Discriminating Against MIDDLE-CLASS ETHNIC AMERICANS.

• Author: CIONGOLI, A. KENNETH
• Position: At the country's elite colleges

Three-quarters of Americans are underrepresented in the demographic breakdown of the student bodies of the nation's elite universities.

Some groups of the American population are severely underrepresented in the student bodies and faculties of the nation's elite universities. This hardly is news. That fact has been heard from the colleges themselves and aggrieved segments of the population for three decades. You might be surprised to learn that, if you are part of the American middle class, it is your group that has been the most underrepresented at Harvard University and its collegiate kin for the last 30 years.

Articles by Jonathan Tilove of the Newhouse News Service, syndicated columnist Patrick Buchanan, and California political activist Ronald Unz have all pointed out that America's white, mostly Christian, middle class has proportionately far less admissions to the Ivy League and comparable schools than any other section of the populace. Tilove, in his special report on "Race in America," points out that the subject is touchy and until now undebated in spite of its three-decade history. The applicable questions are: Does it matter; how did it happen; and what are the remedies?

Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, in his book, The American Business Aristocracy, indicated that 50% of the Secretaries of State from the beginning of the Republic through the 20th century have been graduates of one school--Harvard. The Business Week 1000, an annual compilation of America's top 1,000 CEOs, routinely demonstrates that about 100 of these executives are Harvard graduates, approximately 80 are from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and Finance, and 50% of the total are from just 10 elite universities. When you perform the math and discover that half the country's business leaders come from less than 0.5% of the nation's colleges, it matters. Similarly, presidential cabinets, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the judiciary as a whole are disproportionately replete with graduates of choice universities.

Buchanan believes that the current student body composition counts politically and that administrations dominated by ideological liberals understand this. He contends that the search for campus diversity has extended only to those groups that are traditionally liberal--i.e., Ivy League student bodies are about 50% Asian and Jewish, while these groups represent a mere four percent of the population. With eight percent blacks, seven percent nonwhite Hispanics, and one percent Native Americans added in, Buchanan...