Reader Response Walter Donway ’66

My ophthalmologist’s daughter longed to enter Brown. She had dazzling SAT scores, top GPA, headed the women’s swim team, and more. I encouraged her. She attended the “summer before Brown” program. She was declined admission and took a full scholarship at Tulane. Her parents knew that an applicant with qualifications such as “grew up with the African American experience and perspective” had higher priority for Brown. Her mother said, “Brown doesn’t deserve her.”

Among indignities Brown imposes on us is having to decide: Do I write this letter to an institution primed for years to dismiss it as “just another bigoted, threatened old white male alum”? I noticed in the March/April BAM three letters critical of Brown’s racial and ethnic admissions targets came from Class of ’77 men. I am even older, class of ’66. Postmodernism, the doctrine that social issues are reducible to conflicts of oppressor and oppressed groups, has infected American universities.

When I got to Brown, Jewish students were just being admitted in numbers reflecting their academic qualifications after years subject to a kind of quota. The new “Jews” are Asians, white males and females (including, of course, Jews), and other card-carrying “oppressors.” 

Brown faculty and administrators know all this. Either they are Postmodernists, who embrace it, or skeptics aware that one false move—one politically incorrect remark—and their career could be snuffed out in a gas cloud of denunciation. 

It’s that bad? Read The Diversity Delusion by Heather Mac Donald and get back to me in the morning.