Reply to Update on Harvard Lawsuit

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[quote=Anonymous]Pun not intended, but it’s not black-and-white.

There can be a legitimate interest in using affirmative action or other tools to raise the enrollment of underrepresented minorities at top universities.

However, discriminating against Asian-Americans (a minority group that is a protected class) in furtherance of that interest is where this case is different than the others challenging affirmative action for college admissions.

It’s one thing to use race as an effective tiebreaker between two roughly comparable candidates. However, that’s NOT what’s happening and anyone suggesting otherwise is being willfully blind. Show me an underrepresented minority candidate with perfect grades and test scores with STEM extracurricular activities and you’ll see someone that will get into every school in the country... and I don’t think anyone has an issue with that. What I do think is a problem is that an Asian-American candidate with the same background is essentially pegged as a “robot” and this somehow doesn’t get treated by a lot of people as clearly racist.

The most compelling part of the plaintiff argument isn’t that Asian-Americans would receive more spots if admissions were just based on GPAs and test scores because we know that’s not how the top elite universities work with holistic admissions. Instead, what’s eye-opening is that the Asian-American holistic personality/leadership assessments of alumni interviews in-person were right in line with every other race, but then were docked on that score when they got to the admissions office level (who didn’t meet them in-person) compared to every other race. Essentially, the admissions people appear to be (a) applying that “robot” stereotype to Asian-Americans even when their alumni interviewers who actually met them in person didn’t think that at all and/or (b) artificially depressing those personality scores in order to achieve a certain racial balance for their class. Either one of those is illegal discrimination.

Now, are there many other schools outside of Harvard that would suffice for reflected Asian-Americans? Certainly. However, don’t people realize that this *exactly* the “separate but equal” argument that was used to justify racism for generations? (“We don’t need to serve your kind at this school, restaurant or bakery because there’s another one that can serve you across the tracks.”) The existence of other options at other institutions doesn’t justify or excuse racism at any particular institution - that’s the very definition of “separate but equal”.

I’m actually a large believer of giving underrepresented minorities, particularly those that have dealt with lower socioeconomic status growing up, an advantage in the admissions process at colleges. I’m not saying that we should expect a kid coming from an inner city school to have the same test scores as those that came from affluent suburbs. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable to use a policy that appears to systematically using subjective “personality” scores to depress the admissions of another minority group. There are ways to use affirmative action (or achieve the purported goals of affirmative action) without resorting to discriminating against Asian-Americans on race.[/quote]

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