Op-Ed
Part of the Problem
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Agree to Disagree
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It was the fall of 1962, and the nation stood on the brink of civil unrest. That September, President John F. Kennedy was forced to send federal troops to the University of Mississippi to escort James
Meredith, the school’s first black student, onto campus amidst deathly race riots. Soon after, Kennedy summoned leaders from five major universities, including Harvard, Yale and Notre Dame, to the White
House.
“I want you to make a difference,” he implored them. “Until you do, who will?”
The first to respond to this call, as Berkeley Professor Jerome Karabel recounts in his recent study of elite colleges, was Yale’s incoming president, Kingman Brewster, Jr., who made the controversial decision to confer an honorary doctorate on Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1964.
“Like many members of the Establishment, both inside and outside academe,” Karabel writes, “Brewster was deeply worried that America’s unresolved racial conflicts might tear the nation apart.”
In 2008, colleges and universities are no longer the bastions of optimism in which Kennedy once believed. Now, more than ever, institutions of higher learning are part of the problem, and not the solution.
In the 1960s, it would have been difficult for anyone to imagine a country less hopeful and more divided. Yet in analyzing the economic and social landscape in America today, scholars see a society that, in too many ways, resembles its former miserable self.
A major study commissioned by the Pew Center and authored by the Brookings Institute demonstrates that only one-third of children today will earn more than the previous generation, and rank higher than their parents in family income.
What’s worse, one-fourth of children will “ride the tide,” and remain in the same economic position in which they grew up, and another one-third of all American children will actually experience downward mobility during their lifetime, falling behind their parents “in both real family income and relative rank,” as the study explains.
Yet the most sobering of the study’s findings is not the discovery of an inverted American Dream, but the persistent attachment of racial disparities to that reality.
“The findings for black children born to middle-income parents may be more startling,” Julia B. Isaacs writes in the Brookings study. “Many middle-income black parents have seen their children’s incomes fall below their own; and disturbingly, high numbers of black children have fallen from the middle to the bottom of the income distribution.
“Economic success in the parental generation — at least as measured by family income — does not appear to protect black children from future economic adversity the same way it protects white children,” Isaacs concludes.
That may explain why only 31.9 percent of high school students graduated from Detroit high schools in four years, according to a major study conducted by Michigan State University. In the city set aflame by the 1967 12th Street Riot, only 25 percent of boys are now graduating from high school, according to a Monday report in the Detroit News.
Rich and poor, white and black, upwardly mobile and falling behind: these are the divisions that fuel inequality in America today. Though at times, universities have been infiltrated by these plagues of the outside world — the Straight Takeover of 1969 here at Cornell comes to mind — for nearly a half-century, higher education has sought to offer an enlightened oasis from the nation’s sorrows.
Yet somewhere along the way, colleges and universities became invested in the politics of division, and even as they now trumpet progressive reforms, the country’s dismal regression points to their inadequacy.
One shocking outcome of the Brookings Institute report is that universities are no longer antidotes for inequality, but sponsors of it. As The New York Times summarizes the study’s findings, “Widening gaps in higher education between rich and poor, whites and minorities, could soon lead to a downturn in opportunities for the poorest families.”
Indeed, colleges and universities are creating yet another schism in society: a wealth gap in higher education.
While colleges and universities raised closed to $30 billion this year, nearly $518 million — one-third of the total sum — went to just 20 institutions, according to The Times. Harvard raised $614 million in gifts, and Stanford, $832 million. Four schools, including Cornell, accrued between $400 and $500 million in donations.
So large is Harvard’s endowment now that it “could pay the tuition of all its undergraduates, and its endowment would still grow,” said Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. “It is time for wealthy colleges and universities to begin asking themselves what their broader social responsibilities are,”Nelson added in his comments to The Times.
That’s why the spate of financial aid announcements by Ivy Plus schools these past few months shouldn’t lull us into complacency. Offering tuition-free education to families earning under $100,000 — as is the latest offering from Stanford — is of course commendable, but with 50 years of standstill in economic mobility, and the specter of worse to come, elite colleges and universities need to offer more.
Sensational financial aid packages from the Harvards and Yales also belie a problem that resonates with the nation at large: while the rich are getting richer, the poor are suffering. As Joe Nocera wrote last year, the funding arms race has “made life more difficult for all the hundreds of universities that do not rank, in the public mind, with Harvard, Stanford and Yale. These are the schools that educate the vast bulk of American students. They can’t conduct $1 billion fund drives. And so, ever so slowly, they are falling behind.”
At schools like Cornell, flush with resources and disproportionately wealthy, much more needs to be done. In little over a year, we raised $2 billion, yet at the same time, our financial aid grants totaled only $101 million, and our incoming class enrolled only 167 black students and 173 Hispanics, all according to the Common Data Set.
In the face of widening disparities, the nation’s leaders in higher education need to make a difference. For until we do, who will?
Rob Fishman is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rbfishman@cornellsun.com. Agree to Disagree appears Tuesdays.