Race isn’t the biggest issue at the Ivy Leagues, despite what some may think.
My class began predictably. The professor exposed the deep racism, sexism, and homophobia of a previous generation. My classmates knew their role all too well and with a certain self-righteous satisfaction joined in the evisceration of our unenlightened ancestors. This was a course on Charles Darwin and natural selection — arguably the most important discovery human beings have ever made — and we were intrepid voyagers on the Beagle 2.0 heroically exposing the bigotry of someone born in 1809.
Whether it’s Abraham Lincoln in my course on 19th-century U.S. history or William Shakespeare in my English literature class, the accusations and focus are always the same. Rather than learning about the political necessity of compromise or the elements of good storytelling, we learn about how Lincoln was a misogynist and how subversive postmodernists in the 1990s exposed Shakespeare as a transphobe who surreptitiously embedded white supremacy throughout all his plays. These discussions, couched in the language of insurrection as if we were all insurgents leading the charge against elite power, comfortably distract us from a disturbing hypocrisy.
At no point does it occur to any of us that we are all attending one of the most discriminatory institutions in America. It is the elephant in the room, a form of bigotry rarely discussed in the “social justice”–obsessed classrooms across campus espousing the virtues of diversity. It is prejudice against the poor — “classism.” Indeed, the exhausting discourse on race, sex, and gender identity in my classes is so stale, slavish, and uninspired precisely because there is no real diversity at Dartmouth College. Everyone is from the same background. Everyone is rich.
Dartmouth Claims Diversity, Obscures Class
Dartmouth proclaims “many cultures, one community” and asserts the school’s commitment to harvesting the “great natural resource” that is diversity. The college proudly touts the reliably high percent of black, indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) that make up the undergraduate class, with an express spotlight on geographic heterogeneity. The most recent undergraduate class, characterized as “multidimensional” by the administration, included students from 51 different tribal nations, all 50 states, and a range of foreign countries and territories.
Curiously, this same detailed breakdown is not provided for the school’s economic makeup. When it comes to class, the college is strategically ambiguous. Rather than simply report how many poor students who attend, Dartmouth obscures these numbers by measuring what percentage of the incoming class qualifies for need-based scholarships and recording the average scholarship grant amount for each year. Instead of revealing the income distribution of students, the college submits the percent of students “projected to be eligible for Pell Grants.” While Dartmouth designates anyone who qualifies as “low income,” these grants have no income threshold and are dispensed to anyone who demonstrates “exceptional … need.”
The diversity that Dartmouth so meticulously engineers is the kind that adds more colorful pins to the world map hanging outside the Diversity & Inclusion office but does nothing to help the most disadvantaged among us — poor kids. It is what Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas described as the “aesthetic” of diversity, a cosmetic policy designed to admit full-pay minorities in a pretense of diversity. It’s a mirage. What would it look like if we pulled out all those pins and reorganized them onto a poster charting income distribution? In light of the inscrutable measures of economic diversity provided by the college itself, we must instead rely on the public record of student income using data from the Internal Revenue Service.
Classism Runs Rampant at the Ivy Leagues
At Dartmouth, 21 percent of my classmates are from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution ($630,000 and more), while 14 percent come from the bottom 60 percent (less than $65,000) — and a mere 7 percent are from the bottom 40 percent. Put this way, if your parents make more than $630,000 a year, you are 120 times as likely to be admitted to Dartmouth than if your parents make less than $46,000 (the bottom 40 percent). Based on 2017 reporting from the New York Times, in the Ivy League, Dartmouth student families have the second-highest median income (Brown University is first), and the college is first in the percentage of students it draws from the top 1 percent. Forty-five percent are from the top 5 percent, 58 percent from the top 10 percent, 69 percent from the top 20 percent, and 2.6 percent from the bottom 20 percent.
Perhaps this explains why Dartmouth is so willing to cop to charges of systemic racism and rampant sexual assault on campus — easily fixed under the guidance of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies enforced by Human Resources — rather than own up to the far more formidable problem of class discrimination, which might require cancelling student debt, paying the dining staff higher wages, or admitting more poor kids. Substantive change is hard and sometimes requires us to do more than identify our preferred pronouns. The social justice crusade on Dartmouth’s campus is an ideological and emotional safety net, and so long as you assume that all black people are alike, regardless of income or place of birth, all the school needs to do to fulfill its diversity goals is admit more rich foreign-born minorities. One study showed that, although black immigrants make up less than 1 percent of America’s total population, they comprise 41 percent of black students at Ivy League universities.
All this scheming is, of course, far easier than offering more scholarships to poor kids. Although this economic caste system is hard to see, it is even harder to solve. Dartmouth is undoubtedly relieved that class is not stamped on our skin.
With the Supreme Court striking down race-based affirmative action, however, class may be the only game in town. Will Dartmouth embrace economic diversity, or will it choose to simply tinker with its current scheme, subverting the court’s ruling?
Nicolas Lynch-Pinzon is a current undergraduate English major at Dartmouth College. Before delving into the works of Edmund Burke and experiencing a radical ideological shift, Nicolas worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 and on subsequent local elections, which inspired his scientific research on the relationship between social capital and populism. After graduation, Nicolas hopes to pursue screenwriting.
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