The Case of Harvard: On the Debilitating Coexistence of Three Club Principles and the Fault Lines of the Culture War

By Sebastian Edinger

In the well-known case of Harvard, there is more to see than might appear at first glance and that has been openly discussed yet. The title does not mention Claudine Gay without reason, as she has been pushed too much into the center of a dispute that is really about something far more fundamental. If this were truly only about one person, the matter would hardly be worth mentioning and would be roughly the academic equivalent of reporting on Taylor Swift. What is at stake instead, as I wish to show here, is the fundamental question—highly important also for Western European societies—of how the American educational system ought to be structured, how performance should be assessed, and how it should function as a distributive regulatory mechanism determining power, prestige, and career opportunities. This question does not arise in a vacuum, but in the simultaneous coexistence and conflict of three club principles that have gained immense influence since 1945:

(1) the aristocratic club principle,

(2) the principle of democratic meritocracy or meritocratic club principle, and

(3) the identity‑political principle or DEI club principle.

Without explicit attention to (1) and (2) as central developments in the educational system and society since the 1960s, it is impossible to understand what the Affirmative Action policy, recently struck down by the Supreme Court, was set up against, and to what the counter‑attack is now being mounted through (3). Apart from a few introductory remarks, I will limit myself here mainly to developments after 1945, focus on Harvard, and also take a closer look at the SAT.

Anyone who wants to understand the historical course of this conflict is well advised to read the book Education and Politics at Harvard (1975) by Seymour Martin Lipset and David Riesman, which is not outdated with regard to the decisions that are relevant for the current situation. The book presents the entire trajectory of development from its founding in 1636 by Calvinist Puritans, through religious liberalization over the centuries, up to the meritocratic training ground after 1945. From Harvard’s pre‑1945 history, one episode is worth mentioning here, since it helped shape developments after 1945 and serves as an explicit point of reference in the meritocratic mobilization and closure of the postwar period: Around U.S. President Andrew Jackson (in office 1829–1837) a group formed that became known as the “Jacksonians” (Jacksonianer), who fiercely attacked Harvard’s recruitment practices because they regarded Harvard as an illegitimately elitist institution (in the sense of the aristocratic club principle): “The Jacksonian Democrats on the Board of Overseers and in the legislature increasingly attacked the University as an elitist institution during the 1840s.” (Lipset/Riesman 1975: 73)

Decades of fatal conditioning efforts under the banner of “democratization” have made this passage incomprehensible to today’s readers. How can one attack Harvard as an elitist institution? What else is Harvard supposed to be? A prestigious beacon of the American university landscape that is also accessible to students who are good but not excellent? The key to answering this question is the distinction between an aristocratic and a meritocratic variant of democracy. The Democrats around Jackson attacked, under the slogan “elitist”, the aristocratic version of democracy. In this view, Harvard is then a club that ought to be a university—and would be a university if it selected students strictly meritocratically rather than aristocratically. Put differently: the meritocratic attack on the aristocracy was not an attack on meritocracy in favor of democracy, as “democratization” in the more recent sense (as leveling downward) suggests, but an attack on the prevailing aristocratic club principle, to which the genuinely meritocratic principle was opposed as the genuinely democratic principle. (On the distinction between democratic and aristocratic democracy, see Lipset/Riesman 1975: 289 f.) It is therefore said of the Democrat Bancroft in Lipset/Riesman: “His main complaint about Harvard was that it failed ‘to take students on the basis of merit alone’, that less qualified students were able to enter because they could afford to attend.” (Ibid.: 74)

This distinction between aristocratic and meritocratic selection fundamentally shapes the conflict in the United States to this day. The volume General Education in a Free Society. Report of the Harvard Committee, published in 1946 by Harvard President James Bryant Conant, attempts, under the impression of two world wars, to equip a meritocratic basic position with Humboldtian‑humanist standards. Thus, in explicit contrast to the Jacksonians, the report states: “Our point here is that there is need for a more complete democracy in both these senses not only between student and student but between subject and subject and teacher and teacher.” (Conant 1946: 27) The straightforward translation would be: We need a democratic culture that shapes the entire academic sphere and is humanistically oriented, instead of exhausting itself in a mere performance regime. This is also evident in the concept of intelligence with which the report operates.

