Kayaking in John W. Weeks Bridge and clock tower over Charles River, Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Boston Massachusetts. (Photo by: Sergi Reboredo/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
I arrived at Harvard University in the September to December semester to undertake a fellowship at the Center for African Studies. The subsequent series of orientation events, receptions and ceremonies was a taste of Harvard’s status as a leading global intellectual metropolis.
About a week into the academic calendar, it was announced that the enrollment of African American students for the class of 2028 at Harvard College had dropped by four percentage points, from 18% in 2023, to 14% this year. Harvard’s value of multiculturalism had been dealt a blow.
As a South African, my first inclination was to dismiss this turn of events as a domestic dispute in the American household.
The drop was attributed to the Students for Fair Admissions, Inc (SFFA) v President & Fellows of Harvard College ruling, the so-called “Harvard affirmative action case”.
It centred on the claim that the race conscious admission processes of Harvard and University of North Carolina (UNC) were unconstitutional.
The case dragged on for almost a decade and a ruling was finally made on 29 June 2023. The supreme court majority ruling found that Harvard’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions process violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
This ruling overturned 45 years of supreme court precedent, particularly the Grutter v Bollinger 2003 ruling that race could be considered as a factor in the university admissions process, in the interests of maintaining diverse campuses.
Therefore, the court ruling is binding on all universities in the US. Hence, it is not only Harvard that has seen some demographic shifts of undergraduate enrolment in the current academic year.
The gravity, implications and effect of the case have been analysed and commented upon by those for, against, and ambivalent; among experts, practitioners, industry and civil society.
Even though I fall out of the scope of the case’s target population, I began to wonder about the potential anti-affirmative action slippery slope in years to come that could affect all levels of enrolment.
Being at Harvard is like having a golden circle ticket for a music concert of a top 10 international artist. No wonder the competition to be among the privileged few who have proximity to the Harvard centre stage.
To explore this historic bubble, that I had till recently only seen in movies or read about in books, I take several hour-long walks a week.
On one of the days I walked past Memorial Hall on Quincy Street, a tribute to the commitment of past Harvard alumni to the Union’s mission of slavery abolition.
After passing the Harvard Art Museums, I found myself outside the fancy-sounding Harvard Faculty Club – only to be surprised with an invitation there a week later, for the international visiting fellows and students’ welcome reception.
On my way back to the northwest corner of Harvard Yard, where I live adjacent to the Harvard Law School, I noticed the legendary Sanders Theatre at the Harvard Yard-facing entrance of Memorial Hall, where the likes of Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, Mel Gibson, Prince Charles, Denzel Washington and Whoopi Goldberg have graced the venue as guest speakers.
Just this past month, at student event level, my Graduate School of Arts and Sciences commencement event took place at the Sanders Theatre.
At an international level, the WEB. Du Bois Medal Ceremony organised by the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research was held there on 1 October.
The centre director, the renowned Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, who has been a Harvard faculty member for more than 30 years, and is known worldwide for his Emmy Award 2024-nominated genealogy and genetics series Finding Your Roots, presided over the ceremony.
Recipients of the Du Bois Medal included, among others, the first black and female vice-president of Columbia, Francia Elena Márquez Mina; LeVar Burton, popularly known for his role as Kunta Kinte in the acclaimed miniseries Roots; and Harvard women’s basketball coach for the past 40 years, Kathy Delaney Smit, who holds the highest winning record of all time in the Ivy League. She received a touching introduction by one of her former players, the current governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey.
Zimbabwean, London-based entrepreneur and philanthropist Strive Masiyiwa was also honoured. It is one thing to be impressed that he is among the few African billionaires, but it is awe-inspiring to know that through Higherlife Foundation and Delta Philanthropies, he and his wife Tsitsi, have donated scholarships to 300 000 young people.
It was with excitement that I witnessed one of my intellectual icons, Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, also being presented with a medal for her work as a civil rights advocate, legal scholar and black feminist legal theorist.
She is famously known for her formulation of the theory of intersectionality. Captured in her groundbreaking article Mapping the Margins (1991), which has been cited by almost 47 000 scholars, myself included; the theory has been employed worldwide in various disciplines, and social justice theory, policy and activism.
Coming back to the less glamorous issue of affirmative action. All my reading up on the case led me to a sudden interest in Harvard’s racial demographics. I wanted to understand what the percentages of the population groups look like in the aftermath of the SFFA case.
Prior to my internet survey of the case facts and timeline, I had lazily assumed that any challenges to affirmative action policies would usually be made by the majority population in a multicultural society or state, arguing that in attempts at diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) for minorities, the majority was subsequently discriminated against. Of course, South Africa has a unique inversion in this instance, as affirmative action pertains to DEI for the majority population.
But the complaint in question was brought by a group of Asian Americans under the auspices of the SFFA. Edward Blum, who founded the nonprofit legal advocacy organisation in 2014, is a conservative legal activist. The organisation advocates for the elimination of racial preferences in college admissions, as well as the scrapping of affirmative action and diversity mandates in businesses.
The complaint of the Asian American applicants was that they were disadvantaged in the Harvard admissions process based on a “personality criteria” that marked them down under the stereotypical view that Asians scored lower on personality traits such as likeability, kindness, courage, and respectability — in comparison to other American races that scored higher and were considered more personable.
This was despite Asian American applicants scoring objectively higher in the quantitative academic and extracurricular categories.
Moreover, the SFFA argued that the admissions process indicated a bias against Asian Americans (25% chance), and a disproportionate preference for black (95% chance) and Hispanic (75% chance) applicants. They contended that in the latter two demographics, race appeared to be the dominant admission consideration.
