How We Got the Admissions Data Juuust Right

Hello. It’s me, William R. Fitzsimmons ’67, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid. You can tell by my gregarious smile, and by the fact that my body is slowly transubstantiating into the paneled wood behind me as my mortal soul merges into the great spiritual oneness that is Harvard. For I have not left this office in 50 years. Not even to go to the bathroom.

Today, though, I emerge from my long hibernation to run damage control on the admissions data that you all have been so eagerly awaiting.

As you probably have seen, our Black student enrollment has dropped. But not that much.

We have been impacted by the Supreme Court decision. But not that much.

The primary reason I’m drawing any attention to the drop at all is because I just spent nine years and over $27 million telling everyone that this Supreme Court decision was going to destroy me, and I really don’t want to look like a drama queen for no reason, because application readers hate that.

The other reason I need to show that the numbers changed is that Edward J. Blum — who stands over my bed every night breathing loudly and menacingly opening crackly chip bags — is going to serve my head on a platter if he finds out that a single one of those kids was accepted on the basis of demographic race, as opposed to the experience of having a race and overcoming the challenges posed by that race, as described in 200 words or less.

It’s a real pickle, you know? If your Black enrollment drops, The Crimson Editorial Board and Twitter come after you for not having the spine to defy the Supreme Court and defend the honor of reparative diversity and non-rules-based consequentialism. Your Black enrollment stays up, and Ed Blum ditches the chip bags and drags your butt into federal court.

And the part that really gets everyone going is that I’ve been claiming for the past 388 years that affirmative action is unnecessary because everyone who gets in is equally qualified and race is just one tiny factor among a gajillion more important considerations — and at the same time, affirmative action is critical because in its absence the U.S. Senate will become 100 Mitt Romneys. And so now I basically have to decide one way or the other by choosing whether to spin the data so it looks worse or spin the data so it looks better.

I guess you could say that I’m a dialectical thinker who can hold two opposing truths at once, and that I’m excited to bring my pluralistic mindset to a multifaceted college campus like Harvard. And further, that there is something kind of wiggly about the ways I counted up the demographic data this year, and that if you look really closely you may suspect I just picked the percentages based off the lucky numbers on a fortune cookie I ate yesterday.

Anyway, it’s not all doom and Blum. I got some really broadening experiences under my belt crisscrossing the country to boost rural applications, which looks amazing on a resume, and I think that having five short application questions instead of one long one makes me well rounded instead of pointy, which honestly might be a more advantageous route to acceptance these days with the focus in academic departments on interdisciplinary scholarship.

I guess what I want everyone to know is that Harvard is doing everything it can to create a diverse student body, where by diverse we mean really well suited to brochure photoshoots in which a girl in a rainbow hijab laughs next to her Black friend in a wheelchair — as opposed to ideological diversity or other things that photograph less well.

Additionally, making sure we have a representative from each of the 50 states. This is really important to us. Again, our ethos of who deserved to be admitted revolves around top-tier academic achievement and remarkable potential, or, being from South Dakota if we only have a North Dakota so far. I think we can all agree that the leaders of America will be unequipped to plumb the depths of human knowledge if their classmates only represent forty-eight, or even forty-nine, states. Also D.C., and Guam.

So not to worry. The Class of 2028 (as I have said of every class since 2028 BCE) is our most diverse, promising class ever, and that is a great and legal thing. And finally, not that this is necessarily relevant but I just want to put this out there, legacy admissions will be here for as long as I live. And that is a very, very, very, long time.

Yona T. Sperling-Milner, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a sophomore in Cabot House.