Harvard Rejects Trump Admin’s Demands, Going to Court

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So dumb. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”’

The government isn’t saying that. No one is forcing Harvard to do anything. They have a billion dollar endowment and can do as they please.

What they can’t do is foster an educational atmosphere of harassment and expect the taxpayers to finance it.

Sounds like you skipped the letter with the Trump admin’s demands. In the second link.

I literally quoted from the article.

No one is forcing Harvard to do anything.

Harvard is throwing a hissy fit because it wants to do certain things AND get taxpayer funds.

Doesn’t work like that.

All taxpayers will never agree on anything. If the standard for receipt taxpayer funds is agreement from all taxpayers, then nothing would ever be funded from public coffers.

Right. That's why we have elections. Trump won the last election. In no small part because people were turned off to the liberal elite messaging, the racial discrimination against white and asians, the never ending stream of woke ideology coming out of places like Harvard.

If I have learned one thing in the past couple of years is all the same people who say they can't stand racism against Asians had no problem with COVID epithets and violence against Asians and hate meritocracy when Asians actually thrive.

The same people who cry about anti semitism at universities embrace salutes and white supremacists like Stephen miller.

So no...no one is taking you any seriously any more. You've rung a false tune on that bell too many times.

We all who were attacking Asians during Covid, and it wasn’t Trump supporters.

Same with antisemitism. We’ve all seen outright hate and violence the last 1.5 years and it wasn’t coming from MAGA.

We're not supposed to say it was black people but the violence was disproportionately black people attacking elderly Asians or Asian women.

For some reason, only White people are not allowed to make commentary or observations about racism. There's a lot of racism that doesn't even involve whites.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tax exempt status next.

It's absurd the Harvard pays no taxes and gets $9B of federal money. Meanwhile their class sizes remain tiny, while they talk about equity and privilege, and play racial discrimination games where a black student has 10x the odds of getting in than an Asian American student with similar stats across all achievement deciles.

Please share a post SCOTUS ruling source for that statistic.

I happen to disfavor affirmative action too, but am often surprised how many rail against that while fine with athletic recruiting. They have the highest admit rates of all, and these are supposed to be academic institutions. Some people are just born more athletic; an average person can’t get recruited with just hard work the way they can get good grades or test scores with just hard work.

They haven't released all their admissions data to the general public. But what days we have shows pretty dramatic racial discrimination. Why are you giving them a pass from stuff they were doing just a few years ago?

Because it wasn't illegal then. 37% Asian for the class of '28 and you're still claiming they are racist against Asians? By the way, most of the Asians who work and study at top institutions, and there are a lot of us, are firmly anti-Trump, because we know better than to think he is on our side.

It was always illegal. The opinion says explicitly:

"For the reasons provided above, the Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today. "

It was never legal to discriminate like that.

I don't like trump and I didn't think he is on our side. But I think Harvard was discriminating against Asians and it's weird that you have so much trouble admitting this very obvious fact.

Also, you are either lying or stupid if you are arguing that being overrepresented means you aren't being discriminated against.

So, every Asian applicant should be admitted? And that won't discriminate against some other race?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Harvard should lode its tax exemption and be taxes like any other entity for defying scouts and WH.

This.

Right after churches start paying up. Unethical MFers.

Mosques too, after all we are all about equity here.

And synogogues

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:US Government should terminate Harvard's participation in federal student aid programs. Thy have tens of billions so they can pay their own students to indoctrinate not taxpayer funds. They will be begging to participate within 12 months.

You don't understand how donations to organizations or universities work. And those tens of billions in Harvard's endowment come from donations.
Sometimes donations are not restricted in use. Most of the time - especially large donations that build endowments - they do. They legally can only be used for the purposes and/or in the manner designated by the donor.

I wish the universities would lay out a list of these endowment funds indicating the donations and the accompanying restrictions for each. Circulate that on FOX News and Breitbart and all the other MAGA "news" sources and educate people on reality.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Caltech comes the closest to a true meritocracy. Interestingly, the profs are currently far more concerned with athletic admission boosts than racial, as there’s a high percentage of athletes at a school of 1000.

But even at Caltech I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some differences difference based on sex, given there’s more than double the number of male applicants but the student population is 54% male. So, is that an ok exception? If so, how different from other cases? If not, do we lose something? There has always been at least a case for some form of diversity, but arguing we might as well resort to ditching democratic norms if we can’t agree where to draw the line is like burning down the house when you dislike the paint job.

