cutting admissions preferences that benefit the white and wealthy. Cognizant of those touchy tradeoffs, we keep quiet about admissions, leaving an unfair status quo unquestioned.

If we are to defend diversity, admissions cannot remain a dirty word at Harvard.

To those who want to see admissions reform, I encourage you to express your views honestly and openly. More often than not, speaking with candor, kindness, and respect — no hating on rich kids or legacies, no singling out “undeserving” individuals — will not arouse bad feelings. Sometimes a little impropriety is worth it, but you must try your utmost to approach these conversations with a maximum of care.

Of course, these criticisms will occasionally feel uncomfortable. When that happens, we would do well to remember that the inscrutable, impossible game of tradeoffs that produced our admission says nothing about who we are or what we deserve — at least, not in the broader, real-life sense of our personal worth. With this in mind, we should each resist the urge to dissuade the admissions reformists, strive to engage in good faith, and seriously examine what we believe fair admissions would look like.

When we talk about free speech, it’s the culture wars that leap to mind — conservative self-silencing, groupthink, cancel culture. Awash in this noise, it’s easy to forget that plain old etiquette is often the basic reason our speech is imperfectly free. Difficult conversations require we set aside this politics of politeness and delve to the heart of things.

If we don’t, I fear that when the coming years call us to speak out for diversity on campus, we just won’t have the words.

Tommy Barone ’25, an Editorial Comp Director, is a Social Studies concentrator in Currier House.