Jaswinder Bolina on How the End of Affirmative Action Will Affect Writing Program Admissions

Poet Jaswinder Bolina joins co-host Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about how the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw the consideration of race in college admissions will affect MFA programs. The group reflects on why diversity is a crucial part of any writer’s education and the risk that this decision will change writing programs for the worse.

Comparing the MFA admissions processes for their respective institutions, the three also discuss how everything from scholarships to the workshop environment may be affected, and Bolina speaks about the importance of diverse faculties. He reads from his essay “American, Indian” and Ganeshananthan reads a section of Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent—both examples of how it is impossible to think about American writing, or American history, without considering race.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Cheri Brisendine and Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: At what point does race come into your admissions proceedings, if at all?

Jaswinder Bolina: Race, I think, is in the back of my mind as I go through and read [the application essays]. But, it really does begin with the work. And if the language is interesting, if the kinds of observations being made, the imagery, the description, if those things are popping, I’m not very concerned about what your subject matter is, I’m more looking at the language and the craft of it.

But we do hit a point where once we have our rankings all done, you’re kind of looking to see if diversity represented here. We have a profound advantage. Our faculty is entirely POC. We have six faculty, and every single one of us hails from either first or second generation immigrant backgrounds. And, you know, we have a diversity of races represented here. And so, we’re not looking to impose anything on our admitted pool of students. But we are looking to see that, with a faculty as diverse as ours is, is our student body doing the exact same kind of work? Are they interested in the same kinds of concerns we’re interested in?

V.V. Ganeshananthan: One of the things that will happen in the wake of this decision will be a bunch of adjacent lawsuits, such as “does this apply to how scholarships are awarded? Does this apply to X, Y, and Z? Where does this pertain and where does it not pertain?” As of right now, we have a diversity statement. It’s not a diversity on the basis of race statement, so I don’t know. If it’s just called a diversity statement, an applicant can stress that in whatever way—are they able to do that? They’re certainly writing personal statements, anyway.

Personal statements have often contained statements about identity, and some of those statements have been about race. Applicants are still free to do that. And so I think we can let our applicants know that we are reading them in their full individuality as they wish to be read.

WT: What would you do if your attorney general wrote this directive to your university system? That you should, this is a quote, “immediately cease their practice of using race-based standards to make decisions about things like admission, scholarships, programs, and employment.” Because that’s what the Missouri Attorney General wrote after this ruling.

VVG: What I’m talking about are specifically the essays, and I’m pulling this from that decision. That whole sentence that the Missouri Attorney General just wrote is, I think, about to be the subject of a lot of lawsuits. And public universities are probably going to toe the line of the state attorney general.

Hopefully, one thing that we faculty members can do is to know if the ACLU is going to file a lawsuit about whether we can, or if some other institution is going to, file a lawsuit about whether all aspects of the sentence you just read pertain? I would imagine a thousand legal ships are about to be launched, and I do not have the expertise to sail on all of them.

But I’m going to try to follow as many of them as I can and figure out… where do I have mobility to help people? What can I learn about different aspects of the law? The question of employment is definitely going to come up. And then what Jaswinder said about how do you diversify faculties—that’s going to come up. But I think it’s going to take years, and in the meantime we’re going to be stuck in some sort of weird swamp.

JB: Yeah, but I want to go back to that phrasing. Each applicant must be judged individually—is that the way Roberts phrased it?

VVG: Roberts’ exact phrase is: “In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual, not on the basis of race.” But he also wrote “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

JB: That is actually a really interesting loophole trapdoor, because… it’s not enough. I agree with that. It’s nowhere near enough. But what it says is that—and I think this is what the Tucker Carlsons of the world and the white supremacist everywhere want—is that you’re not allowed to bring this up. You’re not allowed to talk about it. And that’s what they’re afraid of. They’re afraid of letting people talk about it, because when you talk about it, a self-evident truth starts to emerge—the truth of history, the truth of experience. It becomes completely inarguable.

WT: You’re touching on something that I could go on for hours about because, the reason that America has been successful economically is that—when you look at Wall Street and you look at companies—it does have to rely on facts. It has an advantage over authoritarian countries that allow the leaders to rewrite history in the way that they want to. What you see when we talk about authoritarianism on the right in America is that this is the first time that we’ve had people actually promoting a control of truth that would resemble what would happen in an authoritarian society and it will, if ever successful, be incredibly destructive for the country. Not just because it’s morally wrong; it will be destructive in every other way. It destroys what makes the country successful—the pursuit and the belief that facts matter and that the past matters and the ability to argue those past truths.

VVG: I’m going to pick on this slightly and say that the U.S. is very, very good at hiding the truth. It has been for many, many generations, and the battle to extract ourselves from that is the battle that we’re currently fighting. That battle has been going on since the nation’s founding because of the erasure of multiple genocides. What we’re talking about is also something we’ve talked about in previous episodes—we’ve talked about the banning of critical race theory. And we’ve talked about Ron DeSantis banning certain kinds of facts from school, pretending that they’re not facts. That is also here.

