Many years ago, in a better America, Harvard was just a really good college. Not the only good college, but one of them. Many of my high school classmates in Massachusetts went to Harvard, as did I. The rest went to a variety of colleges, some to Yale and Princeton, some to other colleges. Very few went to the West Coast, but then that was before the age of jet travel.

Around that time (the late fifties), a dean at the college wrote a memo to the powers that be, who were at Harvard, warning them against admitting only the best and the brightest, as Harvard was just starting to do. He said (note: we are now operating on hearsay, about which more below) that such a policy would change Harvard and the nation. He was wise beyond anything he could have imagined.

That memo from the dean is in the hands of a friend who promised the dean not to let it see the light of day. He has been true to his word, which is not surprising; he is a most honorable man. And, in fact, we don’t really need to see the actual memo to understand what has happened. The scandals that have occurred at Ivy League schools have made his point all too well.

At least partly, and perhaps largely, because of what Harvard did, which was then mimicked by the other now “prestigious” colleges, the nation has come apart. Coming Apart (published in 2013) is the title of one of Charles Murray’s books. It describes how Americans have essentially become two peoples: successful, rich, Ivy League graduates, intermarrying, and living in the super zip codes (Belmont), and everyone else (living in Fishtown).

It rings all too true. And it is so sad. And, of course, it is part of what has propelled Trump to . . . glory.

David Brooks recently wrote a column for the New York Times titled “America’s New Segregation,” making similar points. It’s worth a read, though the title (titles are rarely chosen by authors) is a bit absurd, given the attention to the subject, especially by Murray’s book.

Brooks writes, “[Traveling around the country] has produced in me one central conviction about what ails America: segregation. Not just racial segregation . . . but also class segregation. I’m constantly traveling between places where college grads dominate and places where high school grads dominate, and it’s a bit like traveling between different planets.”

Once a college degree became the ticket to going to Goldman and making millions, it ceased to be about learning and became mostly about money and status and about science and scientism, mathematics, and practicality, not about truth or beauty, and not about what T. S. Eliot and Russell Kirk called the “permanent things.”

And then, of course, it became irresistible to cheat to get in, and the nation saw a spate of admissions scandals across the country.

The biggest scandal was probably Operation Varsity Blues in 2019, a nationwide fraud involving many elite universities. Wealthy parents paid William “Rick” Singer (the mastermind) to secure admissions for their children using fake athletic credentials, falsified resumes, and by bribing test proctors. The colleges involved were

USC, Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, UCLA, Wake Forest, and some others (Harvard was not implicated). The bribes ranged from $15,000 to $6.5 million! More than fifty people were charged, and many served prison sentences.

Then, because Harvard may have had a sense that by focusing primarily on SAT scores, it had sold out to the brainiacs, “too many” of whom were Chinese, it started to discriminate against the Chinese. They didn’t appreciate that, so they sued and won.

Meanwhile, Harvard sought to burnish its liberal credentials (and toss a bone to the blacks, most of whom couldn’t possibly meet Harvard’s admissions standards), so they selected a black to be president. Not just any black, but an incompetent black woman, Claudine Gay. Gay turned out to be not just a disaster but a public relations disaster, too. She seems to have been a professional plagiarist. One tenured Harvard professor said of her, “This looks really bad for her and speaks to the fact that at worst she is a plagiarist, and at best, her worse-than-mediocre record as a scholar is highly derivative.” Ooh!

Now Harvard has a problem (assuming they obey the Supreme Court’s order not to discriminate against Chinese students): too many Chinese students as far as the eye can see or imagine (think of the size of the gene pool)! If you pick people solely on the basis of brains, you get mostly Chinese students, who turn out to be brighter than most other people.

And they pay full freight, too. And they study things like science and technology—especially the science and technology of helping China beat the United States in warfare. Many—most?—may actually be working, in one sense or another, for the Communist party. Or if they’re not working for the party today, at least they’re on tap whenever the party calls—and woe unto him who dares to say, “I’m busy.” The memory holes in China are big enough to contain entire families, entire extended families, entire extended families and all their friends, and their friends’ friends. No one, no one, says, “I’m busy” when the party calls. Fair Harvard can’t trump that.

Instead of aiming for a class of mixed-race students by cooking the books, Harvard could all along have been admitting well-rounded students from a variety of backgrounds—and a variety of SAT scores—with no need to take race into account, especially with its multi-billion-dollar endowment able to provide any necessary scholarships.

Raising the question, raised implicitly by the Harvard dean so many years ago, why not—at least at the college—educate students from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of SAT scores? That’s one way to bring the country together . . . assuming all the other elite institutions would follow Harvard’s lead. That would make Harvard a better college, a relic and type of her ancestors’ worth. And America is a better country.

Daniel Oliver (H’61-4) is Chairman Emeritus of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in Pasadena, CA. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.

Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.