Stephen J. Nelson: Of visionary John Kemeny and decades of court battles over affirmative action at colleges

John G. Kemeny (1926-1992), Hungarian-born mathematician, computer scientist and president of Dartmouth College in 1970-1981

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

The U.S. Supreme Court is taking up affirmative action at colleges and universities for the sixth time in 50 years. In that litany, an early case was the University of California vs. Bakke. Bakke complained about being denied admission to the university’s medical school because seats were guaranteed for minority applicants, thus barring the door to him and other white applicants.

When the Bakke case was on the court’s docket, John Kemeny was president of Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H. The Dartmouth board of trustees wanted a public statement by the college on Bakke. Given their strong confidence in Kemeny, they gave him sole authority to craft Dartmouth’s stand on affirmative action. Kemeny’s voice from his bully pulpit into the public square about the Bakke case echoes today.

Kemeny’s argument displays ahead-of-the-curve insights. His major concern, one still very much at stake in the outcome of the court’s deliberations today, was that colleges had to be able to maintain their fundamental purposes in the face of any court judgment. Should the court mandate a cookie-cutter approach for college admissions, the unintended consequence would be to reduce diversity among institutions of higher education something that Kemeny said simply would be “highly undesirable.”

Using Dartmouth’s example, Kemeny underscored that the board had affirmed the college’s purpose as “the education of men and women with a high potential for making a significant positive impact on society.”

The board did not define that purpose as “the education of students who have the ability to accumulate high grade-point averages at the College,” a statement that would be “ludicrous!”

Kemeny pushed back against the court going over the edge if it were to compel colleges and universities exclusively to use test scores and presumed objective measures to decide which students to admit. That legal edict would restrict colleges from recruiting and admitting musicians, athletes and any student uniquely qualified to contribute to a student body and a college. Quotas of any sort were in his judgment “abhorrent.” Beware what you wish for.

Years after Bakke, in the 2003 University of Michigan cases, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor asserted that colleges had roughly 25 more years to solve their equity and equal-opportunity problems. After that time, reliance on affirmative-action policies would run out. O’Conner’s clock continues to tick.

Getting to where she urged has proved difficult. Progress on the diversity front in the Ivory Tower is glacial and complicated because competing interests must be addressed and give their blessing or at least not actively resist new programs and initiatives. More time than O’Conner predicted is clearly needed. Ideological players on all sides agree that substantive changes in fairness and equity is the arrival point, though there will always be huge differences about the roadmap.

Greater diversity at colleges and universities makes their campus communities more engaging, more demanding, more rewarding and their members more fully educated. Absent diversity, the highest values of what we want a college education to be will remain outside our grasp. That is true for our body politic inside and outside the gates as graduates take their places in the social of communities and the nation. This picture is the goal, but how to get there and how long it will take are the great unknowns.

The new challenge brought by Students for Fair Admissions alleges that Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American students and the University of North Carolina discriminates against white and Asian- American applicants by continuing the use of race as an upfront criteria in admissions rather than observing a race-blind approach that would place more credence and consideration on an applicant’s struggles with discrimination in their life experiences.

The Supreme Court, of course, relies on arguments. The presidents of our colleges and universities must as a group get in the arena, present their case and gather defenders in amicus briefs. The cards will fall as the court dictates. However, jousting over what the Justices will say has to be embraced. It must be made clear to the court’s justices that they must not do harm to hard-fought policies designed to make our colleges and universities equitable, fair and open to diverse populations. Confining latitude and judgments about the scope of admissions procedures and aspirations to add greater diversity to their student bodies would rob colleges and universities of the very autonomy and freedom in their affairs that makes us the envy of the world. The shape of the future of diversity at our colleges is at stake and college presidents must weigh in with all the authority they can muster.

The voices of college presidents have to be front and center in this debate and in the court’s verdict. John Kemeny’s wisdom is a mantle that today’s presidents and those of us concerned diversity and equal opportunity on our campus must take up.

Stephen J. Nelson is professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and senior scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. He is the author of the recently released book, John G. Kemeny and Dartmouth College: The Man, the Times, and the College Presidency. He has written several NEJHE pieces on the college presidency.

Stephen J. Nelson: The lessons from Kemeny of Dartmouth

John G. Kemeny

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Stephen J. Nelson is professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and Senior Scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Nelson what lessons today’s leaders could learn from his latest book, John G. Kemeny and Dartmouth College: The Man, the Times, and the College Presidency (Lexington Books, September 2019).

Harney: Your new book explores the life of Dartmouth College President John Kemeny. Why is Kemeny’s story particularly relevant today?

Nelson: John Kemeny was inaugurated as president of Dartmouth on March 1, 1970, two months almost to the day before the killings at Kent State. To say that the times were tumultuous both inside the gates of Dartmouth and outside is an understatement for sure. How different were those times from ours today? We don’t need to go through the entire litany of major issues and upsets in the contemporary era: terrorism foreign and domestic; economic crashes and rebounds; and political polarization and ideological loggerheads to suggest that current times are not a hallmark of stability. How Kemeny handled his times as the leader of a college ranging from the strains of internal and external political and ideological battles to fiscal stability in unstable economic cycles informs well and fully how and what college presidents today should do.

One important feature of Kemeny’s story that stands out today is that he was a man who came to America as a Hungarian immigrant, his family in 1940, fleeing the onslaught of Hitler’s horrors. When Kemeny arrived in New York City, he knew virtually no English, learning it on the fly as a 14-year-old high school sophomore as George Washington High, one of the elite city schools in the 1940s. Then just two years later, he graduated as valedictorian. He went directly to Princeton University, double majoring in math and philosophy.

