Henry MacCracken was careful to democratize the process, barring the appointment of executives or NYU officials from the electoral board. He also required each state to be represented in the board, so as to better capture America's zeitgeist. The pool was always drawn from positions of influence; “the most respected writers, historians, and educators of their day, along with scores of congressmen, a dozen Supreme Court justices, and six Presidents”. Yet, be it intention or oversight, the broader public could influence nothing but the nomination process. With no public referenda for elections, the Hall was bound to reflect the electors' professional and societal biases–literally, in the 7 instances of deceased electors winning entry to the Hall of Fame. This immediately came into conflict with MacCracken’s desire for impartiality, as he needed to reduce the votes required to elect a female nominee to offset the “eight electors \[that] refused to vote for any woman”.

Apart from implicit bias during elections, the Hall itself was initially planned to segregate inductees. Budgets were allocated to establish separate wings for women and foreign-born Americans. These wings would never be successfully funded. The lack of progress on the foriegn-born wing postponed the induction of Louis Agassiz, Alexander Hamilton, Roger Williams, and John Paul Jones until the restriction was overturned in 1914. Separate elections for women were likewise abolished in 1922, finally leading to the full integration of the busts and tablets. It was not until 1945 that the Hall saw its first Black inductee, Booker T. Washington. He made up one-half of the Hall of Fame’s Black membership, with the other inductee being George Washington Carver (1973). This is a total of 2 out of 102 Americans raised to the status of “Great”; less than 1%. Women have also been left largely unrepresented, despite consistently making up half of the U.S. population. 11 of the 102 Great Americans are women, and Clara Barton (1976) never had her likeness installed to the colonnade.

The Hall of Fame was constructed to represent the United States in its citizenry. While it falls short in terms of America’s diversity, this cannot be attributed to a lack of nominations or public will. The names of famous Black nominees–preserved in newspapers and in letters from the public–include Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Federick Douglass. Esteemed Indigenous American leaders such as Hiawatha, Great Peacemaker, and Chief Joseph had been entirely excluded from deeper consideration. In fact, the Hall does not host one Latino, Asian, or Pacific American. Three Jewish Americans make up the only religious minorities inducted: Albert A. Michelson (1970), Lillian Wald (1970), and Louis Brandeis (1973). While the electors leaned on rules and precedence to justify their lack of proportionality, they were willing to bend the rules in favor of white renown. In 1960, they waived the posthumous 25-year limitation for the recently deceased Orville Wright. Other changes to election rules, as well as the allowance of political lobbying, was also permitted in the case of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the installation of Confederate figures. The accommodations they secured for Sidney Lainer and others in the 1945 election ensured that Booker T. Washington would not be the sole inductee of that year.

As time wore on, the monument’s particular vision of greatness became more glaring. Bronx Community College (and New York State) saw its first Black college president in 1966, with Dr. James A. Colston. He oversaw changes in policy and hiring practice to become more inclusive to the rapidly diversifying University Heights campus. Dr. Roscoe C. Brown, Jr., the college’s second Black president, specifically broached diversity within the Hall of Fame. He noted the shame he associated with the Hall as a symbol of exclusion. “If it's a monument to anything, it's a monument to the sexism and racism of the elite white males who dominated in the first half of this century". Yet, he still worked to raise millions of dollars to restore the monument. Ultimately, Dr. Brown was both critical of the Hall’s history and proud of what it could come to symbolize. As elections were postponed in the mid-1970s, due to lack of funding, he envisioned how else the college could honor “Great Americans”. In 1977, he created the BCC Humanitarian Award.

Decades later, in 2017, BCC sought new elections to fill the vacancies left by the stowing of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. MacCracken’s vision for the Hall of Fame as a living monument persists in its new custodians. The college planned for the new elections to ameliorate the Hall’s history of exclusion. Such sentiment echoes from Dr. Brown’s call for a new direction for the monument. In positing a new election process, he suggests "we ask the kids who their own heroes are. It makes them think".