Dont quit pictures12/27/2023 ![]() Son Hing spent the following year going door-to-door, soliciting donations. She was concerned about environmental issues, and so she responded to a classified ad placed by Greenpeace, which gave her a job. Why do faculty speak so differently about things that happen in their house as opposed to everyone else’s? Understanding this dynamic might help us begin to answer the question at the root of the inequities in American higher education: How can a system run by liberals be so conservative?Ī fter finishing college in Ontario, Leanne Son Hing wanted to take a year off before graduate school. Faculty have pushed colleges to divest from South Africa and make their campuses more sustainable, and they have vocally advocated for reforming the criminal-justice system. ![]() But academics often take positions that put them in conflict with their employer. It’s natural not to bite the hand that feeds you. One obvious explanation is that they teach at these colleges. Like Katzman, most professors are happy to decry the unfairness of higher education as a system but unwilling to assign blame to any individual institution. ![]() That’s pretty much how it is across the board at elite schools. Conspicuously absent from the faculty’s proposals was any language holding Stanford responsible for the fact that 14 percent of its students come from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution. But the measures are milquetoast: improve data collection by requiring applicants to list who read their application, study the effect of admissions on philanthropic support, and “initiate surveys to track the distribution of income and wealth levels for parents and undergraduates.” Improving data collection and surveying students is hardly a rallying cry for urgent social change. Last year, Stanford’s Faculty Senate adopted a set of proposals ostensibly designed to correct for it. They all know that the influence of wealth in college admissions is a problem. She didn’t seem overly bothered when I showed her data that 25 percent of its early-action admits were legacies. One told me that her college’s president was a first-generation college student who’d significantly expanded the school’s efforts to recruit first-gen kids. A couple told me that their college was not guilty of the most egregious misbehaviors. Several told me that we spent too much time talking about elite schools, even though most focused their life’s work on the study of elites. About as many (2 percent) voted for Jill Stein (class of 1973) as for Donald Trump.Īt the end of each interview, I’d ask these professors what they thought about the culpability of their own college. At Harvard, 73 percent of faculty members reported voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. At New England colleges, the ratio is 28 to one. Samuel Abrams, a political scientist at Sarah Lawrence College, found that among professors, liberals outnumber conservatives by about six to one. As a group, college faculty are about the most left-leaning professionals in the United States. I’ve interviewed many of the most outspoken critics of American higher education. In this regard, there are lots of John Katzmans. Katzman paused for a long time before answering. Why, I finally asked Katzman, was he so disparaging of the organizations that run the SAT and ACT but not of the colleges that base much of their admissions decisions on the exams? After all, those scores mean something only because colleges say they do. In a 1999 interview on Frontline, Katzman famously called the SAT “just bullshit.” It’s difficult to imagine someone who has more vividly illustrated the advantage of wealth in college admissions than he has.Īs our conversations progressed, a question began to nag at me. ![]() Part of what makes Katzman so compelling is that while he taught kids how to master the SAT, he simultaneously emerged as one of the test’s harshest critics-arguing that it didn’t measure very much and that whatever it did measure either was associated with wealth or could simply be bought. He founded Princeton Review, the test-prep behemoth, in the early 1980s, and has founded several other start-ups since. Katzman is astonishingly knowledgeable about the American educational system. I’d sit in my office, try to visualize the beauty of Long Island’s southeastern shore, and listen. Katzman usually walked along the beach near his house in the Hamptons while we spoke. D uring the peak of the pandemic, John Katzman and I had a standing phone date at 7:30 on Friday mornings.
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