Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1997/05/28/destroying_excellence.php
Wednesday, May 28, 1997
Despite the troubles of the New York City public school system, one part of it has functioned splendidly for years. Predictably, it is now coming under attack by the race bandits.
The jewel of the New York City system has long been three fine high schools,
Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and the Bronx High School of Science. You have to take a tough entrance exam to get in, and admission has always been purely on the basis of academic merit. Over the decades, students from these three schools have monopolized the national awards, including the famous Westinghouse Science Prizes.
When I went to Stuyvesant, it was about 85 percent Jewish. Today it is about half Asian.
So, the racket being what it is today, there is growing political agitation to destroy these three schools, just as City College in New York was destroyed a generation ago by 'Open Admissions' under the John Lindsay administration in New York City.
The guerrilla raid on excellence is being spearheaded by ACORN (Association of Community Organization for Reform Now). Its claim is that blacks and Hispanics are not 'represented' according to their numbers in these highly competitive schools. ACORN denounces their admissions policies as 'de facto Jim Crow' and demands that they abolish entrance examinations immediately.
Of course it is true that Asians are over-represented in the student body, just as Jews were when I went there. Such over-representation means that they got the high scores on the entrance exams. I suppose you could say that Catholics and Protestants were under-represented back then, and that whites are under-represented now. But the schools wanted the best students, and the entrance exams don't lie.
When I wandered into Stuyvesant in 1944 from the suburbs I entered a strange new environment. The Jewish students were competitive intellectual strivers, most of them from poor families, and a great many of them leftists and even various kinds of Communists: Trotskyites, Lovestoneites, orthodox Stalinists, and whatnot. But, unlike the later New Left, they really knew their Marxist doctrine and had genuine philosophical arguments. One Trotskyite tried to introduce me to both Wagner and chess, and failed in both attempts. Today he is a university professor of philosophy.
There was no nonsense about grades at Stuyvesant. All grades were publicly posted. You were expected to get 100 on the New York State Regents. When I got a 98 on, I think, Solid Geometry, my friends asked if I had been ill.
Paradoxically, in fact, most of the Communists wanted to go to Harvard and become physicians or go to M.I.T. and become mathematicians or scientists. Not surprisingly, they largely succeeded in doing so.
Stuyvesant proved that you don't need a fancy building to have a good school. The heating pipes leaked steam and the dismal paint curled off the walls. It had two sessions, freshmen and sophomores in the afternoon, upperclassmen in the morning; and everyone had three hours of homework at night. Many of the faculty members could have taught in college today. They were products of the Depression, and landed in the public school system. Some of them, in the English Department, published regularly in the intellectual magazines.
The local culture around the old building was wonderful in its way. At Union Square, a couple of blocks away, you heard the political orators argue fine points of Marxism and watched the old men play chess by the hour. Just south of there, on Fourth Avenue, were a couple of dozen second-hand book stores. Today of these only the famous Strand survives. These were not mere book-stores but informal literary clubs where literary and political arguments went on all day with great intensity. I remember one day defending Hemmingway against an old Marxist who had been denouncing him. The men there were thunderstruck. I gathered that I was the first gentile they had met who could discuss literature.
The national headquarters of the Communist Party was on the other side of Union Square in a shabby old building. The leadership there, said to be on the mysterious and powerful 'eighth floor' (I think) got its orders straight from the Kremlin.
The old Stuyvesant really was a marvelous place, and probably much has been left behind with its recent move to an expensive new building. But, so far, excellence does not appear to have been sacrificed. The top students, whatever the color of their skins, are still carrying away the prizes and still going to the first-line colleges.
The fact is that students in the past and today have applied to these schools precisely because they are difficult to get into and because they got first-rate instruction there. And, because this is so, they do go on to excellence in higher education and important careers.
That is precisely why those Jewish students and others applied when I was there, and why the Asians and others apply today.
Those Jewish students — like the Asian students today — did not want the entrance requirements eased or dropped so that they could be admitted. They would have been embarrassed and horrified by the idea.
That is not the approach of the race bandits today. They want the entrance requirements eased and the exams abolished, thus destroying the very nature of these schools. If they cannot gain admission in the numbers they desire, they want to transform the schools into something lesser, even ordinary. They want to level down, not up. If they are not getting what exists, they want to destroy it.
That is the meaning of the entire vocabulary of 'representation,' 'diversity,' 'entitlements,' 'goals,' 'quotas,' and whatever lingo the race bandits come up with next.
And of course they are eager to use their vocabulary of exorcism — 'racist,' 'Jim Crow,' 'Ku Klux Klan' — against anyone who has the temerity to oppose them.
In recent months there has been a bacterium called Ebolus in the news. This bug eats human flesh and flourishes as its victim dies.
The race bandits are the Ebolus of excellence.
New York City is fortunate that its mayor now is not John Lindsay but Rudolph Giuliani, a redoubtable fellow, and that he has an apparently serious schools chancellor in Rudy Crew. Let us hope that they will hold the line against this willful destruction.