The bell tolls for affirmative action, and now we see the results. After last year’s Supreme Court affirmative action decision, the percentage of black students at Cornell decreased from 11.7 percent to 7.7 percent. But it is important to remember the old saying “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
The Black student population statistic obscures who counts as Black. If you asked the average person what it is a Black American, the answer would be a descendant of American slaves. But that is not what the Black statistic captures in Cornell’s reporting, it captures all who identify as Black, including the numerous groups of immigrants from Africa and across the African Diaspora. While it does not include international students, the discrepancy in representation on campus between students from various parts of Africa and the Diaspora and the African American descendants of slaves, shortened to African Americans, is large. In February of 2024 in Cornell Dining’s celebration of Black History Month, they originally left out African American cuisine from their nine nights of African Diaspora cuisines which included cuisines from many Caribbean and African nations.
Universities like Cornell seemingly have no way to count African Americans on campus. This is a problem that has been raised by scholars like Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. starting two decades ago. The representation of African Americans in elite universities is significant, as the targets of America’s most shameful atrocities, this was recognized in policies like affirmative action. But even affirmative action came up short with the program being a general venture to help increase representation of all historically underrepresented groups. The largest benefactors of the program were not the main victims of America’s greatest harms but white women.
In the wake of the revocation of affirmative action, the policy of liberals in the Student Assembly and across the nation has not been to increase the representation of former beneficiaries of affirmative action but instead to pursue the elimination of legacy admissions, targeting white enrollment instead of increasing Black enrollment. The policy of liberals is to remove the privileges of all alumni of the university including the Black ones. This exemplifies the truly laughable attempts to help African Americans by the liberal establishment. It is supposed to help me, that after three generations removed from an Alabama plantation and through providence and the work — which the word ‘hard’ does not begin to describe — of my forefathers. From sharecropper to community college to a public university, to now with my brother and I at Duke and Cornell.
Instead of being able to pass on legacy to my children at these elite institutions like all alumni before me, my children will be stripped of this status, and my family’s educational path will fall back a generation? When African Americans are finally on a more equal playing field, the solution of their supposed allies is to move the goalposts 10 yards further back for those of us who have reached great heights. While many white alumni have been able to accumulate wealth by sending generations to the same elite schools, as soon as that opportunity can start to be used by African Americans, liberals want to get rid of the system.
Not only is the left’s desired destruction of legacy admissions an attempt to pull the rug out from under the soles of African Americans, but it also forgets their policy goals. Legacy admissions supposedly decrease the amount of colored students when slots are being taken up by children of predominantly white alumni. But logic does not bear out this thought experiment. Affirmative action makes an incoming class more diverse and its elimination decreases Black and Hispanic enrollment. And legacy admissions are meant to give preference to the families of earlier classes, which were the last ones full of diverse students. . Would it not be reasonable to assume that legacy admissions could be an integral part of maintaining the diversity of past generations of Cornellians?
Instead of destroying core parts of our universities and their cherished traditions, what if there was a way to increase at least some diversity. Cornell could follow in the footsteps of Georgetown University but enlarge them. Georgetown in 2016 decided to give preferential admissions treatment to those descended from slaves sold by the university. What if Cornell decided to expand legacy admissions to the descendants of American slaves, those who, without past wrongs, might have established legacy here in their own right?
This policy would not violate the ban on affirmative action because it has nothing to do with race. And it is within the rights of a private institution to both have legacy admissions and determine the objective criteria to receive the privilege.
The solution to the death of affirmative action is not to detach the University from its history and alumni, but to build off that same history and tradition to make a better future.
Armand Chancellor is a fourth year student in the Brooks School of Public Policy. His fortnightly column The Rostrum focuses on the interaction of politics and culture at Cornell. He can be reached at [email protected].
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