The Fall of the American Ivy League in the Name of Equality and Diversity

They strived for political correctness but their quality has gone down;
Top-level papers have turned the tables for China;
The language used to be good but now the meaning is polluted;
Essence is more important than empty reasons.

I tore open the election materials that were mailed to my house. They were full of words like righteousness, equality, justice, diversity — language that was originally meaningful but is now completely negative. Today there is an ironic and satirical catchphrase that the younger generation is sharing on social media. “Entrance exams are like Cho Kuk, loans are like Yang Mun-seok, and gifts are like Gong Young-woon.”* There are quite a few conservatives who have crossed over into illegality and convenience, but the reason that people are especially directing their criticism at these people is because of their hypocrisy and double standards. It’s because these are people and a political party that are shouting this language louder than anyone else.

At first this was promising, but now politically correct language is a target of ridicule. Recent news about the Ivy League schools in the United States' Ivy League, reported by the U.K. publication The Economist, is interesting. Yale and Dartmouth universities have made standardized tests like the SAT mandatory again for applicants starting this year. For us, this means that, in addition to your personal essays or biographies, we will look at your college SAT scores. Meanwhile, people are worried about the declining quality of the elite American universities. Our readers might be surprised that they haven't even considered grades until now, but prestigious U.S. universities continued to pay attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is because the political correctness craze led people to criticize a system where applicants are admitted unconditionally based on diversity despite the fact they don't meet academic requirements. Finally, last year the U.S. Supreme Court held that affirmative action, whereby preference is given to minorities in the admission process, was unconstitutional, and Yale and Dartmouth were the first to raise the flag.

It has been reported frequently that the academic quality of prestigious U.S. universities, which have put diversity ahead of ability, is not the same as it was, but recent statistics specifically highlight this concern. First of all, there is a sharp decline in the world’s university rankings. Every year, the U.K.’s Times recommends universities with the top performance in their fields to more than 30,000 scholars, and the U.S. has dropped in place, while China has climbed over the past 10 years. Starting with Harvard University’s quality rating falling from 6% to 4.5%, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, Yale University and CalTech all dropped in ranking. China’s Tsinghua University’s rating almost tripled from 0.5% to 1.5%, while Beijing University, Shanghai Transportation University and Fudan University also rose in ratings. There are now more authors in the top 5% of most cited scientific research papers in China than in the United States.

There is no one reason for the declining quality of American universities, but there are many overlapping reasons. U.S. universities are good at nurturing students who respect political correctness but have shown less interest in rational debate based on freedom of expression or in improving the quality of academic studies. There is another statistic that stands out in this area. According to the University of California, Los Angeles, conservatives are disappearing from American academic circles. The number of professors who identified as politically left-wing increased from 40% in 1990 to 60% in 2017. Only 23% described themselves as moderate, and only 17% identified as right-wing. The situation in the Ivy League schools is more severe. Last year, Harvard’s student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, ran an opinion poll among professors in which fewer than 3% identified as conservative, and as many as 75% identified as liberal. Which political parties did the American people support during that same time period? We already know that American reality as it was summed up by Donald Trump’s election and the possibility he will be reelected.

A student goes to college to study, not to learn political correctness. An audience goes to the theater for entertainment, not to study. And the public supports politicians who will make their lives better, not those who are hypocritical and have double standards. If you forget your true spirit, you lose trust. The important thing is not to have empty reasons, but to have meaning.

*Translator’s note: Cho Kuk is a South Korean politician who was sentenced to two years in prison for forging documents to help his children gain admission to school. Yang Moon-seok is a South Korean politician under investigation in connection with allegedly illegal loans. Gong Young-woon is a South Korean politician who was suspected of improperly making a gift of real estate in a redevelopment area to his adult son.