Mediocre

by Ijeoma Oluo

  Lowell went through student rolls from the previous two decades and classified students as J1 (Jewish), J2 (probably Jewish), J3 (maybe Jewish), and “other.” Just as Lowell suspected, he found an alarming rise in the percentage of Jewish students—from 7 percent to 21 percent of the overall student body in just twenty years. Lowell took these numbers to the board of trustees in 1922 in hopes of convincing them to implement a quota system to cap the number of Jewish students admitted.7

  Lowell claimed that he was not antisemitic or racist; he just believed that the increasing number of Jewish students would drive away students who were antisemitic. Lowell explained this rationale to a philosophy professor: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”8

  Once the bigoted white students left, Harvard would obviously lose its appeal to Jewish students, and then who would Harvard have? The few Black students that were being forced to go elsewhere to eat and sleep? Nobody wanted that.

  The Harvard board declined to institute the strict quotas on Jewish enrollment that Lowell wanted. Instead, they changed the admission criteria, opting instead to focus more on things like birthplace and family background. They also looked at subjective qualities: athletic ability and the vague “personality.”9 While Harvard touted these changes as steps to increase diversity, they really gave the school a way to quietly prioritize non-Jewish students by emphasizing traits and criteria, like athleticism, that they assumed Jewish students were less likely to have. They were able to hide bigoted admissions decisions behind a so-called broadening of their enrollment initiatives. (This debate continues today, as similar criteria have been shown to be disadvantageous to Asian American students at Harvard, leading many to believe that Asian American students are being discriminated against in the same way that Jewish students were. But the current debate is complicated by the fact that those criteria are advantageous to Black and Hispanic students, who have been and continue to be severely underrepresented at the college.)

  Lowell’s legacy is still felt today on Harvard’s campus. In a 2019 discussion on whether or not to remove Lowell’s portrait from one of the school’s dining halls, student Richard Yarrow said, “The portrait of A. Lawrence Lowell doesn’t need to be peering down at students in the middle of lunchtime or breakfast. I’m a Jewish student. A. Lawrence Lowell was a notorious anti-Semite. He kept out my grandfather.”10

  It was not just elite universities that were concerned with the impact that increased diversity might have on American colleges and universities. In the age of eugenics (the now widely denounced “science” of improving society through the controlled breeding of people with desired characteristics), many well-off white people were concerned about the effect that regular contact—and even, gasp, intermarriage—with poor people, Black people, Jewish people, and disabled people might have on the aptitude of their future generations.11

  One person who was particularly concerned was Princeton psychology professor Carl Brigham. Brigham’s career started in World War I in the Sanitary Corps, where he worked in the psychological service. Concerned with the overall mental fitness of its soldiers, the US military had Brigham run psychological tests on soldiers to screen for intelligence and mental health. After the war, Brigham joined Princeton and became more heavily involved in the eugenics movement, even sitting on the Eugenics Advisory Council. He used his testing on soldiers to justify his calls for anti-immigration and racial segregation to preserve the intelligence of “European national groups.” In 1923 Brigham published his landmark book, A Study of American Intelligence, in which he warned white society of the dangers of rising racial and ethnic diversity. Brigham’s book was used to justify everything from anti-immigration legislation to forced sterilization of people deemed “unfit” to procreate: “The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro. These are the plain, if somewhat ugly, facts that our study shows. The deterioration of American intelligence is not inevitable, however, if public action can be aroused to prevent it.”12

  The book was highly influential in American society and academia, and shortly after, Brigham was asked by the College Board to help develop a new test to screen college applicants for academic ability: the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT.13

  Brigham’s test was quickly rolled out to high schools and by 1926 was used by many colleges and universities across the country to help them select students most likely to find academic success in their halls. But by 1930, Brigham had rejected his own eugenics-based tests. He’d found some fundamental flaws in his methodology. In particular, he had come to realize that what his tests showed, instead of intelligence, was the test-taker’s ability to speak English, attend good primary schools, and demonstrate a strong familiarity with white culture. He wrote a refutation of his earlier army research in a paper titled “Intelligence Tests of Immigrant Groups” and later denounced the SAT tests that he had based on that research, but by then it was too late.14 The SAT persists as the primary test of student readiness used by colleges and universities throughout the United States.15

  It should come as no surprise, then, given the SAT’s racist origins, that since its inception, poor students, Black students, Hispanic students, and Indigenous students have consistently received scores on the test that are double-digit percentages lower than white students. And that SAT scores have long been recognized as poor indicators of actual college readiness. Given what we know about society’s biases and how the scales are always tilted toward people in power, it was inevitable that a test that so clearly showed favor to wealthier white students would be eagerly adopted by schools seeking ways to keep their percentages of wealthy white students high, and their percentages of poor students and students of color low. In disadvantaging poor students and students of color, and in advantaging white students more for their race than for their actual college aptitude or readiness, the SAT test has always worked as designed.

