Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

by Ijeoma Oluo

The Harvard board declined to institute the strict quotas on Jewish enrollment that Lowell wanted. Instead, they changed the admission criteria, opting instead to focus more on things like birthplace and family background. They also looked at subjective qualities: athletic ability and the vague “personality.”9 While Harvard touted these changes as steps to increase diversity, they really gave the school a way to quietly prioritize non-Jewish students by emphasizing traits and criteria, like athleticism, that they assumed Jewish students were less likely to have. They were able to hide bigoted admissions decisions behind a so-called broadening of their enrollment initiatives. (This debate continues today, as similar criteria have been shown to be disadvantageous to Asian American students at Harvard, leading many to believe that Asian American students are being discriminated against in the same way that Jewish students were. But the current debate is complicated by the fact that those criteria are advantageous to Black and Hispanic students, who have been and continue to be severely underrepresented at the college.) Lowell’s legacy