Was it worth the civil unrest and chaos of the 1960s to stop legal discrimination against blacks?
Sure this isn't nearly as bad but it's still racial discrimination and it's certainly worth destroying harvard over.

I bet if you just lined up test scores and GPA, it wouldn't look as bad between men and women at caltech as the difference between blacks and asians at harvard.
I personally don't think we should have gender preferences either but the gap is not obscene

Here's another thing about places like caltech and mit and women. Do you notice anything they have in common?

Wow, talk about discrimination. You sure seem to be up for it when it suits you. The issue with what you perceive as Asian discrimination is cultural, not racial. It's the culture that generates the "Ivy recipe " of violin, robotics, math team, FBLA, golf/tennis etc. It’s about how the students appear in terms of achievements and interests, not race. Also, the constant ratcheting of intensity and achievement means that these kids may not have developed creative or communication skills. Who knows.

You think that not prioritizing students who excel at the recipe is "racist, " but are fins suggesting black students have lesser scores and are therefore less meritorious than Asian. How much prep did both sets of students do? How much enrichment? Hopkins CTY? Math boosted 3 years ahead to get into magnets only for math curriculum to be review because it was already addressed with private instruction? And who believes standard test are the end all be all of merit? Only the parents who invested in them.

Talk about discrimination. Sheesh.

I remember when people were suspicious of Soviet Bloc athletes. They delivered incredible performances for decades but the rumors of performance enhancing drugs became a known fact. People stopped considering them solely on their stats and simply assumed they were juicing.

Admissions officers are comparing kids who just went high school against kids who went to high school + Hopkins CTY + Russian Math + Kumon + Mathnasium + etc.

All things being equal sometimes a kid with a 1500 from a barebones high school looks more impressive.

Many schools have shifted towards lifting kids from economically disadvantaged backgrounds because factoring in race is no longer allowed. I actually agree that race should not be a determining factor, but SES should be. However, this is still making some people angry because their kids are still not getting into Harvard.

Exactly.
But encouraging applications and giving aid to less wealthy students doesn't make them prepared for college work. The problem isn't colleges - it's the K-12 education system!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tax exempt status next.

It's absurd the Harvard pays no taxes and gets $9B of federal money. Meanwhile their class sizes remain tiny, while they talk about equity and privilege, and play racial discrimination games where a black student has 10x the odds of getting in than an Asian American student with similar stats across all achievement deciles.

Please share a post SCOTUS ruling source for that statistic.

I happen to disfavor affirmative action too, but am often surprised how many rail against that while fine with athletic recruiting. They have the highest admit rates of all, and these are supposed to be academic institutions. Some people are just born more athletic; an average person can’t get recruited with just hard work the way they can get good grades or test scores with just hard work.

They haven't released all their admissions data to the general public. But what days we have shows pretty dramatic racial discrimination. Why are you giving them a pass from stuff they were doing just a few years ago?

Because it wasn't illegal then. 37% Asian for the class of '28 and you're still claiming they are racist against Asians? By the way, most of the Asians who work and study at top institutions, and there are a lot of us, are firmly anti-Trump, because we know better than to think he is on our side.

It was always illegal. The opinion says explicitly:

"For the reasons provided above, the Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today. "

It was never legal to discriminate like that.

I don't like trump and I didn't think he is on our side. But I think Harvard was discriminating against Asians and it's weird that you have so much trouble admitting this very obvious fact.

Also, you are either lying or stupid if you are arguing that being overrepresented means you aren't being discriminated against.

So, every Asian applicant should be admitted? And that won't discriminate against some other race?

Every candidate should be judged on merit and not race. I also am stunned that Harvard students any Harvard students are taking remedial math. I don’t care if you are an English major you should be able to take college math with remedial math.

[Anonymous]

without remedial math

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tax exempt status next.

It's absurd the Harvard pays no taxes and gets $9B of federal money. Meanwhile their class sizes remain tiny, while they talk about equity and privilege, and play racial discrimination games where a black student has 10x the odds of getting in than an Asian American student with similar stats across all achievement deciles.

Please share a post SCOTUS ruling source for that statistic.

I happen to disfavor affirmative action too, but am often surprised how many rail against that while fine with athletic recruiting. They have the highest admit rates of all, and these are supposed to be academic institutions. Some people are just born more athletic; an average person can’t get recruited with just hard work the way they can get good grades or test scores with just hard work.

