{shortcode-d1ddb3b48ebc5906ae2f255aafcdb64c6d0773e9}

Harvard’s commitment to holistic admissions now rings a lot more hollow.

This admissions cycle, Harvard has instructed alumni interviewers to avoid any mention of an applicant’s race, ethnicity, or national origin in their write-ups — lest the evaluation be discarded entirely.

It is forbidden to specifically mention the languages applicants speak, the religions they practice, the racial or ethnic organizations they belong to, and their families’ countries of origin. Alumni may not even write “underrepresented,” “minority,” or “person of color.”

Call it Harvard’s latest experiment in selective hearing, since applicants can write about identity everywhere else on their application: in essays, extracurriculars, or Harvard’s short-answer question that specifically asks about “the life experiences that shaped who you are today.”

Thus, the change doesn’t actually obscure any identity information. Instead, it merely prevents alumni interviewers from writing a compelling review of their applicants.

Imagine this: An application brims with concrete references to experiences — the organizations they lead, the cultures they represent, the languages they speak. But in the interviewer’s report, those details dissolve into abstraction. “Committed to an affinity organization” – which one? “Leads a faith community” — of what religion?

The result is a substantial disadvantage for students whose experiences involve their race, religion, or identity, making their applications read as less cohesive and undermining the reinforcement the interview could provide.

Worse still, the shifty basis of the change suggests that it has everything to do with looming federal inquiries and attacks. In a recent training session for alumni interviewers, associate director of admissions Maeve U. Hoffstot ’17 said the policy was adopted to demonstrate “that we are absolutely complying with the law.”

Sounds necessary — until you note that the Supreme Court held that universities may still consider a student’s discussion of race insofar as it reveals something about the applicant’s character, just not to award points for race itself.

So if the standing policy was legal, what else could the move be but a pre-emptive capitulation to the federal government — one that will be most injurious to disadvantaged applicants.

For many applicants, race, religion, socioeconomic status, and more are not merely background context but central to the life experiences that make them want to come to Harvard and inform what kind of student they would be here. These factors cannot and should not be severed from a student’s application.

But given the headwinds of higher education, the disappointing change isn’t unexpected. Harvard and other universities are moving to inaugurate colorblindness as the standard for discussing race, scrubbing identity with the hope that “intellectual vitality” or “viewpoint diversity” can take its place.

That development has done nothing less than dilute the richness of the Harvard community and dampen the difficult conversations we ought to be having about race on this campus, with little upside besides the vain hope that this will keep the Trump administration off our backs.

Here’s the problem: Compliance will not save this University from an authoritarian administration — it only enables more attacks.

Look no further than Columbia University. Early into Trump’s term, Columbia apparently attempted to appease the administration by cracking down on protests, only to be gutted of $400 million in federal grants and contracts. In the end, it bowed to a settlement: paying over $200 million in ransom, inviting a third-party monitor to watch campus, and endowing the feds with some oversight of admissions and hiring policy.

Compliance didn’t shield Columbia; it put it squarely in Trump’s crosshairs. It won’t spare us either.

Drop the blinders, Harvard. It’s time to let race back into the conversation.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.
Have a suggestion, question, or concern for The Crimson Editorial Board? Click here.