One difference between today’s charge that Harvard discriminates against Asians and the fact that Harvard once did discriminate against Jews is that today’s Harvard thinks Asians too soft-spoken, while the old Harvard thought Jews too loud.

Otherwise the situations appear similar. Both cases involve a smart, high-achieving minority threatening to change Harvard’s student demographics, and a devious counter-strike by the college’s administration to prevent it. Today, Harvard awards many Asian applicants low personality scores using questionable criteria, thereby lowering their overall scores and making it harder for them to gain admission relative to whites, blacks, and Latinos. In the 1920s, then Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell purposely set the date for college interviews on Rosh Hashanah to force Jews to choose between worshipping in their faith and applying to Harvard; then he hatched a plan to make applicants submit photographs (to see if they looked Jewish) and a history of name changes (to catch any sneaky attempt at Anglicizing) to enforce a quota on Jews.

Still, there is a big difference between how the two cases ended up. In the 1920s, Harvard rejected Lowell’s plan and crafted an alternative that satisfied public opinion (of which more below). Today, after digging in its heels, Harvard has ended up in court, accused of discrimination. The latter, a public relations debacle, reflects a failure of leadership on Harvard’s part. Things should have never gotten this far. Such a failure of leadership is ironic, since Harvard sees its job as training the nation’s leaders.

A confused definition of leadership led Harvard astray. One cannot conceive of a society without leaders, yet few people today could offer a good definition of leadership other than to say that a leader is someone who wields power. This is not enough. Anyone can wield power. A technician or a bureaucrat can wield power. The same nation, composed of the same people, will show itself to be either disciplined or rebellious depending on the quality of its leadership, and that depends on the leader being more than a competent professional or a fine administrator. A leader must have equal shares of tact and wisdom, both born of experience and perhaps a bit of luck in living.

Each of the three parties in the Harvard dispute—the Asian applicants, the “legacy” applicants, and the black and Latino applicants—offers a vision of leadership. Yet each of these visions is really an example of what leadership is not. It is why Harvard got itself into trouble: It threw its lot in with the minority and legacy visions at the expense of the equally flawed Asian vision, without thinking too much about the kind of leaders it wants to train, beyond the banal persuasion that there not be too many Asians in the mix.

Three Visions of Leadership

The Asian applicants suing Harvard push the idea of meritocracy, where leaders are chosen on the basis of merit. They argue that because they got the grades and aced the exams, they are entitled to Harvard diplomas and all they entail. Intuitively, the notion seems fair because the conditions are the same for all competitors. Everyone takes the same exams; no one gets into Harvard just because their parents gave money or because they can claim membership in an official victims’ group.

Yet the merit system has flaws. The starting conditions are not the same for all competitors. Many college applicants, including many Asian applicants, pay for test-prep courses and high-quality tutors that other applicants cannot afford.

The more serious problem with meritocracy is that it does little to guarantee good leaders, which is Harvard’s stated goal. Leaders must direct the activities of others, not by following in detail the activities of each technician under their command, but by thinking more broadly, with one eye always on the public interest. With so many fields of endeavor now rarefied and specialized, meritocracy tends to produce not wise and thoughtful generalists but elite technicians—people who excel in knowing their field’s details to the exclusion of everything else. This is why they do so well on exams. They know minutiae. But knowing minutiae is not character, just as information is not culture, and scholarship is not leadership. Nothing in mastering a field’s details necessarily translates, for example, into the ability to maintain one’s composure during a crisis. Nor does scoring well on a test translate into an ability to use the minds of others. Leaders must be able to do these things.

Worse, elite technicians tend to be, well, elitist. They are impatient with stupidity. In my experience they don’t think average people should have much say in public life. In politics this means elected officials should defer to experts. In foreign policy this means turning the planet into a federation of lawyers. Such attitudes provoke resentment in a democracy, as well they should.

Finally, supporters of meritocracy tend to view leadership as something best earned through appointment, just as they view college admission as something best earned through scholarship. In other words, they believe a person should be picked to lead after achieving certain milestones. They are wrong. In a crisis situation, for example, no one appoints a leader. The leader imposes himself or herself on the situation. Leaders make themselves. Checking the right boxes on a test or compiling a fine work record is not a necessary prerequisite to becoming a leader.

The “legacies,” or children of Harvard alumnae (and usually white), push the idea of aristocracy, where leaders inherit their positions. It is like the old order of primogeniture. They argue that while their test scores may not be up there with the Asian applicants, they have the cultural background necessary for leadership, since someone in their family went to Harvard. In addition, their parents are typically rich, and when money speaks in America, it speaks authoritatively, making legacies natural members of the leadership class. Most important, because they compose the bulk of Harvard’s donor class, legacies make Harvard possible, which, they argue, benefits everyone.

