2022 Undergraduate Student Enrollment within New York State (Screenshot from the website of the Office of Institutional Research and Planning)
On December 6, 2022, Cornell announced that President Martha Pollack appointed a Task Force on Undergraduate Admissions that held its first meeting on November 21.
The Task Force was assembled just after the US Supreme Court held oral arguments in two cases involving alleged illegal discrimination in the admission policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Many court followers predict that the Court will decide that those schools are illegally discriminating against applicants on the basis of race and may order a merit-based, color-blind admission process. As noted in the press release announcing the Task Force, Cornell joined an amicus brief in the case arguing in favor of continuing to take each applicant’s race or ethnicity into account when making admission decisions. The brief argues that viewpoint diversity at Cornell is important, and admitting students based upon race and ethnicity is essential to creating viewpoint diversity on campus.
This Task Force and Cornell’s future approach to race in its admissions policy is a high-stakes gamble. The 2003 Supreme Court case of Grutter v. Bollinger upheld the University of Michigan Law School admissions policy. However, the Court noted:
The Court takes the Law School at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable. The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
The Task Force must address the fact that almost 20 years have passed, and Cornell has not yet found “a race-neutral admissions formula.”
The President announced four goals for any new policy: “embrace Cornell’s founding principle and its core values; be responsive to the current legal and demographic landscapes; advance compliance with applicable accreditation standards; and inspire admitting units to recruit a class of the appropriate size that is diverse across a range of different categories and that exhibits excellence across an equivalently diverse range of attributes.”
Solving this high-profile problem can make or break an academic career. Indeed, the Dean of the Michigan Law School, who quarterbacked that school’s response to the Grutter case, Jeffrey Lehman gained so much prominence, that it catapulted him into the Cornell Presidency for two years.
Task Force Membership
President Pollack has appointed 15 administrators and faculty to serve on her Task Force. None of the 15 members are outspoken critics of Cornell’s current admission policies. The three co-chairs are Avery August, Kelly Cunningham, and Patrizia McBride, the three people who President Pollack has already relied upon for diversity advice. The Task Force also includes Alan Mathios, the past Dean of the College of Human Ecology, who is also an expert on the university accreditation process. Mathios’ resume touts that as Dean, he “helped facilitate a very diverse student population with over 40% of the most recent class being students of color.”
The task force includes at least four people with computer expertise. This may reflect the possibility that future admission decisions could use artificial intelligence to remove either deliberate or implicit race bias from the process, as discussed at a recent symposium sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.
Currently at Cornell, each college operates admissions independently with humans hired to read each application and final decisions made by a highly subjective process. If Cornell could establish a definition of a successful student (in terms of college GPA, post-college employment or other criteria), then an AI computer model could be established using characteristics and performance data from recent graduates to train a computer how to evaluate applicants. If such an AI model did not include race or ethnicity as an input factor, Cornell could prove in court that it had stopped race-conscious admissions.
Is a Task Force Appropriate Given the Stakes?
Article XIV Section 2 of the University Bylaws gives the individual college faculties the duty to “determine the entrance requirements for its own students.” If any University-wide admissions policy coordination is necessary, that is assigned to the University Faculty and the Faculty Senate, not Day Hall. Under the shared governance model, the University Assembly or the Trustee Committees on Academic Affairs and on Student Life could weigh in on an advisory basis.
It is surprising that this high-profile issue is placed in the hands of just 15 people. The press release announced, “The task force is expected to deliver an interim report by the end of the spring semester and a final report no later than Aug. 31, 2023, so that recommendations may be incorporated as soon as the next undergraduate recruiting cycle.” However this means that the campus can only respond to their proposal during the summer, thereby precluding a shared governance process before the recommendations are finalized.
Aside from the expected Supreme Court decision which should be published before June 2023, there are other pressing concerns. First, Cornell has directed significant resources to recruiting applicants from inner city schools without making as much of an effort to recruit economically disadvantaged students from rural areas, particularly in upstate New York. (On this point, John Chisholm, who served as an MIT trustee from 2015-21, has published criticism that MIT also fails to adequately recruit from rural states.) A map of enrollment from the Office of Institutional Research and Planning shows that the 2022 new undergraduate class is more heavily concentrated in Long Island, New York City, Westchester, and Tompkins County.
Second, both the Supreme Court and the Cornell brief agree that the goal is viewpoint diversity and that race conscious admissions is just a means to reach that goal. However, Cornell’s campus climate (under the current admissions policy) has become less conducive to promoting viewpoint diversity. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said that the university’s speech climate was “Below Average.” FIRE also ranked Cornell 154th out of the 203 colleges surveyed. Furthermore, Cornell to date has not shown any concern for promoting political viewpoint diversity in the student body during the admissions process, including increasing the number of conservatives admitted as undergraduates.
Third, as Cornell becomes more vocal in its use of race conscious admissions, it puts minority undergraduates in a tough position. Some undergraduates might begin to doubt their own qualifications to succeed at Cornell. Hence, we will never know whether differences in student performance at Cornell result from differences in academic preparation or from bias that grows out of a biased admissions process. So, as Justice Clarence Thomas said in another case involving racial preferences 27 years ago, “[t]hese programs stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority.”
Fourth, Cornell’s very selective admissions process and high academic standards makes Cornell graduates highly desired by employers. Any fundamental change in the undergraduate admission process (particularly in light of a new Supreme Court decision) will affect Cornell’s reputation as well as the value of a Cornell degree to all alumni.
Fifth, sacred cows such as athletic admission preferences and alumni legacy preferences are again up for debate, so is the allocation of freshman slots between the various colleges.
Addressing those concerns is probably too much for 15 people to handle in isolation. Broad based community involvement, rather than a summer of secrecy is needed for good decision making. Cornell’s founding principle of “any person … any study” is being redefined, and Cornell must do that in an open and transparent way.
This article was written by a member of the Cornell community who requested to stay anonymous.
