How committed is Harvard University to ensuring a diverse student body? Not very, according to critics of the school’s decision to rescind its offer of admission to Michelle Jones. Jones applied to its Ph.D. program in American studies last year and was rewarded with a full scholarship by the department’s admissions committee, but that decision was overruled by the university’s administration after it learned more about her background.
Until last month, Jones, a black woman, was in prison for the murder of her 4-year-old son more than two decades ago. Jones says the child was a product of nonconsensual sex Jones had when she was 14 with a high school senior and that her mother beat her as a result of the pregnancy. She was subsequently placed in group homes and foster homes. Because of good behavior in prison, which included earning a college degree as well as conducting extensive academic research and publication, Jones didn’t have to serve the remaining 30 years of her sentence.
Though the committee was aware of Jones’ general circumstances, they suggested that she had not been clear about her involvement in the crime “to the point of misrepresentation.” While Jones has acknowledged beating the child and then leaving him alone for days as well as burying the body (which has never been found), her personal statement to the admissions committee said merely that she left him alone and he died. One of the faculty members noted that, as scholars, “honest and full narration is an essential part of our enterprise.”
Regardless, critics of the decision, including the Marshall Project (a nonprofit journalism group that discovered internal memos about Harvard’s decision), have suggested not only that Harvard should be embracing people like Jones who have overcome their past but also that by not doing so, Harvard has once again proved itself a bastion of elitism, not to mention racism.
“Harvard’s commitment to diversity was always a farce,” reads the headline of an article by Crystal Marie Fleming in Vox. Fleming writes, “As a scholar of racial oppression, an African-American Harvard alumna and a past president of the Graduate Student Council at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, I’m unsurprised that regressive forces within and outside of the university attempted to sabotage the career of a black woman scholar. Time and time again, Harvard — despite a superficial commitment to diversity — chooses to turn its back on the most vulnerable groups in our society.”
There are, after all, plenty of deserving minority students to fill the university’s freshman class and its graduate universities without admitting people convicted of violent crimes.
In a piece for the New Yorker, Nathan Heller writes, “Universities like to think of themselves as beacons of enlightenment. This week, though, Harvard staked out a future in the dark.” At Reason magazine’s website, Mike Riggs compared the Michelle Jones case to Harvard’s 1850 decision to admit the first black medical students in the country and then rescind the offer because the students didn’t look like other people at Harvard. “Just as there’s no reason why a former drug dealer can’t get a cosmetology license, there’s no good argument for precluding an adult woman 20 years removed from a crime she committed from being a humanities professor.”
Harvard, of course, has every right to accept and reject applicants without explanation. (In 1995, it rescinded the admission of Gina Grant, a white girl who killed her mother after years of what she and her sister say was consistent physical abuse. Grant had not acknowledged the situation in her application.) But the idea that the college must accept Jones in order to prove its commitment to diversity seems silly and a little offensive.
There are, after all, plenty of deserving minority students (and students who have risen above difficult circumstances) to fill the university’s freshman class and its graduate universities without admitting people convicted of violent crimes.
It would be absurd here to cover the lengths to which Harvard has gone to increase diversity on campus, from its affirmative-action policies and recruitment efforts to the fact that families with income below $65,000 pay no tuition to the resources on campus to help racial minority students feel welcome and ensure that they complete their studies to the separate black graduation it held this year to celebrate the accomplishments of its African-American students.
Nor is it impossible to find students who have come from hardship and gained admission to the school. From Alex Chivescu (who was a ward of the state of Michigan from the time he was 8 years old and since graduating has become an advocate for foster-care reforms) to Ben Danielson (a doctor at a Seattle children’s hospital who spent time in foster care as a child and was in trouble with the law before coming to Harvard) to Esther Mulder (who was in foster care from the time she was 7 months old and eventually attended Harvard Law School), the school has hardly turned its back on those from tough backgrounds.
Michelle Jones will be starting her studies at NYU this fall. And observers may wish her all the luck in the world. But Harvard, for its part, need have no regrets.