College: an Equal-Opportunity Stress : Minority Students Don’t Have a Corner on Alienation
The new academic year has begun, and countless young Americans are settling into college life far from home with more than the usual trepidation. They are the members of a racial or ethnic minority hoping to succeed in a largely white campus world, and it’s fair to say that many of them, especially Latinos from the Southwest, have Jose Luis Razo in mind.
Just weeks ago, the young man from a Los Angeles-area barrio was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the commission of a series of armed robberies during vacation breaks from his undergraduate studies at Harvard University. By the end of his highly publicized trial, Razo’s story was being presented as a cautionary tale. As one of his former classmates, himself a Latino, wrote on this page, “Between the two worlds that (Harvard and Razo) represent is, perhaps, a barrier that should not be crossed.”
Nonsense, I say.
I spent seven years at Harvard (1969-76), as a graduate student in the Soviet Union Program and Sociology Department; as a resident of both university and off-campus housing; as a friend, neighbor and classmate of students of all races and social-class backgrounds, and as a paid recruiter of “under-represented” students to departments within Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Furthermore, I’m a member of a racial minority group, and my parents weren’t rich.
From this background, I must strongly disagree with the perhaps well-intentioned attempts to convert the fragmentary accounts of Jose Razo’s experience into a generalization. I deplore the message this gives, however subliminally, to aspiring low-income minority students and to those who would limit their admittance to schools like Harvard.
The favorite theory is that Razo was fated to fail, that his drastically different childhood environment was bound to make him feel--in fact, literally be--alienated at Harvard. This is based on nothing more than myths and unwarranted assumptions concerning the characteristics--the purported intellectual and psychological limitations --of the “typical” minority student at the “typical” elite university. The suggestion is that only minority students, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, will experience great difficulty in adjusting to life at Harvard and other similarly ranked schools.
Adjusting to student life and finding a comfortable personal niche for oneself is--and probably always was--a great, traumatic experience for practically every student ever enrolled at Harvard. How could it be otherwise? At home, they were clearly among the best and the brightest of their high-school peers. At Harvard, most soon have to adjust to being just another undergraduate, unexceptional among a thousand peers, all strangers in a strange land. That’s why the Harvard student rumor mills are constantly abuzz with reports (both true and false) of suicides, attempted suicides and all manner of other types of nervous breakdowns, suffered by students from all kinds of racial, ethnic and social classes.
Another popular but unwarranted assumption is that a student can feel psychologically secure and develop his or her potential to its fullest only on a campus where a majority of the other students share his or her racial-ethnic or social-class heritage. That isn’t true, either.
Thousands of minority students have matriculated at Harvard feeling no greater sense of alienation from self and others than they felt in high school. If they hadn’t somehow been different from others back in their old neighborhood, they probably wouldn’t have been admitted to Harvard in the first place.
The alienation argument also seems to imply that universities can best serve their students by doing everything possible to accommodate the personas they brought from home--the experiences, values, beliefs, the ways of thinking about and looking at themselves and the world that they developed in their early school years. I disagree. I think the main responsibility of a university is to provide its undergraduates with an environment conducive to personal and intellectual growth. Why else go to college?
Another assumption without evidentiary support holds that members of low-income minority groups are more likely to flunk or drop out of the top-ranked colleges than they are to flunk or drop out of less highly ranked schools. In fact, on the basis of empirical data that I have seen, quite the opposite is true: The higher the academic standing of the college, the lower the minority student attrition rate. Really. A minority student is less likely to make it through San Diego State than Harvard.
What is true is that black American, Mexican American, Native American and low-income white students are still numerically under-represented at Harvard; the minority undergraduate population is in the neighborhood of 25% of the total. But it is not true that the typical Harvard undergraduate is a white member of the indecently monied classes who graduated from an exclusive, ultra-expensive suburban prep school. A great many Harvard students come from either working-class or solidly middle-class backgrounds.
So let’s congratulate and wish well all those minority, working-class young people who have, on the strength of demonstrated ability, won a place at one of the country’s finest institutions of learning, in one of the world’s most interesting cities.
And let’s back off from all those knee-jerk racist, class-biased explanations of Jose Luis Razo and why he committed armed robbery. He doesn’t personify anything other that what he is--a troubled human being deserving of understanding as such. Period.
