> Still, it advances the important goals of exposing students to a somewhat broader range of colleagues and helping to lift more underrepresented minorities into positions in the power elite, which remains heavily white.
I don't know about the power elite, but I wouldn't call Harvard or the Ivy League "heavily white". The current (or recent, last few years) composition of non-international students in the Ivy League is as follows:
Ivy League US Ratio
Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16
Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71
White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82
Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65
Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61
White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56
Edit: Updated table link: https://airtable.com/shrtIPZdmejxwKUcM - jotform seems to let the creator view the table, but anyone else is made to log in. Hopefully airtable doesn't pull shady tricks like that.
Does this presume that all Jewish people are white? I suppose it's probably a safe assumption in the US where the overwhelming majority are Ashkenazim (European Jews).
I think I found a bug in your calculation link. When I click on it, it shows me some kind of button telling me to login with something called the Facebook or Google? Has it been hacked in some way?
I'd be curious about seeing statistics that are white (including Jewish) and also students that benefited from legacy. In fact, if we do a (race && legacy_flag), where do you think it would be favored? I am guessing it would lean very heavily towards white.
The history of Jewish admissions at Harvard* (and Princeton, etc) is sort of 'required reading' to understand the Asian admissions issue.
If I recall correctly large numbers of Jewish students, at least into the 1960s, who applied to the Ivies just had stellar grades. Harvard and others implemented 'character tests' as a result, as they worried the overrepresentation of Jews on campus would scare off Christian parents.
I can believe that. I am confident though that Jewish students benefit heavily more with legacy. Asian Americans don't have 3-5 generations of Harvard and Ivy league students to benefit from. It's all a moot point though because private institutions will never release this information, and we will always have an "elite" white cohort consequently.
Pick one: Affirmative action or equality. Democrats lie and gaslight to pretend you can have both. Everyone is either treated equally or everyone is weighed based on their race or skin color.
If you think racial discrimination is okay so long as it supports a minority group, so be it. Just admit you aren’t a proponent of equality.
Ivy League admissions will always and inherently be about gatekeeping, not equality. The whole system is built around that goal. If you really care about having high-quality "college education for everyone", you'll have to look elsewhere for it and radically expand your notion of where a "high-quality education" might come from.
(As an aside, "affirmative action" is a hugely misleading term for race-biased special treatment in admissions and the like. The original meaning of that phrase just meant "take action to ensure that everyone is being treated equally under the law, and no covert violation of their rights is going on". Having an overt policy that requires special treatment for some is the opposite of what "affirmative action" means! It's an Orwellian twist, a Big Lie meant to make race-biased discrimination acceptable to those who don't know any better.)
Is there a legal basis for requiring Harvard, a private university, to change its admission criteria (however arbitrary or unfair they may be?) Private universities routinely make admissions decisions based on non-academic criteria including geographic diversity, likelihood of parental donations, ability to pay, athletic skill, and demographic desirability (e.g. maintaining similar numbers of men and women.) Needless to say, some of those criteria convey additional advantages upon the privileged and wealthy.
Or is it simply the power of the purse, given that Harvard depends heavily on grants (especially research grants) from the federal government?
(Edit: the answer appears to be both: Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination by private schools receiving federal funding, and Section 1981 prohibits discrimination in private contracts; discrimination may also affect the tax-exempt status of universities.)
(Another question is whether Title IX permits admission of men at a higher rate as a form of equity, or prohibits it as a form of discrimination.)
I just want to chime in to say how astonished I've been in the past with Harvard's behavior, not necessarily with their affirmative action practices, but how they defend them.
I did skim the article, but may not be familiar with the latest stance from Harvard. However, if memory serves their legal defense really just seemed to be that the racism was right. Asian people have inferior personalities (obviously untrue, but that seemed to be what they were saying at times). I was surprised there hasn't been more backlash that this is their present stance (at the time it was and this was not being talked about).
Also, it's worth pointing out that many Asian people are totally playing the game and still getting boxed out. There have been a ton of families that have just said "Okay, this is what we have to do. Be a well rounded person. Show your leadership skills, participate in activities, and be a full person in the community. No problem. We'll just do that."
