Harvard admissions dean William Fitzsimmons on trial

He goes fishing for blacks and  seems to think it is just coincidence that Asians get a raw deal

It was early 2013 and William Fitzsimmons, the legendary admissions dean at Harvard, was agitated. In fact, he was furious.

The reason? A New York Times column by David Brooks highlighting the implication by conservative Ron Unz that Harvard sets a quota for the number of Asian-American students it admits each year.

Fitzsimmons, 74, had spent his entire career pushing Harvard to become more diverse by every measure possible. The suggestion that he was purposely limiting the number of Asian-Americans hit him like an insult. So in the wee hours of a Saturday morning, Fitzsimmons fired off not one but four possible rebuttals to Brooks’s column to his staff for review.

“There will never be limits on excellence at Harvard,” he wrote in one draft. “We will continue to seek the nation’s and the world’s most promising students from all ethnic, cultural and religious heritages.”

Brooks anticipated the blowback. “You’re going to want to argue with Unz’s article all the way along,” his column said. “But it’s potentially ground-shifting.”

The column was prophetic; the ground has shifted. Six years later, Harvard finds itself defending its admissions practices against a group claiming Harvard illegally discriminates against qualified Asian-American applicants. The trial has become one of the most closely followed events in higher education this decade. The case will likely reach the US Supreme Court, and the outcome could influence admissions and affirmative action policies nationwide.

In many ways, it is Fitzsimmons’ own legacy that is on trial, for he has run the Harvard undergraduate admissions operation for 32 years. He graduated from the school in 1967, in an era when it largely catered to the children of the East Coast elite. Today Harvard awards free tuition to all low-income families and scours small towns in middle America for new talent. Fitzsimmons himself has become something of an institution, the personification of the modern philosophy that determines which lucky 2,000 students each year receive acceptance letters.

“I’m proud that Harvard over time . . . has really opened the gates of Harvard in all kinds of ways to a much larger range of talent,” Fitzsimmons said from the stand in federal district court last week, in a scene that would likely have felt unfathomable to him just a few years ago.

Four days in a row, Fitzsimmons took the stand to explain, in granular detail, the techniques he has honed over the years to pick a freshman class from thousands of sterling applicants. And how all of it is intertwined with his own blue-collar upbringing.

“Diversity adds an essential ingredient,” Fitzsimmons told the court. Race is just one factor among many considered, he said. He called the Harvard of today a “profoundly better place” than it was during his time, because of the diversity his admissions team has brought to campus.

As the son of a Weymouth gas station owner, Fitzsimmons is living testament to the power of a Harvard education to change a person’s lot in life.

Growing up just 20 miles from Cambridge, he had never heard about Harvard until he read about it in an encyclopedia. Now he golfs with millionaires. The summer after he graduated, he had to get a bank loan to travel to Europe with classmates. Now he jets around the world on Harvard’s dime.

Growing up, Fitzsimmons hung out with his parents’ friends at the gas station, and with the boys at Archbishop Williams, the Catholic high school he attended. He recently celebrated his 50th Harvard reunion with friends at the Kennebunkport home of Craig Stapleton, the former US ambassador to France.

But talk to people who have known Fitz, as everyone calls him, since he was an 18-year-old with a severe crew cut, and they’ll tell you he’s still the same man. He has traded the buzzed hair for graying temples and wire-framed spectacles, but he has managed to guard the humility, fairness, and boyish sense of humor that have been his since childhood. He has no children of his own, but he is the grandfather of nearly 40 classes of Harvard freshmen.

The trial has also shown him to be a savvy operator, balancing his dedication to equal access, even as Harvard grants an extra boost to athletes and the children of donors and alumni.

Fitzsimmons often enlists friends to help with admissions recruiting, and his 1967 classmate Tom Ridge, the former Pennsylvania governor, calls him “an egalitarian soul.” Ridge said they joke about the “Erie quota,” meaning whether the school will accept any students from the small town where Ridge grew up in public housing.

Last year Fitzsimmons called him excitedly, Ridge said, because a Somali student from Erie had been admitted. Fitzsimmons wanted Ridge to call and welcome him to the class. “I thought, that is very reflective of how he views his responsibility to build as diverse a class as possible,” Ridge said.

Fitzsimmons is the rare 74-year-old admissions dean who still takes recruiting trips. Every year he goes to West Virginia with his counterpart from Yale.

“I just remember myself feeling tired . . . and watching Bill’s energy and being truly amazed at Bill’s ability to do that,” said the Yale dean, Jeremiah Quinlan. The pair always stop at Weaver’s, a diner on the Maryland border, for pie. Quinlan said he admires Fitzsimmons’ encyclopedic memory and knowledge about the country.

“He connects the larger demographic and socioeconomic issues of the country to the admissions work that we do,” he said.