  COLLEGE FOR EVERYONE

  Higher education would not, as we know, remain the exclusive bastion of rich white men forever. By the late 1800s, the federal government, in its recent expansion across the continent, had acquired (mostly through violence against Indigenous peoples) more land than it knew what to do with. In order to fund economic expansion to go with territorial expansion, Representative Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont proposed a national education scheme. With Morrill’s plan, the federal government would give large pieces of land to states. The states could sell the land under the condition that they would use the proceeds to fund higher education focused around agriculture, engineering, or veterinary sciences. These were not the high-minded liberal-arts studies of wealthy white children. The goal of these new colleges was to provide, say, a layer of “middle management” to the American economy. Across the country, sixty-nine new colleges and universities sprang up to give practical education to middle-class Americans that would prepare them to help drive economic growth in their states. Some of our most highly respected universities (including Cornell University, Purdue University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) are land-grant schools.16

  In 1890, Morrill sponsored a bill to increase funding to land-grant colleges. The bill specified that states would be denied the money for their institutions if they discriminated against African Americans in their admissions. In order to make this provision a little more palatable in the post–Civil War South, states were also given the option of educating Black Americans in separate institutions, provided that funding was “equitably divided” between Black and white institutions. While “equitably divided” was a term vague enough to allow Southern states to give a disproportionate percentage of funds to white schools, the funding did lead to the establishment of sixteen Black land-grant institutions.

  These HBCUs
were denied the needed funding to invest in agriculture and mechanical sciences, the way white land-grant colleges had been able to, so they focused primarily on teaching future educators. The lack of investment in mechanical and scientific programs would hurt the reputations of HBCUs for decades to come and would cut them off from valuable sources of research funding through today.17 And although HBCUs suffered from unequal funding and support in the land-grant program, they still fared better than colleges serving other communities of color. There are only two Hispanic-serving land-grant colleges, and American Indian colleges were denied land-grant status and funding until 1994.18

  Over the next few decades, the US government would significantly increase the funding to land-grant colleges and universities, allowing them not only to serve more students but also to offer broader fields of study. The massive increase in college facilities came at a perfect time, as the United States was about to see unprecedented growth in college attendance. World War II was ending, and the federal government was concerned about the futures of returning soldiers. Expecting unemployment rates of up to 25 percent, the government came up with benefit packages for veterans that would prepare them for employment in the new businesses created by wartime industrial expansion. The GI Bill was a large program of various benefits, all designed to help returning soldiers land on their feet, but one of the most utilized and successful was the education benefit.

  With new facilities and funding, for the first time in US history higher education was now easily attainable for working- and middle-class white men. The GI Bill (and military service in general) hadn’t been made widely available to women yet, and the majority of colleges enrolled few, if any, Black students.

  The increase in well-paid, skilled positions after WWII brought higher wages to workers who were able to get higher educations. A college education quickly became the best path to success for working- and middle-class white men in America. In 1964, fewer than 10 percent of college-aged Black and Hispanic Americans attended college. By 1971, the mostly white men with college degrees were earning 22 percent more than men of the same age who only held a high school diploma.19 This difference was more than worth the cost of what was then still a relatively affordable education. As a college education moved from a luxury to a requirement for millions of Americans looking for financial security, federal and state governments increased their investments in higher education, and the number of colleges and universities across the country grew rapidly, from 1,851 to 3,535 in the forty years between 1950 and 1990.

  But by the 1970s the American establishment’s enthusiasm for higher education had started to dwindle. Why? Maybe because it wasn’t all about white men anymore.

  The benefits of higher education could not be the exclusive privilege of white men forever. As schools integrated under affirmative action programs and funding opportunities opened up to women and people of color, campuses across the country rapidly diversified. Along with that diversification of the student body came demands for diversification in fields of study. The first women’s studies department was established in 1970 at San Diego State University, and other, similar programs began opening shortly thereafter. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, multiracial and multiethnic student coalitions at West Coast schools like San Francisco State University and University of California, Berkeley, held protests and strikes demanding the creation of ethnic studies departments, leading to the first such program in the country at San Francisco State University in 1969.20

  With higher education more widely available, the extreme financial benefits of holding a college degree started to level. There were now more qualified workers than ever before. As women and people of color found that their new degrees offered them great financial benefits that they had previously been denied, white men found that for them, the return on investment of their higher education, although still significant (and still leading to income that was much higher than what women and people of color earned), was not increasing at the same pace.21

  Even though a college education was lifting white men, people of color, and women out of poverty at a reliable rate, the attitude toward higher education began to shift. As white men saw that their degrees no longer put them as far ahead of women and people of color as the degrees once did, they began to question whether a diploma was worth the cost.