During his third year there, he left the undergraduate life for one year, joining the Army. He was not yet a U.S. citizen, which he had to become rapidly because he was quickly assigned as a new private just through basic training in January 1945 to Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project working in the final stages of the development of the atom bomb. He returned to Princeton, graduated in four years from matriculation and staying on for his Ph.D. in math and serving as a research assistant to Albert Einstein.

His faculty leadership at Dartmouth is unparalleled—building a math department, co-inventing BASIC, the very influential computer language, and pioneering college computing through the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) and then on to the college’s presidency. He came to our shores as a stranger, fully embraced being an American and had an enormous impact on education and the life and affairs of the colleges and our nation. Those contributions as citizen, educator and leader included toward the end of his presidency chairing the Three Mile Island Commission.

It is trite to call his life the fulfillment of the American Dream, but it was that and more, and his footprint remains large and lasting today. And in the current environment, might a family like the Kemenys and a contributing citizen like John be prevented entry to our country? We could hope not, but there would be no guarantee. Taking “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” was the right thing then and should still be considered the right thing today.

Harney: What were some of the key challenges of the time?

Nelson: John Kemeny’s and Dartmouth’s challenges were many. The country was torn asunder by a debatable and highly contested war. There were continuous strains and pressures of protests to insure full citizenship and equity to Black Americans as well as other minorities, including women. The nation, with enormous impact on the budgets and financial stability of colleges and universities, faced three major recessions one of which in 1973-74 was by some measures as disastrous as the Great Recession of 2008. The reality became clear that the post-World War II through part of the 1960s public funding of colleges and universities was not going to be sustained. And that led quickly to massive belt-tightening brought about by enormous cutbacks (not stanched in the decades since) in federal funding of higher education.

Finally, the drumbeat of the leftover political animus and polarization begun in the 1960s continued to build through the 1970s to what came to be known as political correctness and the ideological battleground that has persisted now for five decades since.

Harney: You have a chapter on “Navigating Affairs Inside the Gates: The Horrors of “Animal House, ” the Indian Symbol, and the right-wing Dartmouth Review.” How did Kemeny’s tenure change Dartmouth’s place in the higher education landscape?

Nelson: Dartmouth in the 1970s had much of the best of worlds mixed with the worst of worlds. Overall, Kemeny’s presidency placed a highly positive imprint on the Dartmouth of those days and its future. He navigated the most difficult decision in Dartmouth’s then 200-year history when he moved—really educated—the campus, the alumni body and the trustees in the successful transition to coeducation. Not only did the college admit women for the first time in a previously all-male history, but doing it did so in a way that within a few short years found women students fully participating (certainly notwithstanding push back from disgruntled alumni in the early years) in the academic, athletic and social life of the campus.

That decision alone raised Dartmouth’s profile as a major player among the elite colleges of the day, some of whom also recently had become coeducational and others that had women in their student bodies for many years. Kemeny knew and argued publicly that if the college had shirked and shrunk from co-education, it would have decided tragically to consign itself to second-class status for the next chapters in its history. He was determined that could and would never be Dartmouth’s fate.

The Dartmouth Review was a thorn in Kemeny’s side in his last year in office (the paper distributed its inaugural issue at his penultimate commencement as president in 1980). Kemeny fought the paper even if in the short time he had remaining in office, he was not able to duke things out with them as he might have been able to do had he had longer. However, in the face of their charges and complaints about diversity, a changing Dartmouth and a litany of other allegations, Kemeny was able to maintain his and the college’s focus on equity in continuing to diversify its student body, faculty and administrative ranks and to keep Dartmouth on an even keel even as the institution evolved so significantly in the short space of the decade of the 1970s. And the gathering strength of the college that he set in motion created the stage that James Freedman as president in 1987 was able to stand on as he pricked the balloon of the Review once and for all, leaving them with vastly diminished credibility and stature. Without the platform that Kemeny had put in place, Freedman would not have had the leverage he was able to utilize to face down the Review (over their “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedman” front page banner) in his first months in office.

Harney: You also have a chapter on the “Economic Shocks of the 1970s.” Do you think presidents today are prepared for an overdue economic slowdown?

Nelson: One of Kemeny’s great genius creations and something initiated at Dartmouth and modeled by almost every college and university since, was the change he made in how endowment income should be conceived and utilized. He knew that having annual college budgets sway with the good or bad fortunes of the market, and investment income and portfolio performance was unnecessarily unstable and unsustainable.

Mathematician that he was, though it was not rocket science, he figured out the calculus of how to get around those undulations. It was simply to establish a conservative, he thought about 5 percent annually, using an average drawdown calculated on a five-year basis for endowment income. Thus in a good year of market performance, the positive difference would be plowed back into the endowment. That then created a rainy day fund for those years when the market fell below five-year average such that the annual operating budget built for the roughly five percent would be able to run without a deficit.

Today, most colleges and universities have partial preparation and security in the face of economic slowdowns if they, as most do, handle their portfolios and the use if their endowment incomes in this way.

The second thing he initiated on the fiscal affairs front at Dartmouth that has now also been mimicked by many, maybe most colleges and universities, was that when building a new building or even undertaking a large renovation of an existing one, that the total budget for the project had to include maintenance and depreciation. That is, it is going to cost money, real money to keep any building running and maintained: heat, light, custodial coverage, roof, plumbing and maybe even a next major renovation.

That continuing, unrelenting and unforgiving cost had to be planned for as a way of overcoming the oxymoronic idea of “deferred maintenance.” That brought further annual stability to Dartmouth’s budgets and plant operations. While that alone doesn’t solve every part of ensuing economic challenges, it is a further hedge against having any one or two annual budgets be overly struck and stymied by national and global economic cycles and even major downturns.