The College of the Holy Cross holds a special place in the heart of many of its alumni, including the author of this article. He met his wife there, sent his daughter there, and has made lifelong friendships. He believes that the college has an important role to play in American life as the nation’s preeminent small Catholic liberal-arts college.
However, recent events have caused concern. The college’s new president, Vincent Rougeau, wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe entitled “Clarence Thomas was a beneficiary of race-based admissions at my school.” This is a disservice to the college, its students, and its alumni, and it says much about how politics have superseded a sense of good stewardship among so many of the liberals and progressives who today run our major institutions.
Clarence Thomas is one of the most prominent and distinguished alumni in the college’s history. Justice Thomas is in the arena of legal and political controversy, so criticism from individuals within the Holy Cross community is not unexpected. However, for the president of the college, its public representative, to wield the authority of his position to criticize Thomas is shameful behavior on Rougeau’s part, both because it is an abuse of his position and because of what it says about racial preferences.
The message sent by these sorts of jeremiads, when they are done with the official seal of the school’s approval, is not merely we disagree with you, but you do not belong; you are not one of us. This is why we get the recent phenomenon of “open letters” from faculty, students, and alumni of various schools trying to excommunicate conservative politicians and judges who attended those schools.
As to the substance of Rougeau’s criticism, it validates Thomas’s fundamental critique of racial preferences. What better evidence could there be in favor of Thomas’s argument that a degree obtained by an African American from a school that uses racial preferences will always carry an asterisk of sorts? That benefiting from racial preferences degrades the dignity of the recipient because it will always be either openly thrown in his face or silently held against him?
No black American should have to go through the world chased by that asterisk. Justice Thomas has sworn an oath to the Constitution and laws of his nation. And nobody, least of all the president of his alma mater, writing in the pages of a major newspaper, should presume to tell him that he ought to rule on racial preferences in college admissions differently than his white colleagues due to his race or how he got into college.