Jaswinder, I think you’re right to say that, in the future, we’re going to have job applicants who are going to have been educated in an ahistorical fashion. And they’re going to present themselves as candidates who cling to those made up histories and made up facts or lack of histories and lack of facts. We have to be the people who say, “That’s actually not rigorous. That’s not something we can bring into our institutions to teach our students.”

We also have to think about the ways in which this decision could cause applicants—particularly those from the least privileged backgrounds—to think that they are not allowed to write about their race in their writing to us. And actually, they are. So I think we have to underline that and amplify it and say, “If you’re writing an essay…” I practically want to put this quote from Roberts on the website, I don’t know. I mean, who wants to do that?

But also, he’s saying that in a personal essay to an institution of higher education that you’re applying to, you’re allowed to write about your race. And the broad takeaway for a lot of people who just read about this decision is going to be, “Oh, no one is allowed to consider my race, so I should stop talking about it.” People will self-censor.

JB: That is where those of us who are already in positions of some kind of power [have to respond]. As limited as that feels as a poet and MFA faculty member; it’s not a ton of power, but it is in our space. And I take that seriously. I think that is one way of responding; It’s got to be a multi-channel response. We have to work to diversify the administration and faculty across the board.

But in the meantime, we can be very vocal; there’s nothing in this decision that keeps us from being vocal about the fact that we care about your experience and we are a place that wants to hear about it. Individuated, diverse, specific… Whether it has to do with your sexuality, your gender, your race, your socioeconomic background, we are interested in stories. Perspectives are always what we’ve been interested in when we go to literature. We want to hear somebody’s unique perspective for what it can teach us about things we don’t know or understand or have never experienced, and I don’t think that’s a wrong instinct.

Grab all those quotes from all three justices, Sotomayor, Jackson, and Roberts. Let’s make them visible, let’s make our position on this visible. Sure, we don’t have to use race as a metric—which, frankly, we have not exclusively done ever. But we recognize race as a legitimate category of experience, even if race itself—as critical race theorists have taught us for a long time—isn’t real, right? It’s not physiological or biological at all. Yet we know that structural racism and systems of racial inequality and differentiation are real, and we care about hearing and reading those stories, regardless of where you come from. And, in fact, we specifically are interested in people who come from different places.

WT: Well, yes, I agree with all of that. And I just wanted to say, Sugi, of course, I do totally agree with you—yes, America has done a very good job of erasing its past. The difference, and I would say up until this ruling, for instance, and why I find this ruling to be chilling, right, is that in Russia right now, if you say that it was unjustified to invade Ukraine, you can be put in jail. Right? In America, you’re not supposed to be able to be put in jail for the opinions that you have. And this is moving closer to that territory, in my view. You know, it is illegal for you to do this thing, to think this thought, to have this conversation. And that is really not part of what the Constitution is about.

VVG: I think it’s definitely a sign of institutional creep. I also think that there have been Americans who have—I’m trying to remember what we were reading from earlier where we were talking about selective violence… Who are the people who have been least able to speak out in this country? And to watch that move into institutions? I think it’s absolutely chilling.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Han Mallek. Photograph of Jaswinder Bolina by Sanjeev Chatterjee.

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Jaswinder Bolina

English as a Second Language and Other Poems (forthcoming October 2023) • 44th of July • Phantom Came • Carrier Waves • The Tallest Building in America • “American, Indian” – The Paris Review

Others:

Supreme Court Rejects Affirmative Action at Harvard and UNC – The New York Times • 20-1199 Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College • “Creativity And Diversity: How Exposure To Different People Affects Our Thinking” by Shankar Vedantam, Jennifer Schmidt, Parth Shah, Tara Boyle, NPR • Quiz Show directed by Robert Redford • SCOTUS affirmative action ruling: Harvard and UNC students, alums react • Here’s what happened when affirmative action ended at California public colleges by Emma Bowman, NPR • Michigan’s ban on affirmative action upheld by Supreme Court | CNN • 20-1199 Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (06/29/2023) • Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs a bill banning DEI initiatives in public colleges : NPR by Jaclyn Diaz • James Tate • Column: On affirmative action, Justice Jackson blasts her colleagues’ ‘let-them-eat-cake obliviousness’ • Affirmative action in college admissions and why military academies were exempted by the Supreme Court – CBS News by Caitlin Yilek and Kathryn Watson • What Counts as Discrimination on a College Campus? By Kelly Field, The Chronicle of Higher Education • Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarantino • Jhumpa Lahiri • Ernest Hemingway • Zadie Smith • Read the full text of the dissents in the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling by Sotomayor and Jackson – CBS News • Jim Crow Laws | American Experience | Official Site | PBS • Homestead Act (1862) | National Archives • Will Essay Prompts Get Students in After the Affirmative Action Ruling? by Scott Jaschik • Highlights of the Affirmative Action Opinions and Dissents by Charlie Savage, New York Times