In the days and weeks after George Floyd’s fentanyl overdose, America’s universities proudly proclaimed an imminent “racial reckoning” on campus. “Diversity,” understood in a very specific way, became the top objective. Harvard’s university press published books on how to eliminate schools that were “too white.” Activists demanded the abolition of “white supremacist” standardized tests, and dozens of schools swiftly complied.
Two years have passed. Last fall, American colleges welcomed their first 100% post-George Floyd classes, and the results are clear: At one elite school after another, ordinary white Americans are being treated as academia’s “undesirables” and are slowly being cleansed out.
On June 13, University of Chicago freshman Daniel Schmidt posted a Twitter thread that quickly went viral. The thread described the class profile of the school he was attending.
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It is a fascinating personal account. Schmidt’s claims about wealth and sexual orientation are hard to measure, though a (non-randomized) 2015 campus climate survey found only 76 percent of men, and 68 percent of women, identified as exclusively heterosexual at UChicago. But Schmidt’s claims about race certainly can be measured. Do the facts bear out his story? Are ordinary middle-class, middle-American, heterosexual whites vanishing from the University of Chicago? There’s a lot of evidence they are.
The University of Chicago avoids saying how many whites attend — nobody wants that information — but in 2019 its freshman class was 22 percent Asian, 10 percent black, and 16 percent Hispanic. Two years later, much had changed. The freshman class of 2021 was the first one whose entire application cycle took place after the great “racial reckoning” of 2020. And sure enough, its numbers shifted greatly from just two years before. This time around, 27 percent of freshmen were Asian, 10 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic.
