Affirmative Action: Culture as Capital

The Crimson published an opinion piece by Sarah Siskind that has been attracting a lot of controversy lately for Siskind's treatment of affirmative action. What's been getting Siskind so much press has been this section:

Race-based affirmative action attempts to target these groups: the discriminated against, the poor, and those with unique experiences and intellectual merits. However, affirmative action is fundamentally flawed because it uses race instead of targeting these groups themselves. Less academically qualified applicants should be treated as such, unless they come from poorer households and therefore do not have access to the same amount of resources as other applicants. However, this would be class-based affirmative action, not race-based.

Helping those with primarily low academic qualifications into primarily academic institutions makes as much sense as helping the visually impaired become pilots. How would you feel if you were assured before going into surgery that your surgeon was the beneficiary of affirmative action in medical school? I do not see why higher academic institutions should lower their standards for admission.

Siskind's piece discourages the use of affirmative action on the principle that it uses race to target the "discriminated against, the poor, and those with unique experiences and intellectual merits" instead of the aforementioned groups themselves. Siskind argues that, as a result, admission boards use race as a proxy for determining the specified groups, which is "fundamentally flawed" in her opinion. Even leaving the question of race out of this question, I think we need to consider one assumption Siskind makes that I believe is flawed after reading Lisa Stampnitzky's article, "How Does 'Culture' Become 'Capital'? Cultural and Institutional Struggles over 'Character and Personality' at Harvard" (Sociological Perspectives, 2006). Namely, Siskind assumes that more selective colleges are primarily academic, when that is not necessarily the case. 

Developments in Harvard's admissions policies in the mid-twentieth century began a trend in the field of selective higher education; selective schools became more likely to use a holistic selection process, considering multiple academic and personal factors in their evaluation of applicants (qtd. in Stampnitzky 476). Lowering the academic guidelines to allow for people (no matter the race) of qualifying character or personality traits may simply be the result of incorporating "institutionalized cultural capital" (Stampnitzky 475).

Siskind's third target group, "those with unique experiences and intellectual merits" should be separate groups. Perhaps affirmative action is about accepting someone with unique experiences (not conditional on intellectual merits). The hope is that unique experiences are not mutually exclusive of intellectual merits; after all, doesn't intellectual curiosity generally lead you to unique experiences?

Finally, I'd like to address Siskind's point on intellect:

Finally, what about intellect? Perhaps our universities are in dire need of diversity of intelligence. Counter to most stereotypes, ugliness is highly correlated with poor intellectual performance by traditional measures, though I don’t know how many qualified applicants will be willing to put that down on their application.

Though she meant it satirically, I wonder if there isn't more truth to her statement than she realizes. Perhaps Harvard (or any other selective school) is indeed looking for diversity of intelligence. After all, the Harvard admissions office in the 1950s "expressed fears that academic achievement might be linked to poor character, neuroticism, conformity, and effeminacy, among other detrimental qualities" (Stampnitzky 472). They didn't want to fill Harvard exclusively with brains; they wanted bodies full of heart, mind, soul, and other intangible qualities.

Harvard admissions officers in the mid-twentieth century were looking to produce national leaders and worried that intelligence (as we narrowly measure it) was not a good proxy to determine those candidates. These admissions officers were looking for a mix of students with "character and personality", the broad interpretation of which allowed them to to "counter the challenge/threat of academic meritocracy yet also allowing them to claim to speak from within the discourse of merit themselves. Their strategy and the adoption lead to the rise of culture as capital within the field of elite education.