Thread by @biblioracle

Upshot of this piece for me is that Harvard is going to Harvard and we should invest much more time and resources into the schools the non-rich are already attending.

https://twitter.com/jaycaspiankang/status/1486795586401566721

Elite institutions are never going to be a gateway to economic mobility. For one, they admit mostly rich people. Two, there aren't that many slots. Ohio St. is about the same size as the Ivy League in terms of # of undergraduate students.

As @jaycaspiankang's piece shows, Harvard is in the business of perpetuating an elite status quo. He calls their approach to diversity "flimsy" which is exactly right. It will never be anything but because if Harvard lets in a different class of people, it's not Harvard.

Consider the freak out at Yale when minority students tried to assert themselves in the great Halloween costume controversy. Consider the campaign against viewing microgressions as aggressions spearheaded by faculty at elite institutions.

Elite institutions have no genuine desire to be actually diverse. You are allowed in if you will adhere to the status quo, and because there's lots of benefits to folks once you're allowed in, that's what lots of people do.

As @jaycaspiankang points out "the browning" of elite schools is better than the alternative, but it's ridiculous to believe that any meaningful progress towards a diverse space has been achieved. Diversity is decidedly not the goal.

The dude bringing the suit against Harvard sucks and is doing real harm, and if he wins, it'll have all kinds of terrible implications around academic freedom, but I'm with @jaycaspiankang that we shouldn't pretend that Harvard doesn't have some dirty hands on this.

I hope Harvard wins the legal case, but that the process is useful in continuing to reveal the utter bankruptcy of these allegedly meritocratic institutions and it helps folks see that there's a better way to organize our system of higher ed 👇beltpublishing.com/products/susta…