They haven't released all their admissions data to the general public. But what days we have shows pretty dramatic racial discrimination. Why are you giving them a pass from stuff they were doing just a few years ago?

Because it wasn't illegal then. 37% Asian for the class of '28 and you're still claiming they are racist against Asians? By the way, most of the Asians who work and study at top institutions, and there are a lot of us, are firmly anti-Trump, because we know better than to think he is on our side.

It was always illegal. The opinion says explicitly:

"For the reasons provided above, the Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today. "

It was never legal to discriminate like that.

I don't like trump and I didn't think he is on our side. But I think Harvard was discriminating against Asians and it's weird that you have so much trouble admitting this very obvious fact.

Also, you are either lying or stupid if you are arguing that being overrepresented means you aren't being discriminated against.

I'm not even in favor of race-based affirmative action, though I can understand why others argue for it. However, it is one thing to be in favor of race-blind admissions, and an entirely different thing to get behind a dictator-wanna-be who wants to clamp down on free speech, defund science, start tariff wars, alienate us from former world allies, and impose various other ill-informed and anti-intellectual policies to ruin this country. You have to be delusional to believe that what MAGA is doing is in the interest of Asian Americans, or in the interests of the country at large. Moreover, you have to be immoral to support an administration who deports an innocent man without cause and sends him to a brutal foreign prison. And then even, though it was clearly done in error, said administration doubles down and refuse to bring him back. Are you really so fixated on the fact that it was harder for Asians to get into Harvard that you are willing to approve of what this guy is doing to ruin a democracy?

So you don't really like racial discrimination but you can understand the argument for it?

OK, is that any different from saying I don't really support trump but I can understand why they support him.

Similarly, I don't like defunding research and I wish he had simply moved the research from harvard to some flagship state schools but I didn't get elected president. If you don't like it, try not losing so many goddam elections.

If you can tolerate racial discrimination against asians for decades and understand why others argue for it, perhaps you can tolerate the persecution for an institution as privileged as harvard for a few years and bring yourself to understand why people are arguing for their reformation.

In the end, this particular move is not really hurting trump with the constituency he cares about. The working class voters from Minnesota to Pennsylvania do not have a lot of love for harvard. They think of harvard and the liberal elites as part of the problem. And as long as trump can keep the voters, he will control the republican party whether he is president or not.

I can certainly understand the possible good intention of boosting minority applicants in a pool to encourage underrepresented groups as well as low income groups, which is not the same as malice towards Asian people or white people or Jewish people. Just like trying to balance gender ratio at liberal arts colleges is not the same as being anti-female, or trying to balance gender ratio at Caltech is not the same as being anti-male. You can disagree with practice, but instead of just campaigning for admissions reform, you're content to see the best research institutions razed to the ground, and willing to see a whole lot of Asian scientists lose their funding. I also hope you realize that a significant portion of his stakeholders want to stop the "Asian invasion" of tech, medicine, and higher ed.

Politics make strange bedfellows. I don't think trump is my friend over the long run any more than FDR thought Stalin was his friend over the long run, but Hitler presented the greater threat. Trump will get defanged in 2 years when democrats take the house and then in 2 more years democrats will take the presidency and possibly the senate as well. But as long as democrats adhere to race identity politics and create a racial hierarchy where it is not only acceptable to discriminate against asians, it is virtuous to do so, it is hard to see them as a long term ally.

Harvard wasn't merely boosting minority applicants, they were discriminating against asians. White applicants with the same application profile were getting in at significantly higher rates than asians. You are downplaying their racism to make the reaction to that racism seem too severe, if this happened to blacks or hispanics, there would be protests and democratic lawmakers would be lining up to cosponsor a bill to end it. And it wasn't some tie breaker boost to URM, the difference between accepted asian applicants and accepted black applicants was enormous.

I don't think caltech serves the nation well by engaging in social engineering when so much our national defense technology comes out of those labs. Unless the absence of female colleagues is reducing the quality of the applicant pool generally (e.g. stuyvesant high school used to be ranked lower than bronx science when it was an all boys school and quickly became the top ranked school after girls started attending, it wasn't just because stuyvesant now had access to smart girls it was also because it had access to smart boys that wanted female classmates).

