Watching Duke basketball this year, I've thought a lot about what it means to be elite.
To our teams, the term is the highest compliment. Year in and year out, our school has been fortunate enough to field players of singular excellence, elite because they are, as the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it, "the best of a class."
Most of us also would like to believe that Duke is an elite, even world-class academic institution. Statistically, it is. Duke's SAT range lies in the highest percentiles, its admissions rate is among the nation's most selective, and it sits comfortably ahead of half the Ivy League in the nefarious U.S. News and World Report rankings.
However, the word "elite" has another, more complicated definition. It can also mean, "the socially superior part of a society." If social superiority is conferred by education, then that is a worthy aspiration. But is social superiority what Duke seeks to create or merely what it recruits from?
An elite institution, in many ways, is sustained by its admissions office. U.S. News looks kindly on exclusivity, and superior professors cannot shine without superior students. Through years of effort, Duke has earned the right to be very choosy about which lucky high school seniors get acceptance letters.
But a quick look at Duke's admissions practices reveals a discouraging truth: Merit scholarships and guarantees of need aside, when it comes to admissions, Duke is not elite, but elitist.
Last year, The Chronicle discovered a private report to the Board of Trustees that revealed that one in five Duke students are here specifically because of the influence of the development office, which coordinates the University's fund-raising efforts, or the athletic department. In 2000, 99 of those were invited to attend the University specifically because Duke believed their parents would contribute financially.
The administration recommended a reduction in development numbers as a result. Unfortunately, my anger and humiliation at Duke's practices run far deeper than that.
One-third of the Class of 2005 came from private high schools, which make up about 11 percent of secondary schools in this country. No statistic shows how many come from the plush public schools of the nation's wealthiest suburbs, but if you add those, I suspect that number would climb well above the halfway mark.
Certainly, high schools that recruit from wealthy, educated populations generally turn out better-educated students. But is the potential of the middling students of such schools--who routinely wind up at Duke as a backup plan--superior to, for instance, the top 10 students in the public high school I attended, none of whom were admitted to my freshman class? Are they superior to every single student ever to graduate from high school in Red Bluff, Calif., except last year's Chronicle managing editor? I submit that they are not.
American progressives complain of a widening income gap, of continuing racial disparities and of persistent poverty. Their grievances all stand upon the same foundations as the $3 million palaces of listless Long Island teenagers--privilege, unadulterated and unabashed, protected by systems beyond the average person's control. The tax system is one of them. Education is another. If Duke is not actively working to dismantle the culture of privilege, then it is complicit in a system that is actively inimical to the progress of American society and to the fundamental fairness for which our nation purports to stand.
As for the University's own problems, it doesn't surprise me that Jamicia Lackey is frustrated that her fellow students think racism is dead. Half of them have probably never even known a black person. Most Duke students come from an insular, exclusive world that Duke's admissions practices actively protect. Most problems that Duke has--from race to housing to a lack of community on campus to even its stagnant national ranking--derive directly from those practices.
This administration does have a choice. It has a choice between creating a University of excellence and conscience, whose selectivity is based solely on academic merit, or it can remain a bastion of the most obnoxious form of discrimination, whose most potent "affirmative action" is for America's wealthy. Affirmative action for the wealthy must stop. Not only is it wrong, but also counter-productive.
After all, I bet grateful students make better future donors, too.
Jonas Blank, Trinity '01, is a former editor of Recess.
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