Inventing Discrimination: Helen Andrews' Harvard Myth

By Jason Morganbesser

Helen Andrews, public intellectual and contributor to Compact Magazine of “The Great Feminization” fame, argues in a new essay that Harvard has flouted the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action, continuing to discriminate against Caucasians. Further, she argues that since the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) case, Harvard has actually become more discriminatory, as the ruling purportedly forced Harvard to begin favoring Asians as well as African-Americans and Hispanics over Caucasians.

Andrews is wrong. She dishonestly cherry-picks data, misinterprets the data she does analyze, and appears not to understand how Harvard’s admissions process actually works. Arguably, Andrews misinterprets this data to justify a right-wing Woke-ism that mimics the worst impulses of the left.

Andrews bases her argument that Harvard discriminates against Caucasians on a statistical analysis of Harvard’s demographics. She claims that Caucasians “were 47 percent of freshmen in the class of 2025 and approximately 31 percent of the classes of 2028 and 2029.” This is false: the Class of 2025 was approximately 44 percent Caucasian, while the Class of 2029 is approximately 35.5 percent Caucasian.

Strangely, Andrews also claims that “Black and Latino shares [of Harvard College classes] have stayed roughly the same,” an obviously fictitious statement. African-American enrollment has dropped from 15.9 percent of students in the Class of 2025 to 11.5 percent of the Class of 2029 (a 29 percent decrease), while Hispanic enrollment has gone from 12.5 percent of students to 11.0 percent (a 12 percent decrease). These are significant drops.

But the most glaring error in Andrews’ article is not her defective research of publicly available facts, but her failure as a demographic statistician. She determines the percentage of Harvard College that is Caucasian by subtracting the number of students of non-Caucasian races from one hundred, an odd methodology that she calls “a matter of inference.”

This is a terrible way of measuring demographics. Harvard double (or even triple) counts multiracial students as members of all of the races with which they identify. The percentage of young Asian people who are multiracial is extremely high, somewhere around 36 percent. Around a third of these multiracial Asians are also some other non-Caucasian race. Around 12 percent of Hispanics are also African-American. Thus, around 6.5 percent of students are double-counted in Andrews’ statistics. Adding this to our earlier 35.5 percent number, we get approximately 42 percent of Harvard students who are exclusively Caucasian.

Andrews’ statistical methodology also does not take into account multiracial Caucasian students. Around two-thirds of multiracial Asians, or 24 percent of young Asian people more generally, are partially Caucasian.¹ About 8 percent of African-Americans also identify as Caucasian.² While statistics are slightly less clear for Hispanics, around a quarter of American Hispanic marriages are to Caucasians, making it a reasonable estimate that perhaps a quarter of young Hispanics are partially Caucasian. If one adds these numbers to our 42 percent number calculated above, we get a total of 55.7 percent of Harvard’s students who are Caucasian. If we perform the same exercise with respect to the Class of 2025, we get around 56 percent to 59 percent.³

In other words, the percentage of Harvard that is Caucasian has remained stable since the end of affirmative action, exactly what researchers thought would happen and exactly what had previously happened at selective colleges in both California and Washington in the 1990s.

It makes sense that Andrews’ math does not add up. SFFA prevents Harvard admissions officers from accessing information about students’ race. Immediately prior to the admissions review of the Class of 2029, Harvard imposed even more restrictive policies, including forbidding interviewers to mention race in their comments to admissions officers—even if the student mentions their racial identity in the interview.

Thus, it is not just that Harvard cannot take race into account; with respect to most students, Harvard’s admissions department cannot even know the race of applicants. Whatever the numbers may appear to imply (and in this case, they do not imply what Andrews is arguing), it is impossible for Harvard’s admissions department to receive the information which Andrews postulates they are using to discriminate against Caucasians.

Of course, this does not mean that it is impossible for Harvard to covertly discriminate in general. For instance, students may skirt regulations by providing information about the way in which their race affected their lives, something Harvard has wrongly promoted. This is a reasonable worry and absolutely should be investigated. However, it clearly does not impact the success of Caucasians vis-a-vis Asians, both of whom are obviously not attempting to covertly inform schools of their race.

There are also reasonable concerns that admissions officers may judge what race someone is based upon their name. However, this would not distinguish between mixed race Caucasians and non-mixed race Caucasians. If Andrews is objecting to non-mixed race Caucasians being favored over mixed-race Caucasians, the discrimination claims she makes are both theoretically and practically impossible.

The rest of the article is humorously bad. Andrews attacks Indian-American doctors because a single Indian-American doctor performed two medically necessary hysterectomies. The fact that these two hysterectomies were medically necessary is acknowledged in the article, making Andrews’ argument more incoherent than misleading. She argues that the growth of enrollment in Southern schools compared to those in the West and Northeast is a form of “White flight” from Asians, in spite of the fact that much of Southern schools’ growth since SFFA has come from non-Caucasian applicants – in particular, Southeast Asian, African-American, and Hispanic applicants. She also includes an entire argument about youth culture based solely on a single Twitter comment. How can a supposedly serious public intellectual write something so dishonest?

The answer can be found in the first paragraph. Andrews argues, “Meritocracy is like free trade. Countries or classes embrace it when it advantages them and view it more skeptically when they are no longer on top.” This, followed by a pseudo-conspiratorial portrayal of a “self-serving” “new class” of “non-WASPs” who cynically promoted meritocracy in the 1960s so that they could “swe[ep] through Washington in the Clinton years,” is an apt portrayal of Andrews’ political outlook. There is no room, in Andrews’ view, for American ideals or institutions or values. In fact, there is no room for any values. Where our founders saw universal ideals, Andrew sees only groups seeking to win power for themselves.

This is the root of Andrews’ misinterpretations: a failure of vision. She cannot understand demographic statistics, because to her, terms like “WASP,” “Asian,” or “Jew” signify merely discrete variables fighting for limited resources. Because she cares only about representing her group, she cannot maintain even a pretense of intellectual honesty. It is a shame that her attitude, a morally relativist identity politics that has long been the bête noire of conservatives since William F. Buckley Jr., is considered by some a serious form of “conservative” intellectual analysis. It is a shame that statistical honesty and truth seem to be increasingly disregarded in favor of a Nietzschean understanding of truth and morality as mere surface-level justifications for more “sincere” self-interests. It is my hope that this rejection of the Western tradition upon which our movement and our nation were built will one day be understood as a momentary aberration completely unrepresentative of American conservatism.

1. It is extremely likely that an even higher percentage of Asian Harvard students are partially Caucasian than this, as multiracial Caucasian-Asian couples tend to be significantly wealthier on average than either Asian or Caucasian couples.

2. A much higher percentage of young African-Americans identify as Caucasian than older African-Americans, making it likely that a higher percentage of Harvard students are Caucasian. Of course, this only strengthens our argument.

3. The reason for this discrepancy is that it depends on whether we assume that 36 percent of Asians in the Class of 2025 were multiracial. Only ~20 percent of students in their mid-20s, which the Class of 2025 is at this point, are multiracial. Using this statistic, 56 percent of the Class of 2025 would have been Caucasian, while using the 36 percent statistic, 59 percent of the Class of 2025 would have been Caucasian.