Season 2: Bonus Episode Transcript
'One Factor Among Many'
Lee Coffin:
From Dartmouth College, this is Lee Coffin, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, with a special edition of the Admission Beat.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case called "Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard." The plaintiffs in this case have argued that Harvard has been discriminating against Asian Americans by using race as one factor among many in their holistic admission process. And sometime before the end of this Supreme Court term, there will be a ruling on this matter with a possible outcome being the banning of race as an element of college admissions. And so I thought as the news percolates this week across all media streams, I wanted to have a conversation with my friend and colleague, Jim Washington, Dartmouth's Director of Admissions for Strategic Initiatives. Jim is the longest-serving admission officer at Dartmouth, but he and I also have a couple of decades under our belts as college admission officers and I thought, in plain English, as best we can, I thought let's try and have a conversation today about, what is this case and why does it matter? So Jim, hi. Welcome to the Admission Beat, your first podcast appearance.
Jim Washington:
Thank you, Lee. It's good to be with you.
Lee Coffin:
Here we are. What are your thoughts as the Supreme Court finally gets to this case and how do we help our listeners understand what's at stake?
Jim Washington:
One way to help our listeners, I think, would be to set a little bit of groundwork about how race in admissions works now. I just think that with various media sources covering the story with different perspectives, it can be hard for the person who's on the receiving end and the public to really understand what's going on. So I thought it would be helpful, from my perspective, to say why I'm concerned about the concern this is generating in the United States. Race is one element, but even before that, we need to talk about the quality. We talk about the diversity, the benefits of diversity, they are there. It's unfortunate that much of the discussion has translated into white versus Black, and it bothers me a ton because as a professional and as a person, that's hurtful and it doesn't help our public really understand what we have going on right now.
Lee Coffin:
So I've been an admission officer since 1990; I think you have a few years on before that, but together we've seen this landscape from the 90s to 2000s to 10s and now we're in the 20s and this topic keeps coming up. There's Bakke in 1978, there's Grutter and Gratz in 2003 on the University of Michigan, there was two Fisher cases in 2013 and 16 about the University of Texas at Austin. And each time the court has said the use of race as one factor amongst many is permissible, and they point to the educational benefit of a diversity body. So that "one factor among many" line is something I repeat often when I talk about holistic review and that each person who applies is the sum of many different parts. And when we talk about building a diverse community, someone's racial background comes into this conversation as one of the factors but the law is it can't be the factor. But I think people misunderstand that and don't appreciate reading a file and getting to know the applicant as a person, with race being a foundational part of someone's identity. How can you meet an applicant without knowing this part of their personhood?
Jim Washington:
Yeah, especially Lee, if I've talked to so many high school students who've been looking for advice on, "Okay, so how do I apply? How do I make myself come through?" I talk about the transcripts and test scores or whatever they may be, but they say, "I really want to make sure I'm not taken as a number. I want you to be fully informed about who I am so that can be taken into consideration along with my other credentials." And I think it's interesting to hear that dialogue initiated from the student and to me, that student is saying to me, "You talk about holistic admission, you got to look at all me. You got to understand some context about my background." Any information on race, that could have significant value from the student's perspective, thinking even in terms of a white applicant whose ethnicity, that's pretty interesting, and it has opened doors to opportunity, but has also shown how it may have been drawbacks to some of that identity, but how the person perseveres and why they love learning and why they're willing to contribute to other people's learning. So it's very hard because the Black-white dynamic is now the official backdrop, but if you really think about it, we're human. We're all human, so we're going to take into consideration everything there is. White people aren't exempt. It's not that radical an idea.
Lee Coffin:
So as an admission officer over at UNH and you've been at Dartmouth for over 20 years and you read a file, how does race enter into your evaluation of that file?
Jim Washington:
Typically it's initially just background information that I'm gathering. Family, family background, mother, father, siblings, geographic location, race. And that doesn't tell me any, I mean, that doesn't give me anything to work with at that point. So what I have to do is start to get into the application and find out, okay, we have a background, we have a sense of the applicant's background, but what has he or she done? What's the rest of the story? I really enjoy moving from that little bit of information to essays because I always say to students who are trying to deal with this process, there's so much in your file, but what we want to make sure we hear is your voice. It's another way of considering holistic admissions. We want to hear your voice.
