DEALING WITH MERITOCRACY IN DEMOCRACY
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Michael
Meyers: But Amherst and Cornell do.
Nathan
Glazer: I know. Many others do. Harvard has a dozen under–
graduate houses and some of those houses have higher concentrations of
minorities than the average on the basis of what students select for them–
selves. In the first year they don't live in the undergraduate houses. They
select a house. Some of the undergraduate houses may have had 40 percent
minorities when the campus had under 30 percent, let us say, so Harvard
introduced randomization, which eliminates that degree of preference,
which may not have been racial.
It
may have been on all sorts of grounds,
music and friendship, and so on. I thought that was a little excessive, so in
a way one has to think of subtle issues in terms of college policy. That's all
I wanted to say.
Peter
Wood: Could I take one more question?
Speaker: I'd like to point out that Professor Glazer's comments about K-
12 education in the United States as being more susceptible to
multiculturalism because of the fixed curriculum have to be viewed with–
in this context. While Gary Nash and Charlotte Crabtree and others may
have created national standards, they are out there. They are relatively
unannounced and uninvited and meaningless in the political decisions of
local school boards that select these national standards. They have no
applicability in the management of local school systems. At the state levels
some boards of education and legislatures create curricula that may have
multicultural implications within them. However, the transmission of
those state interests or mandates is meaningless because the state bureau–
cracies lack the personnel and the will to implement them. The local
politicians, assemblymen, and senators may put pressure on the governors,
who will then pressure the local districts
if
they choose to. All in all, mul–
ticulturalism differs from locale to locale. Professor Glazer's need to find
out what is really going on must be developed from the micro levels.
Michael
Meyers: Part of the reason for that is that these programs and
experimentation are driven by constituencies. The constituency in Newark
is different from the constituency in Scarsdale, but the school board, the
larger school board, it seems to me, has a central role which it is not play–
ing. I've seen so much because systems differ. They say, "Those children are
different from our children. If self-esteem studies or Afrocentrism is going
to help them, well, let them
try
it." In New York you had an attempt at an
African-American immersion, an Afrocentric school for boys in Brooklyn.
There was no other community demanding that, but Brooklyn did and