As with meritocracy, the problem with aristocracy is that it does little to guarantee good leaders. Leaders have to be acknowledged as such, and in a democracy it is hard to win public approval for a hereditary leadership class, especially so in bad economic times.

A natural aristocracy is different from a self-created one. Harvard legacies exemplify the latter and enjoy a prestige that is not natural. On the contrary, many Americans see Harvard’s legacy class as manipulating the system to secure higher admission rates (a 33 percent acceptance rate for legacies versus a 5 percent rate for average people) to further its own personal interests. In the ideal, aristocratic leaders feel themselves bound to the people they lead by ties of honor that require sacrifices of them. Today, average Americans see Harvard legacies getting plenty of benefits, but without making any sacrifices beyond cutting a check to the college’s development fund.

Leaders must know how to make decisions and take responsibility for them. This requires willpower and the moral courage to stick to one’s guns after making a decision. At different times, leaders must also display reserve, solemnity, and discretion. There is nothing distinctive in legacy culture to predict these traits. Some Harvard legacy students, with their cool finals clubs and campus frolics—for example, washing cars in scantily-clad Speedos or dressing up like bees and bringing honey to class—sound like great people to hang out with. But their personalities do not suggest leadership material, although nothing prevents jokesters from evolving after graduation.

There is also the drug and hook-up subcultures found on most college campuses. People who are curious, mischievous, and able to persuade others, but who are powerless over themselves, rarely make good leaders—although this description could apply to anyone at Harvard, not just legacies. Yet if legacies are no different from other students in this regard, then as a class of potential leaders they don’t deserve special treatment.

Most important, aristocrats tend to be dismissive toward average people, more out of social snobbishness than meritocratic elitism. Many legacy students come from blue states and live in or near big cities. When they see lower middle class people, many of whom voted for Trump, they sometimes think: “deplorables.” Yet grasping different approaches to life, and different starting points in society, is a factor that leaders must take into account in human affairs. Harvard’s future leaders must expect to encounter “deplorables” and listen to them patiently. The highly parochial culture of Harvard’s legacy class often prevents this trait from developing.

Many black and Latino applicants push the idea of diversity, where leaders emerge after previously disenfranchised minorities have gained access to elite institutions. They enroll at Harvard not necessarily because they earned their positions through merit—two-thirds of black students and one-half of Hispanic students at Harvard benefit from affirmative action—but as compensation for society’s unjust past. When they graduate, these minority students, like all students at Harvard, leverage their networks and the college’s prestige to secure good careers. They become leaders within their minority communities by virtue of their special accomplishment of having gone to Harvard; then they cross over into general leadership positions by virtue of their good careers and because diversity demands its share of minority leaders.

The problem with diversity, as with meritocracy and aristocracy, is that it often fails to produce good leaders. Minority students who push diversity believe so strongly in equality that it sometimes seems as if they dislike the very idea of leadership. They want to tear down hierarchies, as most revolutionaries do. Yet revolutionaries often lack a sense of what is possible, and so the general public fears entrusting them with their affairs.

Sometimes leaders can make a clean sweep and impose the mold of their minds on a country for generations. But most leaders must move within circumscribed limits. They must take into account tradition and custom. They must work with people as they are, not as they think they ought to be. Minority students fed on diversity ideology often imagine things differently. They create faultless social systems and formulate plans for absolute justice; they preach doctrines and imagine schemes. Nor are their ideas acquired from experience. They are learned from textbooks written by people with little worldly experience themselves. Students have trouble putting these ideas into practice when they graduate because no one ever has.

In addition, a leader’s mind must have some degree of simplicity and clarity. Too much complexity can be paralyzing. But all sorts of complex theories, such as post-colonialism and intersectionality, hobble diversity fanatics. An over-organized mind wastes as much time and energy as an under-organized one; both are bad for leaders. Although diversity fanatics can convince some people of their theories, other people start to imagine that diversity fanatics probably can convince themselves of any theory. This makes normal people hesitant to follow them.

Finally, like meritocracy and aristocracy, diversity exhibits the same pattern of viewing the average person as an administrative pawn, whose objections can be dismissed with the words: It’s none of your business. Such contempt arises not from technical elitism or social snobbishness but from anger and resentment that sometimes crosses over into blind hatred, especially toward white males. A good leader does not give in to such temptations. Indeed, an important quality of a leader is to be unbiased and without excessive self-interest. Leaders who cloak their bitterness with feigned scruples about equality—feigned, because in diversity ideology some people are more equal than others—are pious in the worst sense of the word. Many people instinctively resist their claim to leadership out of fear.

Harvard Then and Now

In 1922, when Harvard President Lowell foolishly went public with his plan to put a quota on the number of Jews, two of the three leadership visions dominated the ensuing conflict: aristocracy and meritocracy.