And so I love finding out all of the interesting experiences that applicants have had, the tragedies. It doesn't always have to be a sad song, but let's face it, we're still dealing with COVID. And to read about students who became head of their household, either because one of their parents or guardians who was the head of the household died as a result of COVID, and now this student is still trying to take all their APs, but they're essentially managing the home, they have siblings who are younger and they want to make sure that they get their education and off to bed. Wow, that's so much more. That's so much more than a tiny criterion of race.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. But that example you just used, I mean, if a listener's saying, "Well, yes, I agree that that should be something you consider, but how does that scenario connect to someone's racial background?"
Jim Washington:
If I understand you correctly, you're trying to make a stronger connection between life experience.
Lee Coffin:
I think so.
Yeah. I mean, I think when people ask me, "Why does this matter?" So, okay, Supreme Court seems poised to tell us race is unconstitutional as an element of a college application. Dartmouth has joined many of our peers in an amicus brief to the court saying it's critically important to the way we meet students and the way we build community. And I have a hard time imagining the work we do in a post-decision landscape. To me, how I would answer the question I asked you is, when I start reading an application and I think, "Who am I meeting? Where does this person live? Who is this person? What circumstances animate their life?" And I also, I'm often thinking about the students we educate today graduate in four years and then begin lives and careers that stretch for decades. And to me, that place that they join four years out is inherently diverse and multicultural and multilingual. And how do you create a campus environment that both diversifies that journey, but also prepares people for partnerships and conversations and points of view that they may or may not understand, and I feel like there's something lost that's fundamental if we take race out of a student's storytelling as part of an application.
Jim Washington:
I think it would be helpful, I guess, to start a little bit at the foundation, which is, we know intellectual talent is not the domain of any one category. For the purpose of this, we're going to stay with race. Lee, I think you've made a great observation that this isn't just about college, this is about the students who graduate from our college and go on in so many different directions, geographic, global. And that's not when you want someone having on the job learning for how to interact with a person of color, as an example. Typically the person who is on the receiving end of the interaction wants to feel that there's a meaningful connection in the work they're doing. But if it all becomes one dimensional, that service is not going to be what it could be.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I mean, this court case has been brewing for years, so it's not a surprise that we get to a moment where there's oral arguments and our colleagues at Harvard, and there's a second case from UNC Chapel Hill, same plaintiffs, different institution. I'm watching the case move through the court now, and I've got my fingers crossed and my toes crossed, I'm like, for a ruling that upholds precedent and says, "Yes, this is still constitutional. There's still a valid way of understanding people by allowing race to be part of that evaluation." But I say that without a lot of optimism, I feel like we're on the doorstep of a new framing and that makes me sad.
Jim Washington:
Yeah, I completely agree, right through to the sadness. Each time this case is resurfaced in some form, it doesn't feel like it's very humanistic in terms of the goal. It's more transactional in some ways and it's competitive. There's always this sense from some person or group, especially group, that, wow, they had taken up my spaces. Well, yeah, but who said you had spaces to start out with?
Lee Coffin:
Right, it's a they and me. Yeah, right.
Jim Washington:
You just can't start from there because it has to be a broader understanding, again, about the talent and the intellectual gifts that folks bring to our campus and across the range of majors that we make, that's what a residential college campus to me is all about. That's how it functions. The fact that we have small classrooms. Well, I think that's going to be a much more interesting classroom if I have folks who... and it could be an international student in my classroom. I may find that just being in the classroom with that person, I've learned so much I otherwise would not.
Lee Coffin:
I think there's also a not so subtle argument here that they versus you, they don't deserve to be here. It's not just, "I lost a spot. It's like you changed the rules to admit someone else." And I've said many times that the insult of that insinuation is that someone hasn't earned a spot in a class and I think that has always been the argument that makes me most upset when I think about the decisions we make in a place like Dartmouth, where we have volume that we manage as we shape a community. And in the shaping, the statistics are foundational, but they're not the end of the story and we look at lots of different elements as we build this community, and I worry about the impact on the experience, the impact on the country. If a place like Dartmouth, which has a mission statement that says, "We educate the most promising students for a lifetime of responsible leadership" and to me, that institutional imperative is creating a diverse pool of leaders in the United States, not around the world as well, but certainly in the United States. That feels fundamental to the job we do here and to people who have not stopped and really pondered like, "Well, what does this case mean? Harvard loses. So what?" I think, well, this is so what. Harvard loses and American higher ed has suddenly shifted in a serious, dramatic way and lost something.