I am willing to see harvard destroyed to serve as a cautionary tale against racism, why aren't you? I'd like to see their tax exempt status revoked and all federal funding withdrawn and reallocated to flagship state schools. There is nothing unique about harvard's labs (or any of the ivy league labs) that the research cannot be done elsewhere. If the grants move to UNC, UVA and U of Florida, so will the researchers. I am not happy that they are using a wrecking ball but just like people thought for decades that a little asian discrimination was a small price to pay for racial justice, this temporary disruption in research is a small price to pay for eliminating left wing racial discrimination.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tax exempt status next.

It's absurd the Harvard pays no taxes and gets $9B of federal money. Meanwhile their class sizes remain tiny, while they talk about equity and privilege, and play racial discrimination games where a black student has 10x the odds of getting in than an Asian American student with similar stats across all achievement deciles.

Please share a post SCOTUS ruling source for that statistic.

I happen to disfavor affirmative action too, but am often surprised how many rail against that while fine with athletic recruiting. They have the highest admit rates of all, and these are supposed to be academic institutions. Some people are just born more athletic; an average person can’t get recruited with just hard work the way they can get good grades or test scores with just hard work.

They haven't released all their admissions data to the general public. But what days we have shows pretty dramatic racial discrimination. Why are you giving them a pass from stuff they were doing just a few years ago?

Because it wasn't illegal then. 37% Asian for the class of '28 and you're still claiming they are racist against Asians? By the way, most of the Asians who work and study at top institutions, and there are a lot of us, are firmly anti-Trump, because we know better than to think he is on our side.

It was always illegal. The opinion says explicitly:

"For the reasons provided above, the Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today. "

It was never legal to discriminate like that.

I don't like trump and I didn't think he is on our side. But I think Harvard was discriminating against Asians and it's weird that you have so much trouble admitting this very obvious fact.

Also, you are either lying or stupid if you are arguing that being overrepresented means you aren't being discriminated against.

I'm not even in favor of race-based affirmative action, though I can understand why others argue for it. However, it is one thing to be in favor of race-blind admissions, and an entirely different thing to get behind a dictator-wanna-be who wants to clamp down on free speech, defund science, start tariff wars, alienate us from former world allies, and impose various other ill-informed and anti-intellectual policies to ruin this country. You have to be delusional to believe that what MAGA is doing is in the interest of Asian Americans, or in the interests of the country at large. Moreover, you have to be immoral to support an administration who deports an innocent man without cause and sends him to a brutal foreign prison. And then even, though it was clearly done in error, said administration doubles down and refuse to bring him back. Are you really so fixated on the fact that it was harder for Asians to get into Harvard that you are willing to approve of what this guy is doing to ruin a democracy?

So you don't really like racial discrimination but you can understand the argument for it?

OK, is that any different from saying I don't really support trump but I can understand why they support him.

Similarly, I don't like defunding research and I wish he had simply moved the research from harvard to some flagship state schools but I didn't get elected president. If you don't like it, try not losing so many goddam elections.

If you can tolerate racial discrimination against asians for decades and understand why others argue for it, perhaps you can tolerate the persecution for an institution as privileged as harvard for a few years and bring yourself to understand why people are arguing for their reformation.

In the end, this particular move is not really hurting trump with the constituency he cares about. The working class voters from Minnesota to Pennsylvania do not have a lot of love for harvard. They think of harvard and the liberal elites as part of the problem. And as long as trump can keep the voters, he will control the republican party whether he is president or not.

I can certainly understand the possible good intention of boosting minority applicants in a pool to encourage underrepresented groups as well as low income groups, which is not the same as malice towards Asian people or white people or Jewish people. Just like trying to balance gender ratio at liberal arts colleges is not the same as being anti-female, or trying to balance gender ratio at Caltech is not the same as being anti-male. You can disagree with practice, but instead of just campaigning for admissions reform, you're content to see the best research institutions razed to the ground, and willing to see a whole lot of Asian scientists lose their funding. I also hope you realize that a significant portion of his stakeholders want to stop the "Asian invasion" of tech, medicine, and higher ed.

Exactly!

You're applauding a racist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Caltech comes the closest to a true meritocracy. Interestingly, the profs are currently far more concerned with athletic admission boosts than racial, as there’s a high percentage of athletes at a school of 1000.

