A Step Forward

Yesterday Dartmouth University College announced that its next president will be Jim Yong Kim, currently chairman of the department of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School. Asian-Americans make up a much greater percentage of students in America’s elite colleges and universities than the population as a whole, to the point where there seems to be a pretty strong circumstantial case that Asian students are now subject to race-based admissions discrimination not dissimilar to the infamous “Jewish quotas” utilized by Ivy League institutions in the early 20th Century. (Dan Golden’s The Price of Admission has a whole chapter on this and is well worth reading in full.) But for a variety of reasons that hasn’t translated into representation in the upper reaches of higher education leadership, where Asian-Americans remain few and far between. So this is welcome news.