Intelligence is not understood here as an independent quantity that distinguishes people regardless of their way of life, but—still influenced by familiarity with the philosophical tradition—is subordinated to the concept of reason: “Intelligence is that leaven of awareness and reflection which, operating upon the native powers of men, raises them from the animal level and makes them truly human. By reason we man, not an activity apart, but rational guidance of all human activity. Thus the fruit of education is intelligence in action.” (Ibid.: 75) There is no trace here of merely translating SAT results into diplomas; intelligence cannot prove itself solely on the basis of academic examinations, but rather enables people, in the medium of the acquisition of education in the proper sense, to become persons, so that these qualities can be made fruitful for society.

That sounds solidly humanistic, but the report also shows that the academic community had long since been seized and permeated by the meritocratic performance principle. The ambivalence becomes especially visible in the fact that intelligence is not interpreted exclusively in a humanistic, i.e. holistic, way, but—under the pressure of the success of intelligence research—is indeed also understood in the test‑psychological sense: “Colleges which reach below the top quarter in I.Q. either have somewhat lower standards or have consciously or unconsciously created new types of courses for the less gifted. Intelligence is thus one ground of differentiation.” (Ibid.: 84) Despite all efforts toward a humanistic understanding of democracy in the face of the Second World War, there was no longer any way around test psychology, and the performance regime, and with it the SAT, in fact embarked on a fulminant triumphal march. The SAT was introduced in 1926, but it was only after 1945 that it was deployed in a highly selective manner. It should be noted that the influence of the College Board, which reorganized itself one year after the report’s publication, only began in the 1950s to permeate the entire educational system and to elevate the SAT to the decisive instrument of selection (cf. Schudson 1972: 61 f.).

First, a quick overview of the SAT results:

Source: https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-rankings

A careful analysis of this triumph of the SAT was presented by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein (both Harvard graduates) in The Bell Curve. Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994). Here the formula is “from 1952 to 1960”, since in this period Harvard’s student selection was fundamentally tightened on the basis of a strict SAT regime: “In eight years, Harvard had been transformed from a school of primarily for the northeastern socioeconomic elite into a school populated by the brightest of the bright, drawn from all over the country.” (Herrnstein/Murray 1994: 30) But what exactly does that mean here in detail?

To further clarify that the club principle continued to survive even after 1945, but was then largely—though, as will still be shown, by no means completely—displaced by the meritocratic performance principle: In 1952, 2 out of 3 applicants to Harvard were admitted, and 90% of applicants whose fathers (at that time almost exclusively) were alumni were admitted. The average verbal SAT score was 583 (out of 800) points. The average SAT score of admitted students at Albion College today is 582. You have never heard of Albion College? Well, neither have I. In 1960, after a radical meritocratic turn, if one wishes to understand the restriction of admissions to a selection from the top 5% of SAT takers in this way, the average verbal SAT score was 678 and the mathematical score 695 (cf. Murray/Herrnstein 1994: 30). – It should not go unmentioned here, in the interest of demythologization, that contrary to the mythologization of mathematical abilities—which is usually accompanied by the assumption that reading and writing at a high level are not extremely (!) rare abilities, whereas mathematics is accessible only to the rarest and most select minds—the top group in the verbal domain is smaller than in the mathematical one. This is still true, even after several revisions of the SAT: In 2022, 8% in the verbal domain reached the top group of 700–800 points, whereas in the mathematical domain it was 10%. In a text from 1989, when the SAT was still substantially more demanding than today, since it has been reformed twice since then in the direction of lowering standards, it even says: “An interesting note is that while 11 percent had math scores over 700, only one percent had verbal scores above 700.” Even though the verbal part is supposed to be so much easier!

Yet what has been mentioned was only the beginning; selection intensified enormously over time. One can indeed speak of a meritocratic transformation of the club principle if one looks at how a small group of universities deliberately absorbed the SAT top group: “Just these ten schools – Harvard, Yale, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Brown, University of California at Berkeley, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Columbia – soaked up 31 percent of the nation’s students who scored in the 700s on the SAT-Verbal. Harvard and Yale alone, enrolling just 2,900 freshmen – roughly 1 out of every 400 freshmen – accounted for 10 percent.” (Herrnstein/Murray 1994: 43) In The Meritocracy Trap (2019), Daniel Markovits, professor at Yale Law School (graduates of Harvard and Yale Law School are clearly overrepresented on the Supreme Court), provides an updated assessment of the situation: The average student at Yale Law School has straight As and scores in the top percentile (99th percentile) on the LSAT, an SAT for lawyers, which, incidentally, is the only university entrance test still recognized by Mensa as an IQ-test equivalent (“The median student at Yale Law School, for example, earned effectively straight As in college […] and scored above the 99th percentile in the LSAT.”, Markovits 2019: 142). More than that: The average student at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford – “The Big Four” – performs better than 95% of all SAT takers, and a quarter of the students at these universities better than 99%. (“The median SAT scores among students at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale now all lie above the 95th percentile, and of the students have SATs above the 99th percentile.”, ibid.: 114)