But even at Caltech I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some differences difference based on sex, given there’s more than double the number of male applicants but the student population is 54% male. So, is that an ok exception? If so, how different from other cases? If not, do we lose something? There has always been at least a case for some form of diversity, but arguing we might as well resort to ditching democratic norms if we can’t agree where to draw the line is like burning down the house when you dislike the paint job.

Was it worth the civil unrest and chaos of the 1960s to stop legal discrimination against blacks?
Sure this isn't nearly as bad but it's still racial discrimination and it's certainly worth destroying harvard over.

I bet if you just lined up test scores and GPA, it wouldn't look as bad between men and women at caltech as the difference between blacks and asians at harvard.
I personally don't think we should have gender preferences either but the gap is not obscene

Here's another thing about places like caltech and mit and women. Do you notice anything they have in common?

Have you been to a math olympiad, or any other high level math competition? Math olympiad is male dominated. Even at the lower AIME qualification level of math, only 22% are girls. SAT and GPA are low ceiling. If MIT and Caltech wanted to really go all out on meritocracy, they could test at a much higher level for math and have an extremely male dominated incoming class, and some people want this. I personally do not, but that does not make me a man-hater. At most non-tech schools, it's the male applicants that have to get boosted to get admitted. I happen to think balanced gender ratios are nice.

And yet the disparity in SAT score between black and asian admits is ginormous.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So dumb. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”’

The government isn’t saying that. No one is forcing Harvard to do anything. They have a billion dollar endowment and can do as they please.

What they can’t do is foster an educational atmosphere of harassment and expect the taxpayers to finance it.

Sounds like you skipped the letter with the Trump admin’s demands. In the second link.

I literally quoted from the article.

No one is forcing Harvard to do anything.

Harvard is throwing a hissy fit because it wants to do certain things AND get taxpayer funds.

Doesn’t work like that.

All taxpayers will never agree on anything. If the standard for receipt taxpayer funds is agreement from all taxpayers, then nothing would ever be funded from public coffers.

Right. That's why we have elections. Trump won the last election. In no small part because people were turned off to the liberal elite messaging, the racial discrimination against white and asians, the never ending stream of woke ideology coming out of places like Harvard.

If I have learned one thing in the past couple of years is all the same people who say they can't stand racism against Asians had no problem with COVID epithets and violence against Asians and hate meritocracy when Asians actually thrive.

The same people who cry about anti semitism at universities embrace salutes and white supremacists like Stephen miller.

So no...no one is taking you any seriously any more. You've rung a false tune on that bell too many times.

We all who were attacking Asians during Covid, and it wasn’t Trump supporters.

Same with antisemitism. We’ve all seen outright hate and violence the last 1.5 years and it wasn’t coming from MAGA.

Some officers working the nation’s capital during the failed insurrection might disagree about MAGA’s non-violence.

Yeah?

How many cops were attacked during January 6?

How many cops got attacked during BLM?

January 6th was treason but no less violent than BLM.

Wow, you have a short memory and are probably not from around here. (Or never venture in the city from Potomac).

1/6, MAGA attacked hundreds of police, bear spraying them, tasering them, beating them with objects. Please review the footage. 1/6 was violent. Google how many Capitol police members have ptsd from that day.

Much of BLM violence was started by or strongly esclated by police/troops. I remember a vet trying to talk to the troops as a servicemember, and they just sprayed him in the face. Trump's sweep of Lafayette park with rubber bullets. Yes, looters took advantage of chaos and unredt, and protesters sometimes obstructed and did not comply, but the violence was largely by the state.

I much rather have protesters destroy government properties than private properties of innocent people.

We should put them all in jail in el salvador.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tax exempt status next.

It's absurd the Harvard pays no taxes and gets $9B of federal money. Meanwhile their class sizes remain tiny, while they talk about equity and privilege, and play racial discrimination games where a black student has 10x the odds of getting in than an Asian American student with similar stats across all achievement deciles.

Please share a post SCOTUS ruling source for that statistic.

I happen to disfavor affirmative action too, but am often surprised how many rail against that while fine with athletic recruiting. They have the highest admit rates of all, and these are supposed to be academic institutions. Some people are just born more athletic; an average person can’t get recruited with just hard work the way they can get good grades or test scores with just hard work.

They haven't released all their admissions data to the general public. But what days we have shows pretty dramatic racial discrimination. Why are you giving them a pass from stuff they were doing just a few years ago?

