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Just a quick Sunday morning reflection, but just wanted to briefly float an idea about affirmative action, ethnic identity, and university reform. As most people probably know, the Supreme Court is widely expected to strike down affirmative action in the near future. However, speaking as someone well ensconced within the very apse of the Cathedral, I'm doubtful it will change much; Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making, and the religion of DEI means that there will be no shortage of reasons to prefer candidates from under-represented minority backgrounds. Sadly, I expect this to continue trumping any kind of class-based affirmative action, for which a far stronger moral case can be made.
If the US is indeed headed towards a new regime of ethnic spoils, how can young Americans who don't benefit from being in an officially recognized URM group - especially those who are nonetheless disadvantaged - still reap spoils of their own in the higher education systems? There are two particular groups I have in mind here. The first is Asian-American students, long the ones who have paid most of the price for boosting enrollment of otherwise underrepresented minorities, while the second is white Americans, especially those from working-class or otherwise economically underprivileged backgrounds.
I wonder if a similar solution might work in both cases. Specifically, is there any reason a new private university couldn't declare as part of its mission statement that it is dedicated to "understanding and promoting Asian and Asian-American identities", or some such, and require all candidates to submit a personal statement spelling out their identity or affinity with one or more aspects of Asian or Asian-American culture? Of course, non-Asian candidates wouldn't be barred from applying, and you'd probably want to take a hefty chunk of non-Asian students anyway, but it would provide a plausible and conveniently illegible selection mechanism to ensure that Asians and Asian-Americans applying to the university would have a natural advantage in getting in.
Could something similar work for white students? As stated so baldly, I think not. "Whiteness" as an identity is seen as too toxic, too vague, and too novel an identity to ground any kinds of claims for preferential treatment; any scholarship program for self-identified White students would be regarded with utter hostility, and would be a poison chalice for any student foolish enough to accept it. What might be more acceptable is to found institutions dedicated to one or another group of "hyphenated-Americans", the most obvious candidate groups being Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish- (or more broadly Slavic-) Americans. Again, in each of these cases, you wouldn't have any kind of explicit cultural discrimination in place, but candidates could be assessed heavily based on how deep and sincere their affiliation, identity, or attachment to the given identity was, as expressed in their relevant candidate statement.
While any such institution would be the target of snarky articles from the New York Times et al., I think that if done sincerely (and ideally using the language of DEI) it would be hard to truly tar the endeavor with the charge of Asian- or white-supremacism. There's simply too much obvious conceptual overlap with existing programs that favor URMs, so to truly rail against it, commentators would have to say the quiet part out loud, so to speak, which would alienate moderates.
Of course, the really hard part would be making these universities places that students actually wanted to go to. For my part, I think the current higher-education system in most of the world is a stagnant cartel, with actual teaching being near the bottom of priorities, and the whole edifice is ripe for disruption. The main challenge to overcome would be the brand power of the old guard, especially the Ivy Leagues, and that's hardly a trivial obstacle to overcome. Perhaps the best two initial strategies in this regard would be (i) hiring a bunch of very good emeritus faculty, who could write excellent letters of recommendation for grad school etc., and (ii) focusing in the first instance on teaching disciplines with relatively legible outcomes, e.g., material sciences, machine learning, data science, mathematics, etc., rather than the humanities. Over a few years, I think it would be entirely possible to cultivate a reputation for providing a superb education in these disciplines, such that employers would have to take note.
All of this would require a large amount of startup capital, but there are Silicon Valley libertarian-types who could - ideally anonymously - bankroll this kind of operation (so Peter Thiel, if you're reading, get in touch).
But perhaps I'm being naive, and there are obstacles here that I'm not seeing. What do you all think?
To be clear, if you're talking about starting a new college as a real option rather than a theoretical exercise, the problem is the "Starting a new college and raising its prestige" part not the "giving it a pro-Asian ideological bent" part. Going by USNWR rankings *, but the youngest school outside a big state system is Carnegie-Mellon founded in 1900. Which is A) 120 years old, B) Backed by Andrew Carnegie, C) Still a small school and ranked all the way down at 26th. What's the most prestigious non-state school that was founded in the last 40 years? I'm not sure there even is one that's past laughable.
