The Higher Circles

"The Prep-School PC Plague" by Heather Mac Donald, in City Journal (Spring 2002), Manhattan Inst., 52 Vanderbilt Ave., 2nd fl., New York, N.Y. 10017.

Within the ivy-covered halls of America’s elite prep schools, such as Exeter and Andover, instructors once instilled in their young charges the high-minded WASP principles of citizenship and patriotism. But now—says Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor—the emphasis, both in and out of the classroom, is on diversity. All of the top schools employ diversity professionals who specialize in what she calls "multicultural consciousness-raising," the kind of race- and gender-based teaching that used to be confined to the universities. In the view of Mac Donald, this new prepschool obsession is "a grievous missed opportunity to create an integrated, colorindifferent society," and, far from enlightening students about multicultural issues, succeeds only in "creating race-consciousness where none exists."

This education in differences proceeds whether the students want it or not. Diversity professionals such as Bobby Edwards, dean for community and multicultural development at Andover (also known as Phillips Academy), is incredulous when even "students of color" profess their lives free from racial injustice. Instead of accepting the students’ reported experience, says Mac Donald, "Edwards chides them: ‘Are you looking at the people following you around in the store?’ "

Likewise at Exeter, according to college counselor and dorm adviser Cary Einhaus, "Diversity is absolutely explicit. We talk about it at the dining-room table, at faculty meetings. It’s part of our common language here." Or, as Mac Donald puts it: "Young people quickly learn that their teachers see an awareness of difference, not commonality, as the highest civic good." An Indian student at Phillips Academy recounted in the school newspaper how back home in Texas "I was never made to feel that I was any different [from the white students] and the kids never found the need or desire to speak about race relations."

But at Phillips, her classmates "tend to classify the community into its various racial groups." All to the good, in the new atmosphere of Phillips: "I have never felt more Indian," she wrote.

All of the top prep schools actively recruit minorities, despite the fact that black and Hispanic admission test scores are often lower than those of white and Asian American students. Attempting to empower these students by emphasizing their racial differences is wrong-headed, Mac Donald argues: "A student who is failing trigonometry will be helped by tutoring and hard work," not by reading books on racial identity.

The race and gender agenda also tends to crowd out traditional learning, Mac Donald says. One English teacher at Exeter told her that "most Exeter graduates have no idea whether Chaucer preceded Yeats." Literature courses are fractured into "identities," such as "Gay Voices and Themes in Literature and Film" or "The Voices of Women Writers."

The private preparatory schools, says Mac Donald, once pulled talented youth "from all classes and all parts of the nation—whom they could fashion into a cadre of informed, public-spirited leaders." Today, they are in danger of squandering an "unprecedented opportunity: to create an integrated ruling class that will carry us beyond our self-lacerating obsessions with race."