Harvard’s Stages of Grief Over Affirmative Action

Almost immediately after the Supreme Court announced its ruling for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, I received several emails about the decision. From Harvard’s president-elect, Claudine Gay, a message of shared grief: “Today is a hard day, and if you are feeling the gravity of that, I want you to know you’re not alone.” A personal message from a former student: “Today is a great day in the life of the country.”

The difference was that the student was writing to someone he knew shared his opinion, while the president assumed that everyone shared hers. In that difference lies the corruption at the heart of higher education. Like many universities, Harvard has been striving for a uniformity of prestamped opinions that its incoming president assumes. But Students for Fair Admissions invites us to hope for a pause if not a turning point in that demand for uniformity.

As a professor at Harvard starting in 1993, I saw how a great university fell into this robotic state. From the mid-1990s to my retirement in 2014, I spoke out against what I insisted on calling “group preferences” whenever the subject was raised at faculty meetings. First among my many concerns was how the pursuit of diversity, engineered on the basis of race, subverted the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That legislation, itself regrettably belated, had guaranteed freedom from “discrimination or segregation of any kind on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin,” even if such treatment was locally required by law. Brave Americans had fought hard to secure those individual rights, and social experiments in other countries had proved that an imposed equality of results impeded the advancement of their supposed beneficiaries.

I also objected on academic grounds that the goal of correcting for socioeconomic inequality was replacing the goal of intellectual inquiry, the search for truth and the pursuit of excellence. Had the school truly wanted to correct racial inequities it would have used its resources to improve the education of millions of underserved children. Instead, I argued, the university’s embrace of racial categories could only deepen and promote politics on behalf of existing grievances.

But the most immediate and consequential effect of engineered group diversity was to quash debate. When I questioned then-president Neil Rudenstine’s self-satisfied report on “diversity at Harvard” to the faculty of arts and sciences in 1996, he was roused to respond with “an uncharacteristic display of emotion,” as the next day’s issue of the student newspaper, the Crimson, described it. In her turn, his successor Drew Faust laughed off my proposal at another such faculty meeting that Harvard investigate the correlation between the introduction of imposed group diversity and the decline of diversity of opinion.

These incidents did me no personal harm, and they would have been amusing had I not worried about the pusillanimity they encouraged. In what was meant as a warning to others, one of my professorial colleagues informed the Crimson that no one listens to Prof. Wisse.

Convinced of their own righteousness, promoters of affirmative action felt justified in scorning opponents of their policies, as President Biden did after recent decisions by disparaging the justices as “not a normal court.”

The difference here is that Mr. Biden is a politician, while my colleagues were supposed to be scholars. The assumptions of liberals that their positions are obviously true and beneficial is one reason I stopped thinking of myself as a liberal. Conservative views are nowhere more necessary than in an institution of learning that is charged with conserving the republic. The American system of government represents the political progress from which racial categorizing is a regression. Until Harvard and its peers recover their truer purpose, they will keep steering us regimentally toward bad ideas and unfree speech.

Fortunately, I received a follow-up email on June 29, also from Harvard’s president-elect, announcing that, “as many in our community and across the nation begin to understand today’s decision, several members of the Harvard Law School faculty will engage in a panel discussion titled Affirmative Action in Higher Education.” This may be the only such faculty discussion in the past quarter-century. Students had organized debates on the subject, but never the faculty, and certainly not sanctioned by the administration. How could they debate such things when all right-thinking people were on the same side?

I would like to believe that my former student was right: The Supreme Court’s ruling may be an augury of a more honest academy, a less prejudicial polity, and a life of free and thoughtful debate.

Ms. Wisse is a professor emerita at Harvard and author of the memoir “Free as a Jew.”