Yet Markovits (as well as Michael Sandel in The Tyranny of Merit, 2020) is not concerned with a statistical description of the situation, but with a frontal attack on a principle that has run off the rails. Whereas in The Bell Curve the cognitive aspect and the relationship between SAT and IQ in regard to the social stratification of society played the main role, Markovits and Sandel attack the transformation of the meritocratic principle into a new club principle and target the correlation between test results and economic background conditions. Markovits points out, for example, that at the Ivy League universities (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, UPenn, Princeton, Yale), Stanford, the University of Chicago, MIT, and Duke University, more students come from the wealthiest one percent of the population than from the entire lower half of the population. (“More distressingly still, across the Ivy League, the University of Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and Duke, more students come from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the entire bottom half.”; Markovits 2019: 137) Michael Sandel likewise highlights this fact by noting that two‑thirds of students at Ivy League universities come from the top 20 percent of the income scale, and that at Princeton and Yale more students come from the top 1 percent than from the lower‑income half of the entire country. (“Given all this, it is not surprising that more than two-thirds of students at Ivy League schools come from the top 20 percent of the income scale; at Princeton and Yale, more students come from the top 1 percent than from the entire bottom 60 percent of the country.”; Sandel 2020: 10 f.)

Affirmative Action as a program, as well as all more recent diversity initiatives, are responses to the fact that both the aristocratic and the democratic variant of meritocracy have led to the formation of clubs. The link between the two is the high correlation between income and test competence, or more broadly: between income and IQ. The replacement of the aristocratic by the democratic principle leads to a socio‑economic aristocratization by indirect means, above all in the marriage market, and ultimately to a very similar result. I cannot go into the shelf‑filling literature on the relationship between income and IQ here without tearing this text apart, but I will make up for this in later texts. What matters now is to interlock what has been said with the Claudine Gay case.

Claudine Gay does not stand for a break with the club principle but for a third club. At the former elite universities in their present form, three club principles (co‑)exist in parallel:
(1) The old club principle, represented by the so‑called Legacy Admissions (translated in the German edition of Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit as „Vermächtnis-Zulassungen“). – Brace yourself: “43 percent of Harvard’s white students are affiliated with Harvard’s alumni, faculty, or donors.” (Xu 2021: 66)
(2) The meritocratic club principle, which is based on SAT results. (Driven to the extreme, or into a salto mortale, this principle leads to the social model outlined by Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033; Young 1958).
(3) The DEI club principle, which is based on ethnic identity (and deliberately discriminates against whites/Europeans).

Curiously, (3) resembles (1), since both principles are identity‑based in different ways, whereas (2) is radically opposed to both. Where there is no indifference between (2) and (3), there exists a relation of hostility or contempt. The resistance that formed against Claudine Gay is based on the fact that intellectuals conventionally assigned to the Right (Steven Pinker, Amy Wax – those who do not wish to let intellectually third‑rate social‑media heroes, even if they are members of government or Suhrkamp authors, dictate what they should see and how, can learn quite a bit about the situation from the texts linked here), or other publicly influential and therefore distinctly audible figures (e.g. Bill Ackman, and also Christopher Rufo, who is too much of an activist to be able to be recognized as an intellectual), for whom (1) and (2) are at least capable of coexisting, rebel against (3), because they are of the view that (3) stands for the undermining of everything that deserves to be called an elite university (in more radical cases: a university at all). The deplorable state of ignorance on this matter in Germany is reliably and strikingly revealed by the fact that, while people immediately pick up all kinds of waffle that the American campus Left spreads on the so‑called social media and dutifully parrot it in a manner as clueless as it is thoughtless, they are just as unfamiliar with one of the driving forces behind the lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court ruling against Affirmative Action, Kenny Xu, as they are with his worthwhile book titled An Inconvenient Minority. The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy (Xu 2021; one chapter of the book is titled “Harvard is rotting”). (One more note for German readers: The analysis of this case had long since begun on Substack before the plagiarism accusations even became known to a broader public; see Christopher Brunet’s The Curious Case of Claudine Gay from 17.04.2022. One should discover this alternative ecosystem – which of course by no means contains only such things – with its many high‑quality contributions if one does not want to remain dependent on the extreme informational drought represented by the mainstream media.)