Jim Washington:
If we really extend that logically, if we lose something as a college in terms of the quality of the interactions with students and faculty, ultimately we're failing the outside world because we're not putting out our best combinations of students. We work so incredibly hard and long hours to understand and to see that they can bring all kinds of strengths outside of the classroom. But again, it's essential to stress, the students are able to do the work. If that weren't true, you wouldn't see institutions like ours that over four years or so have retention rates that are so high. And to me, that's just simple mathematics. So I just wish there were more folks who had an opportunity to get some insight and I hope this podcast actually allows for some of that so you can think about things in a different way while still taking into consideration what's going on with the court.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, as we're having this conversation, I'm watching your face and it's a sad face.
Jim Washington:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
That's heartbreaking. For a long time, this has been your professional calling.
Jim Washington:
Yes, and it has his roots back into my early childhood. I lived in an inner urban area and loved to go to school and a lot of my buddies, I always thought, "Wow, they're just as smart as me, if not smarter, so how come they were not equally represented and going on and having some of the experiences that I have had?" Because the starting point for them, it may have been difficult and whether it's poverty or something of that nature, but they started out with good brains and presumably, and so where do they go? So that message to me always was, the more people that get into places where they want to go, they're motivated not by just being, but by wanting to succeed academically, but in a much bigger way for their family, for their communities, to show what many people don't take the time to measure and we can't get to everyone. That's where I started thinking about which folks are getting left behind.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, and I'm trying to find the optimistic silver lining.
Jim Washington:
Sorry, Lee. I didn't help you at all that much.
Lee Coffin:
No, that's okay.
Jim Washington:
[inaudible 00:19:43].
Lee Coffin:
No, I mean, I asked that not for you to necessarily answer, but just as an admission officer, when I think about, there's a policy right now called affirmative action and that policy is under legal scrutiny and likely to be removed if the legal prognosticators are correct. But then I come to another point, which is, but the principal remains, the policy is overruled. But I can't imagine a college like Dartmouth or a peer group or most colleges in the US are going to say, "Okay, it's no longer important to have social mobility as one of our goals. It's no longer important to have diverse voices in our community or to be serving diverse voices." Because the part about the educational benefit of diversity, I always bristle a little bit at that construct because it suggests the diverse students are benefiting others as opposed to the education of diverse students is the goal in and of itself.
And the byproduct of that is okay, and the whole community is enhanced because the place represents the country or a community in a more full way. But that principle, access, diversity, social mobility, opportunity, to me remains and I just think that post-decision, as we think about what might happen as the nine justices ponder this, and if one of you, one of them is listening, I doubt that, but it's like I think stop and ask a key question around, what is the purpose of an American undergraduate experience? And as merit is a construct that has a lot of elasticity to it and I think, across my podcast, I try and probe a lot of these different ways merit is imagined and considered. And to me, identity is not a type of merit, but it informs merit. Does that make sense?
Jim Washington:
It does. And Lee, I think you'll probably remember some periods where I've said to you, because we've both had fortunately very nice careers in terms of length and quality, and I'm obviously closer to the end of my career than I am at the beginning, but I also see the obligation, the need, the belief in how an educational system needs to function with informed voices of faculty and trustees and all. We're going to lose something, assuming a certain outcome from the Supreme Court, but I got to tell you, the people who are important, they're still there. They're still out there. And we can't just forget about that. So from the reason I go down this road is simply to say, "Yeah, I'm saddened at times, but I don't know if there's been a point in my career that I've ever been so energized to continue to work."
Lee Coffin:
Oh, that's interesting. Why? Are you being defiant?
Jim Washington:
I think it would be too easy for a decision that comes from the Supreme Court—it would be too easy for folks to say, "Well, that's it. I'm done. I'm tired. I've been fighting this over and over again." I just happen to not feel it's done. I'm tired of fighting it over and over again, but I know I've got enough in the tank, not a tank as in army, a tank as in-
Lee Coffin:
In a Jim Washington gas tank.
