Diversity, equity, and inclusion are all the rage on elite college campuses these days (not to mention on Bill Ackman’s Twitter, where he wrote, earlier this month, “DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people”). And understandably so, given how white and male these institutions have been for most of their existence. One of the small miracles performed by a university admissions office is completely remaking the campus population in four short years.
So it’s not particularly surprising that a place like Yale has a much more diverse student population now than, say, when it was founded, in 1701, or than in 1870, when the first Black student, Edward Alexander Bouchet, enrolled, or than in 1969, the year Yale admitted women for the first time. (The last of these events, not unexpectedly, met with considerable controversy.)