Old American Protestants (like Lowell) pushed aristocracy. Jews had gone from 7 percent of the Harvard student body in 1900 to 10 percent in 1920, to 15 percent in 1921, and to 20 percent in 1922—with the expectation that their numbers would soon climb to 40 percent. In the process Jews were accused of changing Harvard’s culture. It’s not just that “Jews set the pace,” pushing scholastic standards so high that everyone else had to work ten times harder, one person complained at the time, but that Jews were taking over campus institutions like student government and the school newspaper. Meanwhile, in classes, one critic observed, no longer did students sit quietly in solidarity with each other when a professor asked a question; instead, Jews eagerly raised their hands, as if they actually enjoyed learning. Worse, Jews argued about everything in an aggressive, take-no-prisoners style. Of the Jewish college man, the head of fraternities complained, “You can hear him a mile off.”¹

Already in 1922, Harvard’s aristocrats saw Harvard as training the nation’s leaders, yet they envisioned those leaders in the mold of Christian gentlemen, with the Roman patrician’s love of free inquiry added in. Jews did not fit this mold. The aristocrats had no problem with a few Jews entering Harvard; they could and would be assimilated, and Jews were fine as long as their behavior did not stray from the norm. The problem, they said, was too many Jews, who would then form a state within a state, or change the culture altogether. William F. Buckley, a Yale graduate, spoke wistfully on the problem years later, when he asked, “But is it meant in welcoming students of other creeds, that a college must forswear its own traditional creed?” Curiously, some Jews, especially established German Jews like Walter Lippmann, agreed with the Protestant aristocrats and supported the idea of quotas.

The Jews pushed meritocracy and for good reason. Not many college opportunities existed for them in those days. State colleges generally did not exist at today’s level, while some prestigious colleges such as Yale, Princeton, and Columbia already had Jewish quotas. If Harvard, the most prestigious of them all, enforced quotas, other colleges would close their doors and Jews would be denied access to a route to the middle class that led through higher education and credentialing.

Harvard’s president lost control of the process when his quota plan went public. In 1923, a Harvard committee resolved the issue. It accepted the meritocratic vision and rejected quotas. It also accepted the aristocratic vision and believed Harvard’s culture worth preserving. It settled the conflict by introducing a new vision of leadership—democracy—to sit alongside the other two. The committee recommended that Harvard seek wider regional representation among its student body, especially west of the Mississippi. The result artificially lowered the number of Jews at the College by dint of a different method.

This third vision of leadership proved critical a decade later when Hitler came to power. Although Hitler respected America’s industrial strength, he did not believe America would fight. He saw America as a “mongrel nation” incapable of forming a national army.² Given the history of states’ rights in the United States, where even as late as the first decade of the 20^th century some U.S. Army groups continued to identify themselves by state (for example, New York’s 69^th regiment or the 29^th Maine infantry), and given mass immigration to the United States from other countries during the first quarter of that century, Hitler came to the erroneous conclusion that America lacked the national cohesiveness to go to war.

Almost as if anticipating the crisis to come, the Harvard Plan helped to train American leaders who saw value in merit and tradition, but who also saw the need to bring the country together, both regionally and ethnically, as a unified fighting force. This was part of the “Americanization” project of the first half of the past century. To this day, critics of the Harvard Plan complain that it caused the number of Jews at Harvard to drop back down to 10 percent, as more Americans (usually non-Jews) from other regions entered the college at the expense of Jews.³ That is true, but they ignore the Plan’s vital contribution to American leadership at a crucial moment in history.

Three visions of leadership dominate the current Harvard debate: meritocracy, aristocracy, and now diversity. Today’s circumstances are analogous to those in the 1920s. In the 1980s, Asian students comprised only 4 percent of the Harvard student body. That number quickly rose to 21 percent in 1993.⁴ At some point the new personality scoring system kicked in, and Asians drifted back down to 17 percent in 2015. Without that system, Asians would comprise 43 percent of Harvard students.

But unlike in the 1920s, hypocrisy and cynicism accompany the three visions. The flaws that exist in each vision as a stand-alone justification for leadership have grown so obvious that each vision by itself has deservedly become a target of ridicule.

The Asian students push meritocracy, but unlike the Jews in the 1920s, who rightly feared being shut out of the American college system, Asian students need have no such fears. Excellent state universities now exist, and Asians often dominate their student bodies—for example, making up 34 percent of the University of California system. They also dominate prestigious private universities such as Cal Tech (43 percent).

