Every morning, while I breakfast on a Billy Bob or a double-egg omelet, I have a go at The Dartmouth. This morning I nearly choked: I was jarred from half-sleep by an op-ed titled "Affirmative Admissions" by Dan Knecht '05 (The Dartmouth, Feb. 20). The piece opened well enough, with "I usually don't appreciate universities meddling in the affairs of the federal government." Jolly good show. Then the whole thing took a turn for -- well -- the awful.
"Dartmouth," notes Mr. Knecht, "has no point system, nor does it have a set formula or equation. On the contrary, our school places every applicant under the microscope: race is considered, along with geography, life experiences and several other factors." Put aside for the moment the fact that none of the factors enumerated above has any bearing on one's intelligence or merit. That argument has been made, and will continue to be made, by countless opponents of race-based admissions. It's old hat, nobody cares a damn about it and it's time to move on to something else.
That "something else" is the subtext of Mr. Knecht's piece. It is, I believe, the meaning lurking behind every remark made in defense of affirmative action. I may come under fire for translating this so bluntly, but lest it slip by unnoticed, I must do so. They are saying this: you, the minority student, will not be accepted by a top-flight school without this advantage." Lest you doubt, I will repeat Mr. Knecht's quote from University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman: "There is no effective substitute for the consideration of race as one of many factors in our admissions process." Between those lines, it reads: your merit is not an effective substitute for a twenty-point freebie. You just aren't good enough to go it alone.
Do you, the minority student, really believe this? Of course not, and neither do I. But your public defenders -- James Wright, Mary Sue Coleman, et al. -- certainly seem to. How else can one explain the fact that, despite all your achievements, they want to hitch training wheels to your college application? How anyone can recognize the implications of this position without feeling gravely insulted is beyond me. If Dartmouth had offered me twenty free points -- because I went to a second-rate parochial school instead of Andover, or even because I'm naturally horrible at math -- I would have looked at St. John's instead.
See, I look forward to earning a diploma, not to spending four years (and an awful lot of money) being condescended to by the real privilege-mongers. A great man or woman secures his or her place in the history books by triumphing over adversity -- not by being compensated for it. Nobody should accept a springboard to greatness while others must slog through the mud.
That said, I resent Mr. Knecht's contention that the proposed alternatives to race-based admission "would give rich, private school students a huge advantage, as they are better taught and have greater opportunities than many underprivileged minorities." I know plenty of silver spoon suckers who, despite their credentials and expensive SAT tutors, didn't even get a foot in the door at an Ivy League university. Like it or not, greatness -- not money or skin color -- begets greatness. And the best among us (as many of Dartmouth's students, minority or not, have and will continue to show us) have taught themselves all they really wanted to know, without fretting that their high schools didn't have a fancy crest or a British name.
So the next time somebody tells you that those Vuarnet-wearing prep school whelps are better than you (and that's what they're saying, no matter how much empty rhetoric they wrap around their stock responses), tell them to save it -- you'll take a twenty-point deduction before you admit to that. Don't buy into the cult of inferiority. Don't make yourselves its poster children. You have far too much to be proud of to sell yourselves so short.