Many of them don't even have that much of a problem with the policy, and have no issue getting their kids to achieve on that front. They still get denied. I don't have the answer, and don't agree with using criticism of affirmative action as a Trojan horse for white supremacy. However, pursuing an openly racist legal defense that Asian people essentially have worse personalities seems quite shocking to me.
Can you provide a source of the “inferior personality” narrative? I have heard about how interviews/character essays/etc. can affect admissions, but that’s a pretty lofty accusation.
So I could be off base, but I recall them being pretty defensive of the metric, and there seemed to be clear evidence that they were getting bad scores. I honestly can't remember, but that seemed to be what they were saying at times. No asians just score lower in "personality". It seems that others in the thread mention they're claiming they score white kids the same, which is at least a better stance.
I can understand the author saying they're gaslighting asian americans, because it definitely seemed that way to me. I'm really not sure what these people are talking about sometimes, because they seem to do a lot of tiptoeing around the issue, "debunking" claims that are either irrelevant or just easy to dispute, but not central to the issue. When they're not doing that they're questioning the intentions of the other side.
I think there's actually good reason to question people's intentions, but it can be counter-productive too. Anyway, your right that I don't really have much to back this up, I just read these stories and Harvard always looks terrible; I put the article down thinking "good lord, what's wrong with these people"
I believe this comes from an ongoing lawsuit[1] that SCOTUS recently agreed to hear.
> The plaintiffs revealed that Harvard admissions officers consistently rated Asian-American applicants as a group lower than others on traits like positive personality, likability, courage, kindness and being widely respected. Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on other admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, but the students' personal ratings significantly dragged down their admissions chances. The plaintiffs also claimed that alumni interviewers (who, unlike admissions officers within Harvard, did actually meet with individual applicants) gave Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to white applicants.
> Defenders of affirmative action--and even some of its critics--frequently criticize Justice Lewis Powell's controlling opinion in the Bakke case on the ground that it rejected the most compelling justification for race-based affirmative action while validating a relatively weak justification. I'll offer a hesitant defense of Powell's position (which subsequently was adopted by a SCOTUS majority).
Discrimination based on skin color is morally reprehensible. Doing it systematically at an institutional level is particularly damaging.
The 'conservative party' as you put it recognizes this. The 'other party' only recognizes it for certain skin colors, which is a subset of the aforementioned discrimination based on skin color.
So yes, you are correct in that the ends of the conservative party seem to be to end racial discrimination. The ends of the other party appear to be stoking racial hatred to garner support based on an outdated perception of their role.
I much prefer the conservative take on this issue in 2022.
Eh, not really. It's pretty obvious that there's racial discrimination in plenty of other areas, and the GOP just plays the "well hold on now" card ad infinitum. Like, they might acknowledge the occasional study showing discrimination in, say, policing, or hiring preferences. But they virtually never propose to actually do anything about it; their usual rhetoric on the issue is just to criticize whatever Democrats propose.
Nothing wrong with critiquing Democrat proposals, obviously, it's just that they never seem to have a credible, serious alternative.
"Imagine a hundred-yard dash in which one of the two runners has his legs shackled together. He has progressed ten yards, while the unshackled runner has gone fifty yards. At that point the judges decide that the race is unfair. How do they rectify the situation? Do they merely remove the shackles and allow the race to proceed? Then they could say that “equal opportunity” now prevailed. But one of the runners would still be forty yards ahead of the other. Would it not be the better part of justice to allow the previously shackled runner to make up the forty-yard gap, or to start the race all over again? That would be affirmative action toward equality."
Agreed, using race as a proxy for all "unfairness" it's simply mathematically wrong. Imagine discarding such an important confounder as economic status.
Shackling both runners to a post would be fair, but would it be a positive outcome?
Perhaps instead of focusing on winners and losers, we should focus on increasing the total distance ran? Starting the race from the beginning would be a waste of 60 yards.
This is spot on. If I'm in the hospital for something, my primary concern is the quality of care I'm going to receive, not the societal fairness/unfairness brought about the hospital's hiring policy.
Affirmative action isn't racial discrimination, it's an attempt to correct for racial discrimination.
