CBR17Bingo: “Play” – because Gladwell discusses sports at Harvard
I read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell back in 2009 and found it interesting. Since then I’ve read a number of other books by Gladwell that I’ve liked in varying amounts. When I saw that Gladwell had written Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering (2024), I was curious enough to pick up the audiobook.
Gladwell uses examples to show how overstories, superspreaders, and group makeup influence a number of things in our lives. In the end, he uses all of these examples to explain how the opioid epidemic got so bad.
On the whole, this book was interesting, and it was easy to listen to. However, I often find Gladwell’s books a little bit forgetful. I’ll remember a couple of really interesting anecdotes but forget the main thrust of his argument.
In The Tipping Point, Gladwell discusses a small town with a high suicide rate at its overachieving high school, some supersreaders of COVID, and how many members of a group it takes to change the dynamic (the answer is the magic 1/3).
One of the more interesting sections to me was when Gladwell discussed how Harvard used competitive sports to allow more white people into the school who may not have gotten in on academic merit alone. I found this fascinating. I’ve often heard the argument that white people are disproportionately advantaged by legacy admissions in elite colleges, but I hadn’t heard the sports argument before. Gladwell focuses on the smaller sports that usually require money and privilege and have a higher number of white participants, including tennis, swimming, and rugby. Gladwell argues that Harvard has used this technique to keep any specific minority population below 1/3, which seems to be the magic number.
In contrast, Gladwell mentions Cal Tech, which has only merit based admissions. Cal Tech has a significantly higher Asian population, something that would not happen in Harvard with all of their admission games.
I wish Gladwell had discussed whether this theory holds with other schools, however, because I have questions. Cal Tech is in California, which has a higher Asian population. I’m pretty sure all of the colleges in California have higher Asian populations than those in the East Coast. Did Gladwell simply cherry pick two outlying schools to make his point?
In addition, many football and basketball teams have a good number of Black players. Admittedly, my knowledge comes from seeing Hoop Dreams many years ago, but the young man in that movie was a Black basketball player at a small midwestern university, and he and his teammates were the only Black people at the school. So, depending on the makeup of the school and how many different sports there are, I would think sports could help add people of color to the school.
What would be convincing–although I’m not sure it would even be possible to get these numbers–would be to see how many athletes Harvard accepts, and what percentage of those athletes are white. Is this percentage large enough to influence the racial makeup of the school? In addition, what are these numbers at other schools? How do these numbers compare to legacy admissions? How do these numbers compare to other schools around the country? Gladwell’s point would be more convincing with a little more information. However, it was fascinating to think of Harvard using sports to keep Harvard majority white.
In the end, Gladwell brings all this information together to explain how the opioid epidemic occurred. Although this was interesting, I’ve already read Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, which went into much more detail of the Sackler family and their actions.
On the whole, this was an interesting book, although I worry that Gladwell sometimes omits information to make simple explanations for things that are actually more complicated.
You can find all my reviews on my blog.