To return, by way of rounding off, to strict description: The dispute over Claudine Gay is a dispute about the guidelines according to which a circle of prestigious universities should, in principle, make personnel decisions. The tenor of the personalized arguments runs roughly along the lines of Peter de Quincey’s article It’s Not OK To Be Claudine Gay: Harvard’s President Resigns, which points out that Summers “published more in the year 1987 than Gay has published in her entire life.” The truly decisive text, however—far more important and likely to pre‑shape further debates not only about universities—is Harold Robertson’s groundbreaking, can‑hardly‑be‑overestimated essay Complex systems won’t survive the competence crisis, which addresses the problem of meritocracy both with regard to universities and to the overall architecture of modern societies and has been clicked on millions of times. In it, Robertson shows that the question “Meritocracy – yes or no?” is not a matter of taste or a harmless attitude question, but a question of survival. Matters of taste can be contained in terms of club preferences and can acquire an apparent weight only within comfort zones; in the case of survival questions, this is not possible. The text thus forms the crucial bridge between the meritocratic test regime and the Gay case, because the latter is seen in the eyes of her critics as a prominent symptom of the competence crisis, which is understood as a necessary consequence of the infiltration, hollowing out, and abolition of the test‑based meritocratic regime. That is, Gay became a bogey figure because she symbolically stands for two bogey figures at once: the destruction of meritocracy as a whole and— as the decisive driver and specific reason for this—Affirmative Action.

The right‑wing, conservative, or simply meritocratic rebellion against DEI as the third pillar of recruitment in prestigious professional fields in general goes far beyond the defense of the old club (1), against which DEI (3) is directed. It is no longer an intra‑identity‑political dispute in which a “WASP identity” (1), in an extreme sharpening, faces a diverse identity (3), but a dispute over which selection principles a modern society must follow uncompromisingly in performance‑dependent sectors if it

1. wants to survive, i.e. secure and preserve the central achievements that ensure its continued existence; and

2. wants to develop further, i.e. cultivate its historically grown identity.

The meritocratic argument provokes so much resistance and hostility because some of its most resolute proponents are of the view that the further development and cultivation of the foundations of modern societies involves a conditio sine qua non that is not primarily a matter of cultural tradition, but primarily of maintaining the demographic identity and the demographic bearers of this historically grown identity and cultural tradition, since only they are capable of guaranteeing survival, further development, and cultivation. Since this argument, contrary to the claims of the DEI faction, is only rarely put forward by racists, it does in fact include those who are not Europeans (cf. Murray 2021) but Asians. For a fully developed and successful rebellion of (1) and above all (2), since (2) would be multi-ethnically formed, against (3) would mean that the United States would split along SAT results and that the educational system would undergo performance‑measurement‑based segregation. Confronting one another would be a mainly European‑Asian “SAT upper class” with very few Latinos and even fewer Blacks, and the rest. This battle will probably be fought in the coming years, and the Claudine Gay case could mark a milestone in the formation of the front lines and the struggle.

References:

Conant, James Bryant (1946): General Education in a Free Society. Report of the Harvard Committee. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Herrnstein, Richard J./Murray, Charles (1994): The Bell Curve. Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: The Free Press.

Lipset, Seymour Martin/Riesman, David (1975): Education and Politics at Harvard. Two Essays Prepared for The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Markovits, Daniel (2019): The Meritocracy Trap. New York: Penguin Press.

Murray, Charles (2021): Facing Reality. Two Truths about Race in America. London, New York: Encounter.

Sandel, Michael S. (2020): The Tyranny of Merit. What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Schudson, Michael (1972): Organizing the ‚Meritocracy‘. A History of the College Entrance Examination Board. In: Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 42, No. 1, February 1972.

Young, Michael (1958): The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870 – 2033. An Essay on Education and Equality. Bristol: Penguin Books.

Xu, Kenny (2021): An Inconvenient Minority. The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy. New York: Diversion.