Christopher Connell ’71
Princeton Alumni Weekly
Excerpt: Even now, tens of thousands of high school seniors around the country and the world are taking SATs — optional since the pandemic — and polishing essays in hopes of walking the campus pathways with Foster and Gardner. Princeton in August tweaked the short essay questions on its application to comply with the Supreme Court ruling, including asking applicants to write about how “your lived experience has shaped you.”
In August, the Board of Trustees established an ad hoc committee to examine Princeton’s admission policies, guided by two key principles: merit-driven admissions and the imperative to attract students from all sectors of society, including underrepresented groups.
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Hugh E. Brennan
October 12, 2023
It is amusing how our best and brightest are willing to subvert the law in the interest of their ideology. I might say in service of their religion. Princeton undergraduate admissions are a limited and valuable commodity virtually guaranteeing entry to the elite of American society. The idea that immutable characteristics of race or ethnicity enter into the equation is subversive of republican citizenship. Justice Harlan’s courageous statement “our constitution is color-blind” in his famous Plessy v Ferguson dissent is, now in our increasingly diverse population, more important as the lodestar of our jurisprudence than ever. That American children of East and South Asian descent should be forced through an increasingly narrowed gate is as atrocious as when there were “too many” Jews. Somehow, a Korean grocer’s kid is tasked with making up for slavery and Jim Crow.
That the public has caught on to this vicious racial gerrymandering scheme is evident in the rapid increase in college applicants claiming indigenous or Hispanic identities. Should DNA tests be required along with essays?
Reflect that our great universities join the antebellum South, Nazi Germany, and apartheid South Africa in their obsession with race. Not very good company to keep.