Where the Ivy League goes, America follows.

The Ivy League matters because Ivy Leaguers occupy the commanding heights of the American culture, economy, and government.  Six of the last ten presidents went to Ivy League schools, and another two went to their peers (Duke and the United States Naval Academy).  Seven of the nine current Supreme Court justices went to the Ivy League or Stanford for both undergraduate and law school.  Ditto for the Senate majority leader.

Today, unfortunately, the Ivy League is plunging deeper and deeper into racialization and pulling the rest of America down with it.

The Ivy League has gone all in on racial preferences.  This year, the Ivy League admissions are striking.

Although roughly half of K–12 students are non-Hispanic white, only 32 percent of those admitted this year to Princeton are white.  Roughly 40 percent of the students Harvard and Cornell admitted this year are white.  Brown and Penn admitted 45 percent white students and Dartmouth 52 percent.  Yale and Columbia did not release their numbers.

This is not solely a function of Asian applicants outperforming their competitors.  At Harvard, 29 percent of new admissions are black, Hispanic, or Native American. More are likely mixed-race.  The Ivies' peers probably did the same, as would have Chicago, Duke, and Stanford.

To see the magnitude of affirmative action, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education noted that to get into the nation's most selective universities, on average, a student must score 750 or above on both the math and verbal SAT.  The journal reports that in the U.S. in 2005, 244 blacks scored 750 or above on the math SAT, and 363 black students scored 750 or above on the verbal SAT.

That same year, it reported, 33,841 students scored at least 750 on the math test, and 30,479 scored at least 750 on the verbal SAT.  As a result, black students were 0.7 percent of the test-takers who scored 750 or above on the math test and 1.2 percent of all test-takers who scored 750 or above on the verbal section.  Overall, there were 49 times as many whites as blacks who scored at or above the 750 level.  Even if we drop the SAT level to 700 — subpar for the Ivy League — 45 times as many whites as blacks scored 700 or above on the math SAT, and 39 times as many whites as blacks scored at least 700 on the verbal SAT.

The faculty in the Ivy League are far left and were likely part of the reason for the admissions pattern.  The Yale News's Madison Hahamy reports that in 2020, Yale professors and lecturers gave less than 3 percent of their political donations to Republican candidates and affiliated groups.  Writing in The Washington Times, Bradford Richardson reports that in 2016, Columbia and Princeton had 30 Democrat professors for every Republican professor.  In the U.S. writ large, the ratio is roughly one Democrat to one Republican.  More specifically, it is 33 percent to 29 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Ivy League matters.  The increasing racialization of these schools and the faculty's leftist orientation will affect what American elites think.  What they think will shape the country.  At the Ivies and their peers, large numbers of students owe their admission to the racialization of American life — which they and their left-wing professors are changing.

We see this today as the leadership of Silicon Valley, the U.S. military, and Wall Street nakedly back the left.  They do so by donating money, framing internet searches, and staffing newsrooms.  By burying the Bidens' pay-to-play schemes, pushing the Russia Hoax, structuring the 2020 presidential debates to focus on left-wing issues, and in a hundred other small ways, these same elites conspired to keep Donald Trump from winning the election.  Even with this backing, only 44,000 votes in three key states kept Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.  

Unless the Ivies rethink this madness, the admissions pattern will continue to put racial issues front and center in American life.  We can expect more cancel culture, hate crime hoaxes, kneeling at games, race-specific dorms and graduations, and racial cheerleading at awards ceremonies.  We can expect more racial tension on campus as events are increasingly viewed through a racial lens.

We should also expect more illegal activity. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that quotas are illegal, except in response to past wrongdoing by the entity that seeks to use them.  It has also repeatedly ruled that race and ethnic preferences must meet a high bar (strict scrutiny).  Few programs meet this bar.  Universities — including SUNY research centers — continue to fund faculty positions that must be filled with people from the correct racial and ethnic groups.  None of this is legal.  This flouting of the law will metastasize.

If they don't care about America, Ivy administrators should at least care about their schools' reputations.  Both are suffering.

Stephen Kershnar is a distinguished teaching professor in the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Fredonia and an attorney.

Image: stevepb via Pixabay, Pixabay license.

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