The figures cited above are with affirmative action. They would be a lot worse without attempting to correct for it.
But of course correcting for historic and systemic inequities is more obvious than just letting the status quo happen. That doesn't make it morally reprehensible, anymore than the status quo, in which white students are advantaged, isn't morally superior.
If you think white students aren't privileged, even now, I suggest you consider the figures regarding folks who get in who are recruited Athletes, Legacies, Donors, of Students of faculty members and staff.
less than 16% of Latino, Black, or Asian students are from the ALDC groups, but 43% of white students are. Of the 43% who are, 75% would have been rejected if treated as white ALDCs.
It absolutely is discrimination as not all whites are privileged. These days your skin color doesn't matter much, what really makes the difference is the wealth of your parents. A rich black guy is privileged compared to poor white guy.
Yes, MOST African Americans are poorer due to historical discrimination. But similarly some whites are also poorer due to historical reasons beyond their own control. The solution should be support to the poor to help them achieve better educational outcomes, regardless of their skin color.
Just raise taxes and build a system that helps all poor people achieve better educational outcomes instead of racist affirmative action. Scandinavian model provides a good example. Anything else is just nonsense and convenient to the rich elite.
Also, it's possible to make college/university admissions very much anti-discriminatory simply by making them exam-based, and preventing those who check the exams from knowging who did the exam. This is how the system should work.
"Also, it's possible to make college/university admissions very much anti-discriminatory simply by making them exam-based, and preventing those who check the exams from knowging who did the exam. This is how the system should work."
This is assumes you want to treat each individual as an individual. But, to progressives, an individual is just an anonymous 'representative' of an ethnic group.
If you had a system as you described, progressives would calculate the acceptance rate for each ethnic group. If the rate for each group were not equal, they'd consider that prima facie evidence that exam-based admissions are structurally racist.
First, I commend you on wanting to do something about poverty. I also feel that policies that help all improverished folks and bring more people into the middle class are important and necessary.
That said, the idea that Black people only have issues because of historical discrimination does not reflect the data, and thus I feel affirmative action would still be needed to address those inequities.
That is to say both Black and White differences, and rich and poor differences need to be addressed in my view. You can't simply ignore one or the other.
There's a rich body of observational and experimental research into racial discrimination, which shows racial discrimination continues to exist in health care, hiring and careers, apartment rentals, punishment in schools, etc.
> Also, it's possible to make college/university admissions very much anti-discriminatory simply by making them exam-based, and preventing those who check the exams from knowging who did the exam. This is how the system should work.
Think about that a bit more, and look at countries that do that and what their higher education system looks like. Consider for example Mexico what percentage of students by ethnicity get into UNAM, what the exams look like, where the exams are offered and where the exam preparation schools are, how much the prep schools cost, if there are ways around it that favour certain groups. Many countries do this, do they have a better or fairer representative sample of students in their higher education, or just students who have been competently trained to pass an exam? An exam is one potential way in which students can shine, but it's unlikely that the person ranked at position 1 is Pareto dominating the person at position 2 on literally every axis.
> Affirmative action isn't racial discrimination, it's an attempt to correct for racial discrimination.
It's very obviously both these things.
It's an attempt to try to compensate for implicit/less visible racial discrimination, with very explicit racial discrimination enshrined into policy.
Not saying it's always a terrible idea, but pretending that it's not racial discrimination is exactly the kind of gaslighting discussed in the article.
How do we know if AA is actually solving the issue? At what point will AA have solved the issue (approximate date)?
Either AA solves racism by $deadline and becomes obsolete, or it doesn't solve racism and is discarded in favor of something better. Either way there is no reason to have indefinite AA beyond $deadline
> policies like promising to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court (or other political bodies with a public representative function) strike me as obviously sensible.
So he thinks racism is ok. And contrary to what he says in his linked article I don't think his choice will necessarily be unqualified but to use race as the primary metric is by definition racist. If Trump said said he would only choose a white man, that policy would aptly be decried as racist.
Racism definition: "a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others."
prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.
You know there's multiple definitions even if you restrict yourself to a single dictionary, don't you? Oxford's definition will change between 1950 and 2020, after all it is an obvious target for--not exactly infiltrating, that's too strong a word--but yeah, it is subject to change.