Fitzsimmons is also aware of the sway his post gives him over the admissions industry. In the early 2000s, he was part of an effort to reduce the influence of standardized tests. Before that, he was known to rail against expensive SAT tutors and academic coaching.

“We want to get the word out more clearly that tests should not be used in a rigid way,” Fitzsimmons said in 2008 at a conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which had asked him to lead a panel examining testing issues. Many colleges, though not Harvard, today are test-optional, and the role of such assessments is indeed diminished.

“There’s no other way to say it, but if Fitz is on something, or leads something, people pay attention,” said Joyce Smith, who is now chief executive officer of that association.

Fitzsimmons’ pioneering efforts have not always been successful. In 2006, Harvard did away with a policy known as “early action,” which allowed students to apply early to one school and commit to it, if admitted. Fitzsimmons said it was his attempt to quell the “college admissions frenzy,” which was particularly bad for low-income students because it lessened their chance of receiving financial aid.

But when few other elite schools followed suit, Harvard reinstated the policy after Fitzsimmons said he was losing diverse applicants to other schools, who were locking them in.

When the international recruitment market was just beginning in the 2000s, he traveled to China to tout Harvard as a place for scholars of math and science, not just humanities.

“There are no quotas, no limits on the number of Chinese students we might take,” he told a group of students at Beijing No. 4 High School in 2008. “We know there are very good students from China not applying now. I hope to get them in the pool to compete.”

He was something of a diplomat at the time as well, meeting with Chinese officials to persuade them to offer the SAT in mainland China instead of just Hong Kong or Taiwan so students who couldn’t afford that trip could apply.

That sort of international hob-nobbing is a long way from where he started. When Fitzsimmons was a junior admissions officer at Harvard, he was assigned to recruit from the Boston Public Schools. Michael Contompasis, the longtime headmaster at Boston Latin School, met Fitzsimmons back then. Over the years, they negotiated over hundreds of BLS students who applied to Harvard.

Recently, when Contompasis was back at BLS as interim headmaster, he pushed for a student who had grown up in the Mildred C. Hailey Apartments housing project in Jamaica Plain and overcome major obstacles in his academic rise. Harvard was hesitant, but Contompasis won.

“Fitz, over the years, obviously has developed an inner sense of ‘Is this kid going to make it here, does he or she have the wherewithal to go through four years at Harvard?’ ”

Fitz was not the only Harvard admissions employee to take the stand during the trial, but he was the most fluent, speaking with the ease that comes from decades of experience. But even as he fends off the charges of unfairness — charges he considers manifestly unfair — he admits there is always more to do.

“It’s a work in progress, we always feel we can do better,” he said. Soon applications will begin to flood in for the class of 2023.

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A Florida State University student who allegedly threw chocolate milk on people at an FSU College Republicans tabling event Tuesday was charged with battery

“FSU expects each member of the community to embrace the values of civility and ethical conduct and obey the law,” the school tweeted Friday. “Regarding Tuesday’s incident, the individual was identified, arrested and charged with battery.”

Police records obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation identified the student who allegedly threw the drink as Shelby Shoup and stated she turned herself in Thursday.

“[Kathryn] Judge [the complainant] advised that she was volunteering at a Republican party table on Landis Green when she was approached by a female who began yelling at her and then pouring chocolate milk on her on two separate occasions,” police records said. “Judge had a large chocolate milk stain on her shirt.”

“Her given name is Kathryn but she goes by Daisy,” FSU College Republicans told TheDCNF.

The record added that chocolate milk was also thrown on a male individual.

A video captured by Courtland Culver and shared by FSU College Republicans on Thursday captured an individual throwing her drink on a person off-camera.

“You are supporting Nazis,” she said.

Another person asked whether she was supporting communism.

“Yeah, I fucking am. Fuck you, man,” the woman responded to the student before throwing her drink.

Toward the end of the video, the individual kicked a Ron DeSantis sign.

DeSantis is the Republican gubernatorial candidate for Florida.

“We are glad that no serious physical harm came to our Vice-Membership Chair, and will always stand up for the basic rights and respect that every one of members is endowed,” FSU College Republicans said in a statement Thursday.

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Why students feel so vulnerable

Encouraging the young to see themselves as fragile has had dire consequences.

FRANK FUREDI   

I wasn’t at all surprised to read reports this week about more and more university students seeking mental-health support. Apparently the number has increased by more than 50 per cent in the past five years in the UK. My research suggests that young people’s quest for identity has become entwined with ideas of emotional fragility and vulnerability. They are encouraged by contemporary culture to interpret their problems through the prism of mental health. This is how it works.

