Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [136]
America's civil rights revolution in many ways began with the 1954 landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education. In Brown, the Supreme Court struck down race-based school segregation, rejecting the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public education. In the early 1960s, President John E Kennedy put his presidency squarely behind the cause of civil rights, passionately arguing in a nationwide television address:
We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or [caste] system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?25
Kennedy also summoned to Washington the leaders of America's most prestigious universities and implored them to diversify their student bodies, telling the group, “I want you to make a difference…Until you do, who will?”
President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. A year after his death, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which enacted sweeping voting reforms, required employers to provide equal employment opportunities, and made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in public places such as hotels, restaurants, and theaters. Around the same time, Yale University president Kingman Brewster embarked on unprecedented institutional reforms, with Harvard shortly following suit. Brewster hired R. Inslee (“Inky”) Clark to be Yale's new admissions director, with the mandate of building a more pluralistic student body. Brewster and Clark eliminated geographical factors for admission—which had been a way to limit Jewish students—and reduced preferences for alumni legacies and prep school students. The result was a spike in the percentage of Jewish students in the freshman class, from 16 percent in 1965 to about 30 percent in 1966. Clark's first class contained 58 percent public school students, more financial aid applicants than non-financial aid applicants, more minorities of every kind— and the highest SAT scores in Yale's history.
Clark's new admission policies came under direct fire from members of the Yale Corporation and alumni contributors. Summoned before the Yale Corporation in 1966 to discuss the changes, Clark explained that in a changing country, leaders might come from nontraditional places, including in the future minorities, women, Jews, and public school graduates. A Yale Corporation member retorted, “You're talking about Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table. These are America's leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school graduates here.”
But Brewster and Clark, as well as their counterparts at other institutions, persisted. The number of black and other minority students accepted to Ivy League schools rose dramatically during the sixties. In 1960, the “Big Three” had collectively just 15 African American freshmen; in 1970, there were 284 (83 at Yale, 103 at Princeton, and 98 at Harvard). Overall, between 1970 and 1980, the number of African American college graduates increased by 91 percent.26
The changing face of U.S. higher education was part of a much more radical transformation of American society. The sixties and their aftermath did not end the primacy of white Anglo-Protestant men in the corporate world or in Washington, but women, blacks, and other minorities made impressive inroads in American business, politics, and culture. At the same