Dictionaries are political speech. Spanish ones under Franco didn't have the words "huelga" or "sindicato" which mean "strike" or "union."
This is racial discrimination for the Right Reasons, apparently. As long as everyone agrees on when we can and cannot discriminate by race, it should go very well.
I'm not convinced that our society has had that wider debate. I myself am not convinced that these "Right Reasons" are good and fair, even if they are so widespread.
There certainly are good reasons to discriminate based on race, this just happens to be one where there’s a wide variety of opinions about whether the reasons are just.
I'll be straight - the only reason I can think of to discriminate based on race is for medical reasons - and that is by their doctor to diagnose specific illnesses. Can you give some more good reasons?
I think you’re on the right track. I replied to a sibling comment with some other good reasons for discriminating based on race. Basically, race is a pretty good shorthand for a shared experience of a group, and there are genuine instances where that shared experience can be leveraged to do good things.
Discrimination is absolutely never the answer. Inequality is a hard problem to solve but that doesn’t mean we should take the lazy route and embed discrimination into all areas of life.
You cannot solve discrimination with discrimination. Democrats have been trying the lazy route for 40 years with no progress. Perhaps we would have been better off trying to solve the root causes instead of uselessly chasing quick fixes?
Discrimination itself is not something that needs to be “solved.” Unjust discrimination, yes, for example instances where that discrimination actively harms, as first or second order effect, without sufficient remedy. But there are quite a few instances where discrimination is warranted, and just. For example, when recruiting for medical studies where the disease being studied is common in one race but not another; in acting, where the character being portrayed is of a particular race and that characteristic is essential to encoding that character’s motivations; in certain public interaction roles like therapy, community organizing, policing or public health outreach, where the target demographic is a traditionally underserved minority. The there are situations where the selection of an individual puts no others at any disadvantage, such as the selection of a Supreme Court judge. In those situations, there is neither justice nor injustice in racial discrimination: it is simply a matter of what set of experiences the President wishes to see on the bench.
All races of people are equal in there inherent value as individuals, but they are not equal in their experiences, situations, or needs. To deny the common experience of racial groups in order to optimize for “discrimination” is naive. Discrimination is not inherently unjust, it is a consequence of a universe which has finite resources in time, money, attention, and power.
Well the Supreme Court has become a joke of an institution with really no credibility left. We made some progressive progress but now we are at a crossroads about to go backwards. However, appointing a black women to the Court is not racist.
> However, appointing a black women to the Court is not racist.
Appointing a black woman at the conclusion of a thorough candidate evaluation is not racist. Stating outright that you will appoint a black woman before candidates have been evaluated is racist.
I feel sorry for all the asian judges of any sex, women of any other race, men of any race, Muslims of any sex, Hispanics of any sex, and anyone else not “black woman.” Apparently none of them are eligible for this prestigious appointment. Too bad for being born the way they were, I guess.
Before I answer that, let me give another wrong answer: We do not measure it by how well it advances a conservative agenda.
That should expose what the problem is. The referee should not be one of the players, on either side. "Progressive progress" is the opposite of how we should judge the Supreme Court, just as "conservative progress" would be.
And that should tell us the answer. We measure how well the Supreme Court does by how well it impartially judges based on the cases and the law, not based on any agenda.
Now, judging that is obviously hard. Everyone is inclined to think the Supreme Court is biased against their position whenever it judges in a way they don't like. And maybe that's the only way to really measure it: If both sides think it's biased against them, then it might be doing rather well.
Asians in America are more often rich (Indian, Japanese, Chinese immigrants, not Korean or Vietnamese refugees), in some markets more so than whites (e.g. Los Angeles), and have much more power and access than latinos and blacks. The system is broken and adding more Asians (broadly) does not make it better. There are sub-groups of Asians which are vastly more underprivileged than other Asian ethnicities (Japanese-Americans are ~10x more wealthy than Korean-Americans in L.A. [1]). Affirmative Action isn't intended to just give non-whites opportunities equally. It's intended to restore equity by giving greater opportunity to those historically disadvantaged, focusing on the most disadvantaged first (descendants of American slavery, refugees of war, etc).