The new language of harm

In the summer I gave a lecture to a lively audience of student counsellors in Galway, Ireland. After my talk, a counsellor from Dublin asked me if I had a solution to the problem of students who cut themselves and then flaunt their scars and compete with one another about who has experienced the greatest pain. That self-inflicted scars are now a kind of identity surprised me. What didn’t surprise me, however, was the fact that the quest for identity has become so destructive.

I had no solution to offer the counsellor. But one thing I know for sure, as a result of having worked in higher education for almost 50 years, is that to understand the destructive turn of the quest for identity, we have to look at society’s obsession with the supposed vulnerability of young people.

It was in the late 1990s, as I was carrying out research for my book The Culture of Fear, that I first noted the dread surrounding the state of mind of students and young people in general. A new discourse was emerging – one that focused on ‘student fragility’ and which suggested that many undergraduates lack the capacity to deal with the uncertainties of campus life.

This new discourse spoke to an expansion of the meaning of ‘harm’. The fairly routine challenges involved in becoming an undergraduate – whether it’s making the transition from school life to college life or dealing with homesickness – came to be reframed as threats to students’ wellbeing. The presumption that students were unable to cope with life on campus led to calls for the provision of more and more mental-health support from university authorities. The term ‘vulnerable student’ started to be used. It gave an impression of students not only as vulnerable, but as being at greater risk from everyday life than their peers who went into the world of work rather than to university.

Because the idea of the fragile student is now so widely accepted, it is easy to overlook the fact that it is a relatively recent development. Today, the term ‘vulnerable student’ is used in everyday conversation, both within and without the university. And yet a search of the LexisNexis database of English-language newspapers failed to return any references to ‘vulnerable students’ during the 1960s and the 70s. There were 13 references in the 1980s, of which seven referred to children in schools. The first reference to vulnerable university students appeared in The Times (London) in 1986, the New York Times in 1991, and the Guardian in 1995. There was then a huge increase in references to vulnerable students in the latter part of the 1990s, and a veritable explosion in the first decade of the 21st century.

In the year 2015 to 2016, there were 1,407 references to vulnerable students. Even taking into account the likelihood that LexisNexis has expanded the sources in its database, the increase in allusions to vulnerable students is still remarkable. It is a striking illustration of how university students are conceived of today – as weak and lacking in traditional coping mechanisms.

The discovery of the ‘vulnerable student’ has played a significant role in the transformation of once unexceptional aspects of campus life into terrifying experiences. The new consensus that students must be protected from feeling uncomfortable in classrooms, or from being offended by gestures and words, is founded upon the idea of student vulnerability. So, Neil Howe and William Strauss, in their report Millennials Go To College (2003), argued that, unlike previous generations, the current cohort of students find it difficult to flourish in the often unstructured environment of higher education.

This belief that millennials find it more difficult than previous generations to make the transition to independent living is widely held by educators on both sides of the Atlantic. The UK’s 2018 Student Academic Experience Survey observed that undergraduates are ‘significantly more unhappy and anxious on average than other young people the same age’.

The self-fulfilling prophecy

By all accounts, student vulnerability appears to be a fact of life. A survey published in the Harvard Crimson says that among the class of 2018, 41 per cent have at some point sought mental-health support from Harvard’s health services; another 15 per cent have sought support off campus. Reports of students presenting for mental illness have expanded at a disquieting rate. Frequently, the term ‘epidemic’ is used to describe the emotional crisis afflicting campuses today.

How should we make sense of this apparent epidemic? The first thing we must note is that this talk of a mental-health crisis on campus is a result of the ever-expanding trend for medicalising human experience. When a student’s ups and downs are interpreted through medicalised ideas and language, then things like pressure and stress come to be seen as pathological. Feelings and emotions that were once considered normal seem more threatening in our medicalised culture. This is why even affluent Ivy League undergraduates, who face minimal physical threats or threats of any kind, can claim to feel threatened and insecure.

Increasingly, the socialisation of young people has become reliant on ideas normally associated with therapy. The young are encouraged to interpret their problems in psychological terms. As the political scientist, Mark Neocleous observes, ‘“That was really traumatic!” is now thought to be an appropriate response to any event that would once have been described as “rather unpleasant” or “quite difficult”’.

From time to time, sceptical commentators argue that students’ claims to fragility are contrived and the growth of mental-health problems is not real. But just because the new identity of the vulnerable student is a culturally created phenomenon, that doesn’t mean undergraduates do not genuinely feel pain. Because once students have been encouraged to identify as vulnerable they can easily develop a disposition to interpret every problem they face through the prism of mental health. And in such circumstances they can come to think of themselves as actually ill, and to see student life as a minefield.

The discovery of the vulnerable student is a striking example of society’s loss of faith in the ability of young people to deal with life’s challenges. Worse, it turns students into potential – and in some cases, actual – patients. It is time that society stopped talking up the vulnerability of the young and instead celebrated their capacity for independence and freedom.

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