Inclusion

As an international student, I came to Princeton sensitive to the concept of diversity in admissions — a uniquely American project. When Shirley Tilghman, during our opening exercises, listed several different Princeton groups that now seem typical — athletes, legacies, low-income — and told us “you [all] belong,” I was taken aback. Was there any reason for us not to feel we belong? As I spent more time at Princeton, I did realize that holistic admission criteria based partially on background would create an insidious and ever-present question of why someone “got in,” as if the answer were reducible to one diversity category. On this hinges a slippery, elusive notion of fairness that gets us all worked up. Is it fairer to correct for differences in opportunity, or is it fairer to standardize acceptance based on narrowly-defined academic criteria?

The British university system represents the academic-only option. In reference to the American system, an Oxford recruiter told me and a room of applicants, “I don’t care how many children you save in your free time. I just want to know how smart you are.” I was in the midst of pages of American college essay drafts, and this woman’s no-nonsense, straight-laced attitude indulged my cynicism. Research on student life, though, revealed that some Oxford colleges had not accepted a non-white applicant in several years, and that the number of students at one college from the entire country of Scotland was less than the number of students from one affluent county in Southern England. When charged by the media for perpetuating some of the worst income inequality and social immobility in the developed world, the Oxford response was to shrug shoulders and claim that Oxford’s lack of diversity merely reflects the realities of British society.

The Oxford response struck me as unacceptable, if efficiently “meritocratic.” In my mind, equal access to education is the only way to create equal life chances. If a publicly-funded university skirts this responsibility in the United Kingdom, the fact that tiny, privately-funded universities like Princeton take righting national injustices on their shoulders is nothing short of noble. Sure, affirmative action can never be implemented perfectly, but the fact that Ivy League universities at least try is impressive.

However, in many ways, the University’s moves toward diversity are more reactionary than progressive. Instead of being as inclusive and representative of the population as possible, diversity on campus seems to target specific groups deemed important. As the categorization of different groups as marginalized changes in the public conscience, the University scrambles to demonstrate inclusion of that group. Anti-Semitism, racial segregation and gender inequality all had their darkest times, and recognizing discriminated groups as an important part of the Princeton community has happened in succession, but never at once. Asian-Americans have just recently received belated recognition for years of societal marginalization, and we are now dealing with how that factors into level of representation at universities. There’s no way to guess what is next, but I can imagine that there will eventually be remorse for some of the prevailing attitudes directed toward Muslims. Even if you take the broader picture out of the equation, students of a certain religion and of certain nationalities — such as a Muslim Yemeni — at any American university are automatically subject to regular FBI interviews and monitoring during the course of their studies. Of course, it is not possible to guess how the trends in diversity discourse will progress. However, it is unfortunate that inclusion happens on a case-by-case and piecemeal basis, when claims for ethnic representation are essentially just different permutations of the same problem.

Part of the problem is that we do not really have a metric for diversity. This is a more serious charge than saying that diversity is “tokenistic”; we don’t even know what we’re looking for. A glance at the “diversity” table of the Class at 2016 admissions statistics reveals a mess. Diversity in nationality is conflated with race. Anyone who is both a U.S. citizen and white is not “diverse” — take, for example, a naturalized Georgian immigrant. Some racial categories seem to count only American citizens; others do not. Large ethnic regions are completely ignored. There is no mention of Arab students. Where do they fit into this? On top of this, there is no mention of socioeconomic diversity.

We fear rationalizing diversity with a quota system because it makes a vague and yet controversial commitment to diversity too rigidly institutionalized. Instead, we could aim to keep inclusion and representation as a whole in mind instead of concentrating on certain target groups. We should continue to evaluate applicants holistically and consider each person’s background on a more case-by-case basis. As far as I understand, we may already do this, but we do not articulate it as such. Most importantly, we should not only correct for injustices with the most political and popular attention but also consider diversity in all its multitudes.

William Beacom is a sophomore from Calgary, Canada. He can be reached at wbeacom@princeton.edu.