WRONG MAJOR

Liberals are obsessed with who gets into Harvard. They should care more about kids at failing schools like Hempstead

HARVARD has been convulsed by a lawsuit charging it with racial discrimination. Harvard is run by nice liberals in the interest of nice liberals, and nice liberals do not like being accused of racial discrimination, which is practically the worst thing a nice liberal can be accused of countenancing.

The school’s gatekeepers do seem to be awfully hard on Asian-American applicants, who are accepted by Harvard in much lower numbers than are students from non-Asian backgrounds with similar grades, test scores and academic résumés.

What goes on at Harvard is of great interest to members of the American elite, and their daily devotional is The New York Times, which has run, by my count, more than 30 stories on the Harvard controversy, including a cloying descent into millennial navel-gaz- ing headlined “5 Harvard Friends, and a Frank Talk About How They Got In.”

The article is precious, noting every undercut, pair of wired-rimmed glasses and “swirl of bleached hair” attached to the little Ivy Leaguers.

You will look in vain for “5 Friends Talk About Their Experience at Hempstead.” Where? Exactly. The Hempstead School District on Long Island is, by any reasonable measure, a catastrophe, an offense against the very idea of public education, one of the lowest-performing districts in the state, plagued by violence, ineptitude, corruption and hopelessness. You’ll find about two stories about it in the Times in the past decade, mostly straight reporting: The state had considered taking over the school district, but in the end declined to bear the burden. Not a swirl of bleached hair in sight. The kids in Hempstead are poor and screwed in a place that nobody cares about. Nobody who reads the Times, anyway. I’d be surprised if more than one in 10 New York Times editors could drive to Hempstead High School without resorting to GPS. It’s about a 20-minute drive from where the Times is printed, but it is far from where the Times lives, physically and spiritually.

The point of this is not to beat on The New York Times and its wellto-do readers. (Except for the saccharine specimens in the wedding announcements.)

Any intelligent Times editor with an interest in bringing his readers the news they actually care about would have covered the hell out of the Harvard story. And the question of how our institutions, public and private, deal with race is a legitimate public concern.

But, here’s a thought: Do you know who are the young Americans we need to worry least about? Who probably are going to do just fine in life? My guess: the kids teetering on the cusp of getting into Harvard, whose nextbest option is Stanford or Bryn Mawr or, heaven help them, a generous offer from the University of Texas.

Most of the kids at Hempstead will not graduate from high school. Eightyfour percent of them will fail to satisfy the state’s minimum academic standards.

Very few of those mostly Hispanic and black students have reason to be concerned about whether their Harvard applications are going to get a nudge from affirmative action.

What troubles this country is not what’s happening at Harvard. It’s what’s happening at Hempstead, whose 10 schools have a budget of more than $200 million overseen by a $340,000-a-year superintendent. And it’s not just Hempstead: One in four NYC public-school students fails to graduate on time — and those are the city’s best numbers, ever.

The figures are even worse for black and Hispanic students, whose dropout rates are about twice those of white and Asian students. Fewer than half of the city’s public-school students satisfy the minimum standards in math or English. Nothing could be less relevant to them than Harvard’s admissions procedure.

Members of the elite are a tribe like any other tribe, and they have their own tribal interests. Their hearts are at Harvard, not Hempstead.