To make it prestigious you're going to attract students. And not just any students, talented students with other options, attracting nothing but low performers who couldn't get in anywhere else won't help. And no, abandoning affirmative action alone will not deliver a significant number of ignored but talented Asian/White students, if you had the resume for affirmative action to matter to you just go somewhere else. There is no pool of kids who don't go to a decent school because of Affirmative action, only kids that got into a modestly worse school. If I were Black I would have been shoe-in anywhere in the top 5, but it's not like as a result of being white I slid into the 100s or something. The kids who get bumped from Harvard get into Cornell, from Cornell to Lehigh, from Lehigh to Penn State, from Penn State Main Campus to Penn State local campuses; the kids below Penn State don't matter.
Students will need to choose to go to your brand new school over highly ranked schools. Some of the issues attracting students to unwoke college groups I discussed in a prior motte conversation here. So let's just be real here, Unwoke university needs to attract women, and it needs to place students in prestigious organizations and jobs. If a university can't get kids jobs, and you can't get laid, it ain't happening; Asian and white guys at the 165 LSAT range will just cruise on to Penn State Honors instead.
Most observers put the male:female ratio at, say, a Jordan Peterson show at around 9:1 male:female; that's a big hill to climb. 68% of Young Women, 72% of women with a college degree identify as Feminists, we can basically write them off from Unwoke university; it's tough to claim numbers on multiple issues, but how many of that remaining quarter-to-third of young women who aren't woke are religious? Those girls are going to pick Messiah or Liberty over Unwoke U. I understand we have some women around themotte, but no one is going to sit here and claim it is better than a third are they? Very few people are going to choose to go to a college that is 90%+ male over one that isn't. I guess you could just go full-send and make it a male only school, I'm not sure that's legal anymore but it might be worth a try at that point.
I'm not going to say it is impossible to bootstrap prestige, but it certainly isn't easy. Takes decades. The Federalist Society is the best example we have, but it was grafted on top of existing schools; notoriously because it had better funding our FedSoc always had better food than the liberal equivalents, and people sometimes went to events just to get a free burrito. Carnegie type money and a commitment from some business leaders would make that easier, but you need serious money to overcome the inbuilt advantages of the existing schools. And given that this is an honest to God shot across the culture war bow, don't think the woke colleges will take this lying down. Grads from woke schools will commit to not applying to businesses that hire from Unwoke, etc. Would, say, Exxon commit to getting nobody from Harvard/Yale/Stanford to get kids from Unwoke? By the time you successfully bootstrap prestige we're probably four full SCOTUS turnovers from now, and who knows what AA law looks like.
But let's assume you could start a new prestigious university, I doubt it would work from a legal perspective, because you'd have to show a compelling interest in only letting in Asian kids or Irish American kids or whatever. Which doesn't really exist, there is plenty of Asian or Irish culture at other schools already. Conservative SCOTUS justices want to overturn AA, they don't want to institute legalized white nationalism and overturn a century of precedent to get us back to Plessy or something.
So, no, in conclusion this wouldn't work at all.
*Just from a quick glance at the rankings, if I missed a more recent one let me know.
I think Monash University, Australian National University, and University of New South Wales in Australia (1958, 1946, and 1949) and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (1991) are cases of success in growing a new university even though there were other local universities that were already relatively prestigious.
That said, I’m not sure it’s replicable exactly in all situations. It may be that the market space at the time of these universities’ founding was unsaturated and they could absorb a glut of talented students that the existing institutions would’ve been happy to admit but did not have the capacity for. I think - correct me if I’m wrong - they also tend to be more unbalanced in their subject strengths; Monash is a world leader in pharmacology, ANU is excellent in a bunch of anthropology and humanities-focused subjects as far as I can tell, UNSW in water resources and mineral sciences, HKUST in (surprise!) business and finance.
Maybe a way to grow a new institution’s prestige is to focus really hard on one thing a la UCSF? You could even do it to the point of only offering programs in the field of interest (again, like UCSF). Still wouldn’t be easy, but it’s probably easier than trying to compete in all fields. (I think this was touched on in the OP.)
The big difference is that those are government funded. I don't want to speak to that overseas, I'm not familiar with the contrasts in the systems. In the USA some California state schools were founded much later, but they are part of the broader California state system and have huge resources to draw on. OP's hypothetical was a private university, which in the US sense means it is not under the orders or or primarily funded by the government, outside of grants and scholarships and such.
Fair!
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