  To add insult to injury for white men, suddenly women and people of color were demanding that college courses represent their interests as well. Students began agitating for social and political change on campus. Even white students were coming home filled with new ideas about peace and equality, which caused white parents across the country to think that a degree might not be as good for their children as they had once thought.22

  The growing doubts about the value of a college education were not entirely based on resentment over the rising status of women and people of color. Starting in the 1980s, costs for education rose rapidly. Although a college education in the 1980s and ’90s was more valuable than ever, as employers increasingly insisted on college degrees, the sticker shock of the upfront cost—especially compared to what earlier generations had paid—left many feeling as though college was once again a rich man’s game. But even with the increasing outcry over tuition prices and the seemingly lackluster returns on that investment (cries that came most notably from conservative circles), college enrollment levels kept rising—especially for women and people of color.23

  Riding the wave of economic and educational dissatisfaction in white America, President Ronald Reagan’s administration began to argue that perhaps the government funding of higher education was little more than a drain on revenue to support jobless young people on the taxpayer’s dime. They were, the Reagan administration said, “tax eaters.”24 Like Reagan’s infamous invoking of the “welfare queen,” his rhetoric on higher-education assistance fell in line with his stories about how supposedly undeserving groups were taking advantage of the hardworking American.

  Reagan’s disdain for higher education—especially government funding for higher education—was both political and personal in nature. In his run for governor of California in 1966, Reagan successfully campaigned in part on a pledge to “clean up” UC Berkeley. Outraged at 1960s protests against the Vietnam War, Reagan painted a picture of spoiled hippie kids learning to be ungrateful while living on taxpayer money. Once elected governor, Reagan had UC president Clark Kerr fired, violently cracked down on student protests (in 1969, the police response to one such protest—at the People’s Park in Berkeley—left one student dead and dozens of students wounded), and immediately began undermining the UC system’s programs to keep college financially attainable to any student who wished to attend.25

  Having practiced on the University of California system, Reagan, once he became president of the United States, took his educational reforms national. He passed sweeping tax and spending cuts that slashed funding for students, making college more expensive and inaccessible to those who needed it the most. Due to the racial economic disparities in America, students of color were often more likely to need the financial assistance and educational programs that the US government had previously funded and were therefore some of the most greatly impacted by Reagan’s funding cuts. But at a time when middle- and working-class white America was dissatisfied with slower economic growth and increased competition at home (from women workers and workers of color) and abroad (from the rise in foreign manufacturing), Reagan was not punished politically for cutting the feet out from under underprivileged students. He was rewarded with reelection and the highest approval ratings since Franklin Roosevelt.26

  THEY’LL TEACH YOU TO HATE AMERICA

  We’ll take $200,000 of your money; in exchange, we’ll train your children to hate our country.… We’ll make them unemployable by teaching them courses in zombie studies, underwater basket weaving and, my personal favorite, tree climbing.

  —Donald Trump Jr.27

  In July 2017 the Pew Research Center found that
a whopping 58 percent of Republicans and right-leaning Independents thought that colleges and universities were having a negative impact on our country. That number had increased from 37 percent in just two years. “Why does a kid go to a major university these days? A lot of Republicans would say they go there to get brainwashed and learn how to become activists and basically go out in the world and cause trouble,” Trump supporter Frank Antenori explained to the Chicago Tribune. More right-leaning Americans appear to agree with Antenori every day. While the majority of parents in America know that their kids must attend college to have a chance at a financially secure future, the university is no longer a place that many conservative white families look forward to sending their kids.28

  In March 2019, President Trump proposed an $8.5 billion cut—an astounding 12 percent—to our nation’s overall education budget. On the chopping block were after-school programs, funding for textbooks and school counselors, teacher-development programs, college work-study programs, college-preparation programs for disadvantaged youth, some federal student-aid programs, and subsidy programs that delay the accrual of interest on student loans while recipients remain in school.29 In addition, Trump proposed lower limits on student loans with the justification that it would force colleges and universities to lower costs.30 Juxtaposed against the massive budget cuts were enormous increases in private-school vouchers, high school vocational programs, and funding for trade schools, community colleges, and apprenticeship programs.31 These changes are unlikely to get past a Democratic House, and his previous attempts at gutting higher education were so drastic that they were unable to get past a Republican House either. But chances are, he’ll keep trying.

  Trump has not been the only Republican determined to undermine the American higher-education system, and this trend will likely continue long after Trump leaves political life. “Wasteful,” “greedy,” “elite” colleges have been a target of Republican politicians and officials since the Reagan years. Tuition had long risen faster than inflation, and the returns on that increased spending seemed to be decreasing. For the working-class white male who missed the days when a man could get a good-paying job at a factory with no need for a college degree, a politician willing to blame it all on a liberal college system getting rich off taxpayer money so that it could turn your children into hippies and position women and people of color above you was almost guaranteed to gain conservative support.