In other words, the complaint centred on a tension and tussle between Asian Americans and applicants of other races, including White applicants.
The SFFA protested that Asian American percentages have remained more or less at the same level for decades, held in place by a quota system, whereas they should have been higher.
As such, Asian American students found that they were competing among themselves for admission. The main contention here was that once race was factored in, some African American and Hispanic applicants surpassed Asian American students, because of affirmative action.
The university defended its race-conscious admissions process for nine years in the US district court and then before the US court of appeals for the first circuit, where both ruled in Harvard’s favour.
At a glance, it seems that Blum’s anti-affirmative action stance capitalised on the complaint of the Asian Americans as a Trojan Horse to bring the case before the conservative supreme court bench — the majority of which is well-known for its antagonistic posture toward affirmative action and DEI policies.
Blum’s mission was eventually and strategically accomplished.
Again, I can’t help think that these are American-family problems that are unique and particular to their context. But, from a precedent point of view, there is a potential slippery slope that arises, on both sides of the affirmative action conundrum, which is instructive for other contexts.
If we consider multiculturalism as an objective value that somehow balances the interests of the majority, minorities and all others in-between, I find that if this intricate and sometimes elusive balance is not struck, there could be slippage in at least two directions. On the left, one could find runaway liberalism and on the right hegemonic nationalism.
I think that the former Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) offers an apt example of the liberalist and nationalist slippery slopes that might in turn be instructive to the Harvard case.
Incidentally, I enrolled at RAU in 1996 to study towards a BCom (Law) at a time when the medium of instruction was Afrikaans, my fourth language. I chose this Afrikaans medium and Afrikaner nationalist/conservative university based on the advice that it offered the best commerce and law degrees in the country.
Over five years I gained exposure to what seemed like the birth pains of transformation at RAU. During my time at RAU there was an extensive transformation drive and early stage plans towards the restructuring of the higher education system.
One envisaged benefit of this move was to merge previously disadvantaged (black) institutions with the previously more privileged (white) institutions. As a result, in January 2005, RAU officially merged with the Technicon of the Witwatersrand (Wits Tech) in Auckland Park and Doornfontein, and the Vista University campuses in Soweto and East Rand. The new institution was renamed University of Johannesburg (UJ).
In the ensuing years, a mass white student exodus and migration occurred and the rumoured reason was the unsubstantiated assumption that the excellent standard of education would subsequently drop because of the erasure of the Afrikaans language, culture and values.
So, when in 2019 I returned to the former RAU, now UJ, for further studies, the first thing that struck me when I got to campus was the demographic change of the student population.
In a striking contrast to 20 years earlier, the majority of the student population was black/African, with smatterings of coloured, Indian and Asian students. My immediate question to myself was, “Where did all the white students go?” RAU had transformed so comprehensively that I could not reconcile the look and feel of my former alma mater to the present institution.
This, I find, is the slippery slope towards the polar opposite of extreme nationalism. It is perhaps a demonstration, not of multiculturalism, but instead of how far the liberalist pursuits of equality, diversity and inclusion may overshoot the mark. This could result in the almost total exclusion of the previous hegemonic group or majority population and therefore undermine the very diversity that was envisaged in the first place.
I later found out where at least some of the annual incoming white student population migrated to. No, not Australia or New Zealand. They seem to be concentrated at the University of Pretoria, University of the Free State, North-West University, Stellenbosch University and the private Afrikaans institutions Akademia University and Soltech Technical College.
Rather than integrate, the Afrikaner students migrated because of the slippery assumption that Afrikaner nationalism equates with academic excellence.
When one considers the new anti-affirmative action status quo within the micro context of Harvard University, what the plaintiff Asian Americans/Asians have managed to achieve, is not an automatic increase in the percentage of their population (at least in the short term) based on the scrapping of the race criterion.
As of 2024, their percentage remains at 37% in comparison to the 2023 enrolment. Instead, the elimination of race as an admission criterion has resulted in an increase of the white American number, at the cost to other races, including their own.
What the SFFA has so far achieved is a decrease in the African American minority number, stagnation of the Asian American minority number, and an increase in the white majority groups’ number. I won’t claim that this would thus further white nationalist interests at Harvard, but it could result in a slippery slope that may create fertile ground for exclusionary nationalism.
Early signs of this nationalist sentiment can be found in former president Donald Trump’s campaign’s reaction to the SFFA ruling: “This is a great day for America … People with extraordinary ability and everything else necessary for success, including future greatness for our country, are finally being rewarded. This is the ruling everyone was waiting and hoping for and the result was amazing … It will also keep us competitive with the rest of the world. Our greatest minds must be cherished and that’s what this wonderful day has brought. We’re going back to all merit-based — and that’s the way it should be!”
Note the “great day for America”; “greatness of our country”; “competitive with the rest of the world”. Don’t these notions sound strikingly similar to the loaded, dog-whistle, and coded slogan “Make America Great Again” (MAGA)?
I thus maintain that unbridled affirmative action could lead to a complete change of the constitution and demographics of the population in that particular context, and consequently a change in values, culture, a disconnect from history, institutional knowledge and memory. As was the case with RAU. This might be for better or worse.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the resistance to affirmative action on grounds of colour blindness, meritocracy, equality, non-discrimination, etcetera, could result in an nationalism that upholds, foregrounds and promotes the interests of the hegemonic majority to the exclusion of others. Harvard fought valiantly over the past decade to try and prevent this slippery slope. A luta continua!
Sarah Setlaelo is a writer and holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Johannesburg. She is a visiting fellow at the Harvard University Center for African Studies.