No, many Asian students want to go to Harvard for very un-meritocratic reasons. For the merit system to be fair, life after Harvard, and not just before, must be a series of exams open to all, so that everyone can compete fairly for the best jobs. This, of course, doesn’t happen, nor do Harvard graduates—Asian or otherwise—expect this to happen. On the contrary, they expect the social networks they forge at Harvard to give them a leg up when applying for jobs; they expect to intern for Harvard alumni in high positions, putting them on the inside track for prestigious careers; they expect the name “Harvard” to open doors for them, as if by magic. One recent Harvard graduate described this to me as “dropping an H-bomb” during a job interview. Meritocracy’s supporters believe in merit as the fair standard on the way into Harvard, but not on the way out.

Just as hypocritical, some Asian students reverse course once admitted to Harvard and publicly oppose meritocracy, the way some Jews voiced support for Jewish quotas once they were safely ensconced at Harvard.⁵ Hypocrites make for bad leaders, and people who push meritocracy until the moment meritocracy becomes inconvenient are hypocrites.

Black and Latino students push diversity, but diversity’s supporters then go overboard and downgrade the importance of merit altogether, even calling it a myth. Some diversity supporters see testing as a manifestation of white privilege; others want to replace objective measures of merit with a straightforward lottery, as if admission by chance is somehow fairer than admission by merit. They ignore the fact that grades do matter and often predict student outcome in college. They ignore evidence for “mismatch,” where minority students with poor academic records often do worse when placed in elite colleges instead of colleges more appropriate for their level of academic accomplishment. They ignore the fact that after college some jobs, such as aviation and anesthesiology (my own field), really do require merit, and that without it innocent people get killed. Dreamers who ignore reality make for bad leaders, and diversity supporters who ignore reality are dreamers.

The “legacies” who push aristocracy are the most bankrupt of all. In the 1920s, Harvard’s aristocrats wanted to preserve a very real culture, but what culture do today’s aristocrats want to preserve? Certainly not a Christian culture—Harvard is almost hostile to Christianity. Certainly not a tradition of free inquiry—Harvard is as rife with speech codes and political correctness as nearly every other college. Certainly not a culture at risk of disappearing because student government, campus clubs, and the school newspaper are being taken over by a new student demographic—unlike the Jews at Harvard in the 1920s, Asian students today show no predilection for swarming these institutions. No, legacies want to keep their path into Harvard free and clear, to secure for themselves and their children high-paying careers afterward. Their problem is that they have no ideology to give their self-interested behavior cover, so they cynically support diversity, hoping that by stoking the conflict between diversity and meritocracy they will divert attention away from themselves and continue to slide into Harvard unnoticed.

And Harvard has gone along with the legacies, siding with aristocracy and diversity at the expense of meritocracy. That has exposed the college to the charge of discrimination, even while the motivations of those making that charge are just as suspect.

Harvard needs to implement a fourth vision—democracy—alongside the other three visions to restore some balance. If the United States experiences a major war in the next 20 years, it will not be against a hostile power like Nazi Germany; it will far more likely be a kind of civil war. Nonetheless, the precautionary measures needed are the same. The Harvard committee of the 1920s wisely understood that what is true of Harvard is true of the factory, the hospital, the business office, and the country. Someone has to take command when people need to act together. For this to happen, those in leadership positions must recognize and respect all of those whom they would lead. Indeed, leaders must be able to foresee unhappiness and remedy injustices before complaints get out of hand. To do so they must maintain close contact with the people they govern. They must have an understanding of other people’s lives. Today, Harvard’s meritocrats, aristocrats, and diversity supporters, each for different reasons, often have contempt for average people, and especially for red state people. Average people and red state people know this, and reciprocate that contempt. It is a dangerous situation.

If Harvard sees itself as training the country’s future leaders, then it needs to bring this fourth, democratic vision of leadership back to campus. It needs a 1920s-like Harvard Plan, where geographical distribution, especially from rural areas, influences admissions. To make room for these new students Harvard should cut most from the legacies, who are the most ideologically bankrupt; then from the meritocrats, who are often just hypocrites; and least from the diversity students, who are mostly guilty of just dreaming.

To lead is a trust, not a privilege. Indeed, trust is what makes leadership possible. Leaders must be able to think creatively and suggest something new, while still retaining a broad following. They must be able to order sometimes reluctant subordinates to get things done, but without resorting to the dictatorial way to overcome their problems. They must be able to smooth over conflicts that erupt among those they lead, but without losing their ability to exercise personal will and power. None of this is easy, but none of this is even possible without trust between leaders and the led. People will allow themselves to be led if they believe their leaders know where they are going, care about their concerns, and have the nation’s best interests at heart. In a democracy this means that a leader’s mind must be marked, at least in part, by a democratic sensibility.

In Plato’s Republic, the best leader has a mind in which reason, spirit, passion, and desire exist in balance and work in concert. To become a leader, a Harvard student needs meritocracy, aristocracy, diversity, and democracy to share space on campus. That is not the case today.