Or, instead of focusing on first principles of justice and equity, we can continue to just hand-wave the difference of ability and struggle that exist between asian immigrants and flatten it all into "asian" giving benefits to the most privileged of them.
In my industry, European-Americans and Asian-Americans have teamed up (unwittingly or otherwise) to limit diversity because they make up the vast majority of the labor and take many opportunities that could go to blacks or latinos.
>Affirmative Action isn't intended to just give non-whites opportunities equally. It's intended to restore equity by giving greater opportunity to those historically disadvantaged, focusing on the most disadvantaged first (descendants of American slavery, refugees of war, etc).
Is that how the harvard applications questions are structured? ie. do they ask "are you a descendant of american slavery or refugee of war?", or do they ask "what is your ethnicity, white, hispanic, black, asian, mixed, other?". I'll be more willing to believe your explanation if the questions are structured like the former rather than the latter. However, in my experience I've almost never saw the former.
> It's intended to restore equity by giving greater opportunity to those historically disadvantaged,
No, it literally isn't. Bakke in 1978 said that affirmative action is justified because diversity benefits everyone. It is not supposed to be used to favor historically disadvantaged people, and of course, after Bakke, universities don't claim to be using it for that purpose.
Of course, you may say that the universities are lying through their teeth when they claim that. You'll probably even be right. But taking them at their word, affirmative action is not "intended to restore equity by giving greater opportunity to those historically disadvantaged".
they might not be rich, but most of them are solidly middle/upper middle class and have a strong family structure in which the parents take a very active role in their childs life and future. This is not to say Asians don't work hard, in general a lot of them work very hard and have high standards for themselves, but i would say that if they went to a state school vs Harvard, i would bet their future outcomes wouldn't be too different. If someone from a under represented minority who came from a poor family managed to get into Harvard, their future outcomes might change a lot, they could finally get access to a sort of "knowledge" that middle and upper middle class give to their children since the time they are born, a knowledge on what the world is really like and what is possible in this world.
I just want to point out that this is part of the premise of the original article:
> Harvard’s admissions policies make me especially queasy, because the burden rests so heavily on Asian Americans. Still, it advances the important goals of exposing students to a somewhat broader range of colleagues and helping to lift more underrepresented minorities into positions in the power elite, which remains heavily white.
Generally, going to prestigious schools benefits under represented minorities more than it benefits Asian Americans to an extent that affirmative action can be effective at addressing systemic inequalities, but it's still discriminatory against Asian americans to do so. It's a matter of opinion whether it's a good tradeoff or not
Is there anything that the admissions committee can do to make sure that admission is totally discrimination free? Even evaluating by pure test results would mean that there is systematic discrimination towards the unprivileged. Asians are extremely well represented at top schools, i'm not sure what they are fighting for?
The thing is that there's two levels of possible discrimination; systemic discrimination and admissions discrimination. Pure test results are discrimination free at the admissions level, but they don't address systemic inequities. To accommodate for systemic inequities, we use admissions discrimination. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing; the author thinks it's a worthy tradeoff.
> Asians are extremely well represented at top schools, i'm not sure what they are fighting for?
The truth is that Asian Americans have to get higher test scores / GPA / extracurriculars to get into prestigious schools. It's true that this might have a positive affect on reducing systemic discrimination in the long run, but it's hard for Asian American applicants to accept that the burden should be placed on them.
I don't know about the power elite, but I wouldn't call Harvard or the Ivy League "heavily white". The current (or recent, last few years) composition of non-international students in the Ivy League is as follows:
Multi-ethnic students and minor ethnicities were excluded from this table. Sources used were the universities own diversity reports, and the lowest estimate for the Jewish student body from the following Jewish organizations: http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat....The (slightly messy) calculations: https://www.jotform.com/tables/220446862418862 - please let me know if you find any errors.
Edit: Updated table link: https://airtable.com/shrtIPZdmejxwKUcM - jotform seems to let the creator view the table, but anyone else is made to log in. Hopefully airtable doesn't pull shady tricks like that.