NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I have a deep well of affection for my alma mater, the College of the Holy Cross. I met my wife there, we sent our older daughter there, and I made the most lasting friendships of my life there. I have never missed a reunion, and was back last weekend for my 30th. It’s not just the power of community of Holy Cross alumni and students: I continue to believe that there is an important role for the college to play in American life as the nation’s preeminent small Catholic liberal-arts college, with a historic mission of educating the next generation of Catholics in the faith and sending them forth to carry it into the world. It shouldn’t be just another link in an archipelago of secular colleges with identical student bodies and philosophies.
But all has not been well on Mt. St. James in recent years. The college’s new president, Vincent Rougeau, made a particularly bad decision in writing an op-ed in the Boston Globe a few weeks ago entitled “Clarence Thomas was a beneficiary of race-based admissions at my school”:
During the height of the civil rights movement, at a time when racial integration was sparking controversy on many campuses, College of the Holy Cross President the Rev. John Brooks drove around the country to personally recruit Black high school students to the college’s all-male, primarily white campus in Worcester. The 20 young men he recruited have become an illustrious group, including business leaders, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a Super Bowl champion, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, class of 1971.
Thomas, once the beneficiary of the most overt example of race-based admissions I can imagine, will probably be among the Supreme Court’s majority in the next few weeks when it is expected to strike down the use of affirmative action in college admissions. [Emphasis added.]
This is shameful behavior on Rougeau’s part, both because it is an abuse of his position and because of what it says about racial preferences.
Clarence Thomas is one of the most prominent and distinguished alumni in the college’s history, probably rivaled among living alumni only by Boston Celtics legend Bob Cousy and, if you must include him, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Justice Thomas is in the arena of legal and political controversy, so I would never argue that he should be immune from criticism, including criticism from individuals within the Holy Cross community. (I have not hesitated to quarrel with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, even though she was in my law-school graduating class). But for the president of the college, its public representative, to wield the authority of his position to criticize Thomas is a disservice to the college, its students, and its alumni. Doing so says much about how politics have superseded a sense of good stewardship among so many of the liberals and progressives who today run our major institutions.
Think about it: When you hear from your old school, the tone used to discuss prominent alumni is typically as celebratory as a family Christmas card talking about the kids. This is intended to convey a sense of communal pride not only in the accomplishments of alumni but also in the many and varied paths they have taken in life. It’s supposed to convey a sense of family and belonging, and for alumni of a politically or socially left-leaning bent, it is nearly always done without a sense of judgment. That is doubly true of a small college with a huge reservoir of communal spirit and a long tradition of families attending across multiple generations. It is certainly how Holy Cross talks about all the other illustrious members of that group of black men — many of them prominent in public life — who were recruited along with Thomas.
It is hard to imagine the college’s official voices and administrators discussing Dr. Fauci or other left-leaning political figures in terms which suggest that they should be publicly castigated, even if they were taking steps that directly stifled campus life. There’s plenty of that out there for them in the world, but their own school should not be casting stones. And yet, when it’s conservative alumni, there is a tendency to treat them as, at best, somewhat embarrassing, and, at worst, people to be scolded from a school-provided soapbox. This is why we get the recent phenomenon of “open letters” from faculty, students, and alumni of various schools trying to excommunicate conservative politicians and judges who attended those schools. “Not in our name,” they often say.
The message sent by these sorts of jeremiads, when they are done with the official seal of the school’s approval, is not merely we disagree with you, but you do not belong; you are not one of us. Is it any wonder that conservative-leaning students and alumni, even those who are not all that politically active or vocal themselves, frequently feel alienated from their schools by this kind of thing?
As to the substance of Rougeau’s criticism, it validates Thomas’s fundamental critique of racial preferences. Thomas turns 75 years old next week. He has been out of college for 52 years. He went on from Holy Cross to Yale Law School, and then worked for a major corporation, in state government, and on Capitol Hill. He headed an executive-branch agency. He published a memoir and several law-review articles. He has been a justice of the United States Supreme Court for more than 31 years. He is nationally known, and has produced his own extensive and scholarly body of constitutional theory. He was once respected enough by his alma mater to serve on its board of trustees and receive an honorary degree.
And yet, Rougeau’s op-ed announces to the world that, even now, we will never stop telling people he only got into our college because he was black. Even after all these years. Even after everything he has done with the opportunities he has had. (Never mind that Rougeau cites as “the most overt example of race-based admissions I can imagine” a personal appeal by Father Brooks to recruit skeptical black students to the school and offer a scholarship to a student who was in desperate financial need.)
What better evidence could there be in favor of Thomas’s argument that a degree obtained by an African American from a school that uses racial preferences will always carry an asterisk of sorts? That benefiting from racial preferences degrades the dignity of the recipient, because it will always be either openly thrown in his face or silently held against him? That it creates a sense of debt to the institution granting the preference, or worse, a sense that the institution owns your opinions forever?
No black American should have to go through the world chased by that asterisk. There’s a famously mordant observation on racism in society that goes something like this: “What do you call a man who graduates last in his class in medical school? Doctor. What do you call a black man who graduates first in his class in medical school? N*****.” It’s a grim comment on a world that never lets you forget that some people will always see you first and foremost as black. That’s a world we’re supposed to be trying to get away from, not leaning into.
Justice Thomas has sworn an oath to the Constitution and laws of his nation. And nobody — least of all the president of his alma mater, writing in the pages of a major newspaper — should presume to tell him that he ought to rule on racial preferences in college admissions differently than his white colleagues due to his race or how he got into college.