Because it wasn't illegal then. 37% Asian for the class of '28 and you're still claiming they are racist against Asians? By the way, most of the Asians who work and study at top institutions, and there are a lot of us, are firmly anti-Trump, because we know better than to think he is on our side.

It was always illegal. The opinion says explicitly:

"For the reasons provided above, the Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today. "

It was never legal to discriminate like that.

I don't like trump and I didn't think he is on our side. But I think Harvard was discriminating against Asians and it's weird that you have so much trouble admitting this very obvious fact.

Also, you are either lying or stupid if you are arguing that being overrepresented means you aren't being discriminated against.

I'm not even in favor of race-based affirmative action, though I can understand why others argue for it. However, it is one thing to be in favor of race-blind admissions, and an entirely different thing to get behind a dictator-wanna-be who wants to clamp down on free speech, defund science, start tariff wars, alienate us from former world allies, and impose various other ill-informed and anti-intellectual policies to ruin this country. You have to be delusional to believe that what MAGA is doing is in the interest of Asian Americans, or in the interests of the country at large. Moreover, you have to be immoral to support an administration who deports an innocent man without cause and sends him to a brutal foreign prison. And then even, though it was clearly done in error, said administration doubles down and refuse to bring him back. Are you really so fixated on the fact that it was harder for Asians to get into Harvard that you are willing to approve of what this guy is doing to ruin a democracy?

So you don't really like racial discrimination but you can understand the argument for it?

OK, is that any different from saying I don't really support trump but I can understand why they support him.

Similarly, I don't like defunding research and I wish he had simply moved the research from harvard to some flagship state schools but I didn't get elected president. If you don't like it, try not losing so many goddam elections.

If you can tolerate racial discrimination against asians for decades and understand why others argue for it, perhaps you can tolerate the persecution for an institution as privileged as harvard for a few years and bring yourself to understand why people are arguing for their reformation.

In the end, this particular move is not really hurting trump with the constituency he cares about. The working class voters from Minnesota to Pennsylvania do not have a lot of love for harvard. They think of harvard and the liberal elites as part of the problem. And as long as trump can keep the voters, he will control the republican party whether he is president or not.

I can certainly understand the possible good intention of boosting minority applicants in a pool to encourage underrepresented groups as well as low income groups, which is not the same as malice towards Asian people or white people or Jewish people. Just like trying to balance gender ratio at liberal arts colleges is not the same as being anti-female, or trying to balance gender ratio at Caltech is not the same as being anti-male. You can disagree with practice, but instead of just campaigning for admissions reform, you're content to see the best research institutions razed to the ground, and willing to see a whole lot of Asian scientists lose their funding. I also hope you realize that a significant portion of his stakeholders want to stop the "Asian invasion" of tech, medicine, and higher ed.

Politics make strange bedfellows. I don't think trump is my friend over the long run any more than FDR thought Stalin was his friend over the long run, but Hitler presented the greater threat. Trump will get defanged in 2 years when democrats take the house and then in 2 more years democrats will take the presidency and possibly the senate as well. But as long as democrats adhere to race identity politics and create a racial hierarchy where it is not only acceptable to discriminate against asians, it is virtuous to do so, it is hard to see them as a long term ally.

Harvard wasn't merely boosting minority applicants, they were discriminating against asians. White applicants with the same application profile were getting in at significantly higher rates than asians. You are downplaying their racism to make the reaction to that racism seem too severe, if this happened to blacks or hispanics, there would be protests and democratic lawmakers would be lining up to cosponsor a bill to end it. And it wasn't some tie breaker boost to URM, the difference between accepted asian applicants and accepted black applicants was enormous.

I don't think caltech serves the nation well by engaging in social engineering when so much our national defense technology comes out of those labs. Unless the absence of female colleagues is reducing the quality of the applicant pool generally (e.g. stuyvesant high school used to be ranked lower than bronx science when it was an all boys school and quickly became the top ranked school after girls started attending, it wasn't just because stuyvesant now had access to smart girls it was also because it had access to smart boys that wanted female classmates).

I am willing to see harvard destroyed to serve as a cautionary tale against racism, why aren't you? I'd like to see their tax exempt status revoked and all federal funding withdrawn and reallocated to flagship state schools. There is nothing unique about harvard's labs (or any of the ivy league labs) that the research cannot be done elsewhere. If the grants move to UNC, UVA and U of Florida, so will the researchers. I am not happy that they are using a wrecking ball but just like people thought for decades that a little asian discrimination was a small price to pay for racial justice, this temporary disruption in research is a small price to pay for eliminating left wing racial discrimination.

