As the Supreme Court grapples with the question of how much diversity is enough—while it determines the fate of Fisher v. Texas, the lawsuit challenging race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas at Austin—I find myself reflecting on my own life. I think of my father, Ted Gup, who, in 1943, was admitted to Harvard University. Some weeks before his arrival, he received a letter from the college asking him if he would be comfortable with a “dark-skinned” roommate.
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As the Supreme Court grapples with the question of how much diversity is enough—while it determines the fate of Fisher v. Texas, the lawsuit challenging race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas at Austin—I find myself reflecting on my own life. I think of my father, Ted Gup, who, in 1943, was admitted to Harvard University. Some weeks before his arrival, he received a letter from the college asking him if he would be comfortable with a “dark-skinned” roommate.
There was some irony to the letter, given that my father was the son of a rabbi, and that as recently as 20 years earlier, Harvard’s president had tried to limit the number of Jews on the campus. But such a letter was hardly surprising. Just two years earlier, in 1941, Harvard had declined to field its lone black lacrosse player, Lucien Alexis Jr., when the U.S. Naval Academy objected to his presence on its field, and that same year refused to allow the one black member of its glee club, Drue King, to sing in the Duke University chapel when that institution protested.
But back to my father’s story. He responded that he could care less the color of his roommate’s skin. That fall he was introduced to his roommate, Harish Mahindra—not the black American he had expected but a young man from Bombay. The two of them hit it off and became friends. For my father, it was an introduction not only to a roommate but also to a different culture, religion, race, and nationality. It was, in short, a vital part of his education.
The story resonates with me. In 1964 I was admitted to a boarding school in the Midwest where I felt the not-so-subtle sting of anti-Semitism. I often wondered if I had imagined it, but some 30 years later, on a visit to the campus, I asked for and received my admissions folder. There on the cover was a blue Star of David and a notation suggesting that the school had not been forewarned about my faith. Jews were rarely admitted, and it seemed I had somehow slipped through the net.
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Flash forward to 2003. I am a fellow at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, my office across the street from Eliot House, where my father and Harish Mahindra had roomed together 60 years earlier.On a lark, I visited the dorm and knocked on the door of my father’s old room. The door opened, and before me stood a young woman. She was from India. I told her the story of my father, Harish, and the letter. She looked at me in disbelief. How could Harvard, with its dazzling diversity, ever have behaved in such a primitive way?
It is instructive how such tentative steps toward diversity rewarded their institutions and enriched their communities.
Drue King—the Harvard glee-club member barred from singing at Duke—went on to become a distinguished physician. His son and two granddaughters followed him to Harvard, and a third granddaughter graduated from Duke, having made the Dean’s List. As for my father’s roommate, Harish Mahindra, he went on to become a billionaire industrialist in his home country. His son, Anand, would graduate from Harvard College in 1977 and the business school in 1981. In October 2010, he would give the university $10-million in support of a center for the study of the humanities—now known as the Mahindra Humanities Center—the largest humanities gift in Harvard’s history.
And this year, my boarding school, which once expressed misgivings at admitting another Jew, awarded me its highest honor, as an outstanding alumnus who “represents the human and individual values the Academy strives to foster.”
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As the Supreme Court weighs affirmative action, I cannot help feeling that somehow such deliberation is out of step with time itself. We live in a diverse society and are the better for it. We seek diversity not merely to right old wrongs or balance the ledger of our collective conscience, but also because it is an integral part of the process of building great institutions of higher learning. Thirty-plus years of college teaching has made a firm believer of me.
The arguments against reverse discrimination, taken out of context, are indeed compelling. But the truth is that the admissions process is, by definition, an act of discrimination, as well it should be. If by bias we mean deliberately creating an environment to maximize the educational experience and to create a community that will ultimately serve the nation and world at large, then yes, that is what we should be about.
That individuals of merit will be turned away because colleges are pursuing that goal is a hard fact of life, but part of a broader societal mandate. This year Harvard turned away 94 percent of its applicants, including some 1,800 students who were first in their high-school classes and many who had perfect SAT’s. No one doubts that those applicants were capable of the work, but from a macro point of view, the composition of a class and a campus is a critical part of institutional excellence, no less than the choice of texts or curriculum. There is more to admission than grades and test scores. A symphony demands more of an orchestra than a stage full of first violins.
I do not pretend to know how much diversity is enough. What I do know is that in 2012, our colleges have yet to fully catch up with the rest of society, to reflect its true breadth, to prepare students to be comfortable in a nation that is diverse ethnically, racially, politically, and economically. In moving from prejudice to preference, we are simply acknowledging the arc of history and embracing a change that has already embraced America.
The only real question before the court is whether colleges will be free to pursue excellence in all its many manifestations, or be forced to dilute the educational experience and compromise their ability to best prepare the next generation for a complex and increasingly diverse world. The court will decide as it will, but history—mine and the nation’s—has already ruled on the merits of the case.