Dissent: Equitable Admissions Are Proportionate

This Editorial Board has often found itself on the right side of history when it comes to college admissions.

We have penned defense after defense of race-conscious admissions. We have written odes to the brilliant diversity of our campus. And we have argued trenchantly for the consistent application of these egalitarian principles to class.

But today, after years spent contending that no barrier thrown up by an unequal world should encumber access to Harvard, the Board has decided that it need not stand by that principle fully when the barrier in question obstructs men. With the uncompromising belief that underrepresentation of one kind in higher education threatens representation of all kinds, we dissent.

To reach its conclusion, the Board relies on the reparative rationale behind our support for race-conscious admissions. The logic goes something like this: Certain groups in America face systemic disadvantage; this disadvantage harms all members of such groups, putting them behind in the college process; colleges, which have important obligations to serve society, ought to account for these disadvantages when making admissions decisions.

Now, we understand our peers’ reluctance to support an admissions boost for men. It feels odd — frustrating, even — to call for colleges to come to their aid when women continue to face so many deep inequalities.

But the proof is in the pudding. At the level of education, America is failing its men — men of color, especially. Yet, even as it recognizes this crisis in male development today, the Board fails to apply its own reparative rationale correctly. With shares of male college achievement in decline for decades, a true reparative rationale would call for selective colleges to adjust for this disadvantage by the well-calibrated application of admissions preferences.

To argue as the Board does today, to disregard the educational disadvantage wrought by America’s male development crisis, to mark a neat asterisk beside it denoting that we need not care about it because it does not emerge from a long, sordid history of social subjugation, is a dangerous game.

Advantage and disadvantage is not some tidy binary that categorizes groups sweepingly as either ahead or behind across all domains. Groups we generally regard as advantaged can and do face important disadvantages, and to act as though their general advantage justifies or erases those particular disadvantages implies an understanding of justice that is bloodlessly zero-sum.

An eye for an eye, as it’s said, leaves the whole world blind. Likewise, an attitude of indifference to inequality in one realm cannot but cultivate indifference to inequalities in other realms.

Instead of absolving selective colleges of their obligation to admit comparable numbers of men and women, we wish that the Editorial Board had consistently applied its reparative admissions rationale to men.

A better universal ethic for college admissions starts with the following, deeply egalitarian axiom: Ability is equally distributed across the population; a child born into one circumstance is just as likely as a child born into any other to possess the potential for qualities sought by Harvard — intelligence, creativity, industriousness, and the like.

It then follows that a perfectly fair society — one in which circumstance does not impede the realization of one’s potential — would see outcomes that are exactly proportionate to its demographics. In such a society, Harvard would be a perfect cross-section of the nation with respect to the elements of one’s background — race and class, geography and gender — that most shape individual outcomes.

Whenever outcomes diverge from this expectation, we believe institutions should do their utmost to correct this distortion.

Colleges can act on this universally reparative ethic by using a catch-all adversity score to adjust for an individual applicant’s disadvantage, as the Biden administration announced it would develop this summer. The fairness, consistency, and honesty of such an approach may make it the most politically and legally tenable avenue to maintaining and expanding campus diversity. (It bears noting: Only an adversity score that captures male academic underperformance — rather than a broader basket of social outcomes where men are more privileged — will ensure proportional representation for men in college.)

So, yes, it feels strange to argue that men need help in college admissions. But we do so with our eyes fixed on the horizon: Holding tightly and consistently to the reparative ethic envisioned by our precedents on admissions is our best hope for realizing a Harvard that is diverse in every way.

Leah R. Baron ’25, a Crimson Editorial Editor, is a Statistics concentrator in Lowell House. Tommy Barone ’25, a Crimson Editorial Comp Director, is a Social Studies concentrator in Currier House.

Dissenting Opinions: Occasionally, The Crimson Editorial Board is divided about the opinion we express in a staff editorial. In these cases, dissenting board members have the opportunity to express their opposition to staff opinion.