Very well stated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Caltech comes the closest to a true meritocracy. Interestingly, the profs are currently far more concerned with athletic admission boosts than racial, as there’s a high percentage of athletes at a school of 1000.

But even at Caltech I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some differences difference based on sex, given there’s more than double the number of male applicants but the student population is 54% male. So, is that an ok exception? If so, how different from other cases? If not, do we lose something? There has always been at least a case for some form of diversity, but arguing we might as well resort to ditching democratic norms if we can’t agree where to draw the line is like burning down the house when you dislike the paint job.

Was it worth the civil unrest and chaos of the 1960s to stop legal discrimination against blacks?
Sure this isn't nearly as bad but it's still racial discrimination and it's certainly worth destroying harvard over.

I bet if you just lined up test scores and GPA, it wouldn't look as bad between men and women at caltech as the difference between blacks and asians at harvard.
I personally don't think we should have gender preferences either but the gap is not obscene

Here's another thing about places like caltech and mit and women. Do you notice anything they have in common?

Wow, talk about discrimination. You sure seem to be up for it when it suits you. The issue with what you perceive as Asian discrimination is cultural, not racial. It's the culture that generates the "Ivy recipe " of violin, robotics, math team, FBLA, golf/tennis etc. It’s about how the students appear in terms of achievements and interests, not race. Also, the constant ratcheting of intensity and achievement means that these kids may not have developed creative or communication skills. Who knows.

You think that not prioritizing students who excel at the recipe is "racist, " but are fins suggesting black students have lesser scores and are therefore less meritorious than Asian. How much prep did both sets of students do? How much enrichment? Hopkins CTY? Math boosted 3 years ahead to get into magnets only for math curriculum to be review because it was already addressed with private instruction? And who believes standard test are the end all be all of merit? Only the parents who invested in them.

Talk about discrimination. Sheesh.

I remember when people were suspicious of Soviet Bloc athletes. They delivered incredible performances for decades but the rumors of performance enhancing drugs became a known fact. People stopped considering them solely on their stats and simply assumed they were juicing.

Admissions officers are comparing kids who just went high school against kids who went to high school + Hopkins CTY + Russian Math + Kumon + Mathnasium + etc.

All things being equal sometimes a kid with a 1500 from a barebones high school looks more impressive.

Many schools have shifted towards lifting kids from economically disadvantaged backgrounds because factoring in race is no longer allowed. I actually agree that race should not be a determining factor, but SES should be. However, this is still making some people angry because their kids are still not getting into Harvard.

If you tell me my kid loses out to a slightly less qualified poor kid, then my kid should have tried harder. But if you tell me my kid loses out to a UMC black kid because of his race and has to do things to hide his race on his applications to avoid discrimination, then fck you. But you can't take that too far either.

The disparity cannot be so large that it becomes obvious. Any sort of preference is an admission of failure in achieving real equality.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Funny thread…..you can clearly distinguish the state educated posters from the private ones…

You can also clearly see the mommy’s whose kids did not get accepted to an Ivy League…..the hate and contempt for the elite academic institutions is incredible….

Don’t worry underachievers. In less than 4 years Trump is gone, and all of these attacks on universities will stop and the Make America Dumb Again movement will go away….

Trump is the symptom, not the disease. If it wasn't him it would be someone else. Racial preferences and antisemitism just isn't as popular as the democrats had hoped

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Caltech comes the closest to a true meritocracy. Interestingly, the profs are currently far more concerned with athletic admission boosts than racial, as there’s a high percentage of athletes at a school of 1000.

But even at Caltech I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some differences difference based on sex, given there’s more than double the number of male applicants but the student population is 54% male. So, is that an ok exception? If so, how different from other cases? If not, do we lose something? There has always been at least a case for some form of diversity, but arguing we might as well resort to ditching democratic norms if we can’t agree where to draw the line is like burning down the house when you dislike the paint job.

We don't have to agree on where to draw the line on racial discrimination, the constitution does that for us.

And gender discrimination? That's OK?

I don't think so but maybe. Gender is not a suspect class but it is a qausi suspect class which means that gender discrimination is subject to intermediate scrutiny rather than strict scrutiny.