Strong evidence contradicting Harvard University’s claim of elite status was available decades before the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University lawsuit the Supreme Court ended in 2023. Harvard’s subjugation of merit to politics goes all the way back to at least the 1920s, when, as Justice Clarence Thomas noted in his SFFA v. Harvard concurrence, it set quotas on Jews to reduce their enrollment.

Indeed, as I note in my recent book about identity politics, “the federal government had begun hiring people based on race” and demanded the same of its contractors as far back as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency in the 1930s and 1940s. Under Roosevelt, the federal government pioneered the “disparate impact” doctrine today better known as diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act and other identity politics measures of the era were immediately interpreted by federal agencies and courts as requiring employers such as universities, even private ones, to hire and promote on the basis of sex and race. So, as I explain in False Flag, even though the Civil Rights Act explicitly bans “preferential treatment” by race or sex, it has always been used by federal agencies and courts to require the opposite.

This means, as Thomas testified in the 2020 documentary Created Equal, racial discrimination in favor of minorities at so-called elite schools was already widespread when he studied law in the early 1970s. Thomas was accepted to Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale law schools, and went to Yale.

Ivy League DEI Since At Least the 1970s

In Created Equal, Thomas says he struggled to find a job after law school because 1970s law firms knew black Ivy League graduates had been admitted with significantly lower qualifications than white graduates. As Thomas writes in his SFFA v. Harvard concurrence, “I have long believed that large racial preferences in college admissions ‘stamp [blacks and Hispanics] with a badge of inferiority.’”

Thomas, of course, is the most brilliant American legal mind of his lifetime, a peerless justice who sets the standard of constitutional analysis. Anyone who reads his work can see he didn’t need affirmative action.

Its use, however, harmed him and everyone else it claimed to “help.” In his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, Thomas writes that while struggling to find a job he bitterly affixed a 15-cent price sticker to the frame of his law degree “to remind myself of the mistake I’d made by going to Yale. I never did change my mind about its value.”

In the 1980s, it remained well-known in posh circles that being Asian or white reduced one’s chances of Ivy League admission. By the 1990s, Charles Murray and Richard Hernnstein quantified the boost that being black or Hispanic gave Ivy League applicants as around 200 to 300 SAT points, depending on the school — an enormous difference in academic ability akin to men’s natural advantages over women in sports. The prevalence of racial discrimination in university admissions from the 1960s on, especially at allegedly top-tier schools, led to 1990s policies such as California’s affirmative action ban in 1996.

But for half a century, universities have largely ignored such restraints and kept on discriminating. The SFFA vs. Harvard lawsuit only confirmed Harvard had continued its 60-year practice of admitting black and Hispanic students with much lower academic records than those of admitted Asian and white students. And it is still engaging in high-dollar litigation to protect its half-century record of excellence-destroying racial discrimination.

Racial Discrimination Destroys Excellence

This means that for at least 60 years universities that claim to be elite have prioritized politics over excellence. This also affects teaching quality, and may help explain why research suggests teaching quality at “elite” colleges is no better than at lower-ranked colleges.

While the students whom race preferences mismatch to universities drop out more and earn lower grades than students who are truly elite academically, many remain through graduation. This pushes professors to accommodate them in lectures, assignments, and grades. It is probably a contributing factor in the rampant grade inflation at Ivies that makes four out of every five grades at Harvard and Yale an A, itself a marker of less-than-excellent academic quality.

It also leads to periodic scandals when professors are caught noticing this reality. University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax was suspended for a year at half-pay, and her university attempted to strip her tenure for anti-affirmative action statements including, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.”

In 2021, Georgetown Law School fired adjunct professors Sandra Sellers and David Batson for a private conversation in which Sellers told Batson, “I hate to say this. I end up having this, you know, angst, every semester that a lot of my lower ones [students] are blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like oh, come on. You get some really good ones. But there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy.” Batson responded with a neutral “Mmhmm.”

Georgetown and U-Penn are supposed to be top-tier law schools. But no university that engages in such pervasive academic fraud can be considered elite. And racial discrimination is not the only mark against Ivy League and other “top-tier” schools’ PR claims. It is just the sharp point of a large iceberg of intellectual corruption.

Decades of Expensive and Useless ‘Research’

Cultural Marxism doesn’t just ruin classroom and graduate quality, but also universities’ other main product, research. “Top-tier” universities are the top contributors to the replication crisis not just in the almost wholly corrupt humanities but also the allegedly “hard” sciences. In short, the replication crisis means that most of the scientific work that boosts the reputations of so-called “top-tier” universities is fraudulent. Donors and taxpayers have paid billions of dollars to attain nothing except self-deception.

Could it be that systematically elevating students, staff, and faculty for more than half a century on the basis of race, sex, and political affiliation instead of intellectual capabilities has contributed to the complete unreliability of universities’ work? It certainly stands to reason, especially when combined with continuing revelations of Ivy professors’ and presidents’ plagiarism.

Data SFFH v. Harvard unearthed showed the majority of Harvard’s students would not be enrolled without some preference. Admissions preferences include athletes (who on average exhibit the lowest academic records of all students admitted) and children of alumni, donors, celebrities, and staff. These comprise 29 percent of admissions. Add to that Harvard’s 27 percent of international students (some of whom will overlap with the donor preference), and the race preferences for black and Hispanic students, and you have a clear majority of students admitted due to some preference that has nothing to do with merit.

Highly Credentialed Incompetence

This suggests the minority of students who did earn their way into Ivies provide intellectual window-dressing for the rest. It also indicates Ivy League experiences are today elite in perhaps only one sense: access to power. Thus Harvard lends its prestige to leftist incompetents such as Joy Reid and Bill De Blasio. (Next it will be Gavin Newsom.)

Rent-seeking can and nowadays most often does pay better than hard work and individual excellence. But that system cannot be called a meritocracy, and its gatekeepers cannot be called “elite” at anything but deception.