Jim Washington:
As in a fuel tank. I've got enough there to work towards some solutions, resolutions, that leave us in a position where we're still doing a phenomenal job in educating just some wonderful people from so many different kinds of situations and backgrounds.
Lee Coffin:
So one of the themes of the podcast is news you could use. So if you're a junior in high school and you're from an underrepresented background and you're watching this story play out and thinking, "Did the door just close for me?" What's our hopeful advice to that student?
Jim Washington:
I would say stay steady to your commitment of accessing higher education. A door in some area has been closed. The house where all the magic happens, the campus, that's still open. We have to find ways to make that clear for students who could easily be discouraged.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, I think that's right, because I've just started to ponder this one for the high school juniors and beyond who are people who might wonder, "Okay, what just happened and how does this scramble my path to college?" I think the ruling will be really informative around to what degree is the use of race permissible or not. But let's say it's removed, so I've been pondering how do we start to frame this conversation going forward? Because the ruling will come and we will be bound by it whether we agree with it or not. I'll go on record, I don't agree with the arguments and I think it's a mistake to go down this path, but I'm not a lawyer and I don't sit on the Supreme Court. So I have the agency to imagine the ongoing recruitment and selection process beyond this to say, okay, so as I've said, the principal remains, we are going to continue to reach out to students from diverse communities with diverse backgrounds.
In the broadest definition of that, you said this before Jim when you were mentioning ethnicity, and it's these multiple layers to people that I think get lost over in this conversation or in like, where do you live? What are your ambitions? Are you the first person in your family to go to college? Because race doesn't stop any of those other boundaries. I mean, people of all backgrounds have this multidimensional identity and I think that's the way I would start cheering the next cohort of applicants who appear in our pools. We will likely not know this part of their story overtly. I think the application, in practical terms, will not ask the question anymore about a racial identity, doesn't mean a student can't still talk about it in whatever part of the application seems salient to that kind of introduction, and does that ring true?
Jim Washington:
Absolutely and I would also caution against, first of all, I don't even know how record keeping is done right after we've admitted a class and so forth to figure out what we have. But when that gets figured out, if there are different configurations, well, we're talking about a process, we're talking about creative new ways. Free of race is a factor that help us get to know the young people, as in you've described Lee. And this reflex to be, "Oh, your number of this went down, your number of that went down," that is important to know. But we're underway with a new way of doing business and it naturally suggests that there's a transition period. I see it in work all the time, I see it in so many different places where there's change. And first of all, change equals stress so people have that, that's going to be something that we're walking in and among. But I think it's going to take a little bit, some time, to make sure that we're having the kinds of context with prospective students as we've always had and we've remained committed to knowing them. I still keep going back to the students, I've done college fairs and so forth, and I'm going back to that belief again when students say, "I don't want to be a member, I want you to know who I am."
Lee Coffin:
Well, and Jim, I think as we end this conversation, that's probably the headline. Keep celebrating who you are. I think to listeners who are consuming news, this story will continue from this time in early November until the ruling. The ruling could come at any time, likely late June. And hope this conversation alerts people to something that's less abstract and a legal case at the Supreme Court. This is one of those rulings that will have an impact. This has the potential to really disrupt the norm in a way that, to me, moves us backwards, not forwards. And I hate ending this conversation on that note because I always try and be reassuring. I guess the way to be reassuring is to say, I don't surrender. I mean, I think you said this earlier. I double down and I say, okay, I keep reminding myself that one factor among many means there are many other factors, and which of those other ones become salient in this new normal that we're heading towards?
So Jim, thanks for joining me on Admission Beat for what I know is an important and personal topic for you. And when I was imagining who I'd like to have this conversation with, you were the first one to come to mind because I know your thoughtfulness on this topic and the depth of your professional and personal commitment to it is deep, so thank you.
Jim Washington:
Thank you. I really do appreciate having this chance to talk and I hope it's valuable for the folks out there, the listeners.
Lee Coffin:
Well, and we'll be back as this story progresses. So for now, this is Lee Coffin and Jim Washington from Dartmouth College with this special edition of Admission Beat. See you soon.
Jim Washington:
Take care.