Elite Colleges Have Found a New Virtue for Applicants to Fake

By Alex Bronzini-Vender

Mr. Bronzini-Vender is a sophomore at Harvard University.

The spring before I applied to college, the guidance counselors at my private school herded our mostly white grade into the gym and told us that the Supreme Court was about to ban affirmative action. There was, however, a loophole: Though the court would no longer allow colleges to screen applicants for race per se, they would probably still be allowed to ask applicants how race had shaped their lives. My guidance counselors called it the identity question. Like most of the rest of my classmates, I started thinking about how to spin my whiteness into something more interesting.

I went through the application process again last spring, as a freshman, hoping to transfer. This time I found a new question: “Tell us about a moment when you engaged in a difficult conversation or encountered someone with an opinion or perspective that was different from your own. How did you find common ground?”

It’s known as the disagreement question, and since the student encampments of spring 2024 and the American right’s attacks on universities, a growing number of elite colleges have added it to their applications. Caroline Koppelman, a private admissions consultant, has called it the “hot new it girl” of college essays. There’s no evidence that civility mania will improve campus discourse, but it seems poised to widen the inequalities that already plague hyperselective college admissions.

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This fall, an expanding number of top schools — including Columbia, M.I.T., Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and the University of Chicago — will begin accepting “dialogues” portfolios from Schoolhouse.world, a platform co-founded by Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, to help students with math skills and SAT prep. High-schoolers will log into a Zoom call with other students and a peer tutor, debate topics like immigration or Israel-Palestine, and rate one another on traits like empathy, curiosity or kindness. The Schoolhouse.world site offers a scorecard: The more sessions you attend, and the more that your fellow participants recognize your virtues, the better you do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/college-admissions-essays.html

Civilty for whom? And, who needs Trump when we have universities to play against free speech?