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Harvard Stands Up for the “R” Word
As many are aware, Harvard is being sued for discriminating against Asians, who apparently have to have an SAT score 140 points higher than other minorities to gain acceptance. All of this is very confusing, but Dr. Faust, President of Harvard, makes a Faustian bargain to explain the veritas:
This email letter is addressed to Alumni (of which I am one) and Friends (of which I am probably no longer, and let’s face it, I may also soon no longer be one of the former). I cannot abide by this kind of immoral behavior. Or is it moral? Which one is it? How can we really know the truth? Answer: matriculate Harvard. They hold all the truth. They are so truthful, they can change “R” to “D.”
Monitum: They alone bestow the truth upon those who they decide are qualifiedly diverse. Well, I certainly ain’t that. So there goes the alumni, and the neighborhood.
Published in General
I don’t know about you, but I would like to see a sex act between a non-binary pansexual and a lesbian Demi-girl. I would think they would get confused every so often.
I thought Harvard had two categories for admissions: (1) those who have a “friend” donate $20M to the school, and (2) everyone else. That is a type of diversity.
Everyone who is making heavy weather of the fact that Asians supposedly have to score 140 points higher on the SAT to get into top colleges is being confused by a misuse of statistics.
The problem is not that Asians “have to score higher.” The problem is that Asians who apply to Harvard have an unfortunate tendency to make themselves ALL LOOK THE SAME.
The same summer camps (math and science). The same competitions (science). The same activities (music, performed in a fair to middling manner). The same values (work hard, respect family, follow the rules).
I know this because I tutor Asians in Silicon Valley. I have to constantly tell them that if they want admission to Ivy U, they must make themselves stand out from the crowd.
Their parents ignore me. They are convinced that they and their friends from China know the American college system better than other American. And so they do what their friends from China do: pump up their SAT scores, engage in the same activities, etc. etc.
Now, these applicants HAPPEN to be Asian. But that’s not why they are getting turned down. They are getting turned down because colleges do not want 40% of their student population to have met each other at the same summer camps in Silicon Valley.
I don’t know what fallacy is going on here—something about confusing the part with the whole perhaps.
Absolutely true on both counts. ;)
Maybe they should just cut out the middleman – no more non-legacy whites, leaving extra room for minorities who under-perform and over-perform.
It would be the ultimate act of PC self-immolation. “look, ma, no privilege!”
I know this is true. Very astute comment. I used to tell the music students to study the bassoon. And learn some obscure foreign language. Be interesting.
If Harvard is discriminating against Asians, I am pretty sure it isn’t because they don’t like them. Harvard’s Asian studies program is one of the oldest among American universities in our country. The academic friendships that have existed among Chinese, Japanese, and Harvard academics are legendary.
And Chinese students make up a large percentage of Harvard’s graduate schools.
This will be an interesting case. I’m guessing it will really shake up the relationship between the Ivies and the federal government. The Ivies will probably come to Harvard’s aid because they are dealing with these same impossible quotas.
Perhaps this will put an end to affirmative action, which should have died a quiet death twenty-five years ago.
Most people have probably forgotten this story, but it is funny, given how things turned out.
President George H. W. Bush and his Justice Department sued all of the seven Ivies and MIT years ago. They accused the Ivies and MIT of informing each other about the high-achieving scholarship students. The schools would sort these students out, and each school would pick the student it wanted. That student got one offer–one financial aid package.
President Bush said the Ivies were in a sense “price fixing”–denying the students the opportunity to shop for the best deal. President Bush won.
The Ivies were mad.
Enter Bill Clinton soon afterward. He got a hero’s welcome in Cambridge. He wasn’t very smart, but they applauded him wildly anyway. Too funny. :-)
I have lived long enough to see Harvard University give a robust defense of state sanctioned racism. Evidently, in modern America, you can be a walking monument to the KKK as long as you say “diversity” while you do it.
So true.
I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, I’ve noticed a sense of entitlement among some Asian families – the notion that their child deserves to go to Harvard because he or she checks off some list of boxes. In some cases, it’s not too far from the same sense of entitlement that Hillary Clinton had about the presidency: “I held the right jobs for the right amount of time, I had the right political positions, I did my homework, now it’s my turn to be in the highest political office/college in the world!”
On the other hand, the reason many of the kids you describe aren’t getting in to their preferred colleges is simply because they can’t game the system as well as their (white) neighbors who have been in the US longer and have their ears pinned to the college admission rumor mill. For example, the parents who figure out that paying for your child to go on a volun-safari in Africa or arrange for them to work in the local soup kitchen is the new admission hotness. That’s also not just by any means, even if it has nothing to do with actual racial quotas.
One point that the plaintiffs here (and perhaps some on this thread) seem to be missing is that Harvard is under no obligation to accept only the most academically talented students. Indeed, they would be well within their rights to decide they only want people of above-average but not stellar academic potential and exclude people whose SAT scores are too high.
While that probably won’t come to pass, the fact that the plaintiffs seem to be focusing so much on SAT scores means that if this lawsuit gets anywhere, one of the first things Harvard likely will do is completely eliminate standardized test scores from their application process. Which would have the ironic consequence of hurting future Asian candidates by tossing out what is often the strongest part of their applications.
It’s not another universe. It’s simply not of this nation.
You and @hoyacon noted the number of times Drew Faust used the words diverse or diversity. That’s because you are in retreat. You’re measuring the size and power of the enemy’s big gun, which they’ve used to win all the battles in the past 40 years.
I note that other than when it was once used combined with the prefix “Asian,” the word “American” was never used in Dr. Faust’s letter.
That’s because she is no longer an American. She’s given that up. She is a trans-nationalist citizen of the world.
In spite of her excellent book about how the Civil War changed the way Americans thought about death, Dr. Faust can now just as easily be the head of a global corporation, on the board of an international NGO or be simply a functionary of the European Union.
Her ideas no longer reflect American experience, laws, customs, mores, traditions or history. They are alien to the historic American nation.
What her ideas do reflect are precisely those that are preached today from the boardrooms and Human Resources Departments of every Fortune 500 Corporation.
Harvard and Exxon-Mobil are 100% congruent in that regard, aren’t they?
So who do you think is calling the tune – Drew Faust?
Interesting. I was thinking about this aspect of this case last night. I would be surprised if Harvard did not say, “We don’t rely on these scores heavily anyway.” Although they have maintained this position publicly for years, in my head, it just makes sense to screen the 42,000 applicants they get each year using SAT scores.
But this is where the plaintiffs will be able to make their case–if they have found evidence in writing in some way that the policy even exists, Harvard won’t be able to defend itself on the basis that the admissions committee didn’t use it.
This is the way discrimination suits play out now. If the standard exists and if Asians were rejected, that’s all it takes. It does not need to be established that they were actually rejected because of their SAT scores.
I hope and pray this is the end of the quota system for admissions. Not even Harvard–whose law school graduates probably wrote these laws–can make these formulas work.
Harvard invented the SAT as a scholarship test in the first place. They know that discriminating against minority groups is not in their intellectual best interest. The diversity of their student body has a source of institutional pride for generations. They like to tell their incoming first-year students that they expect them to learn as much from each other as they do from the faculty.
The best outcome would be that the quotas be scrapped for every college and university in the United States.
So, you are telling me to discriminate… Not hard really. I went to Dartmouth. We have no love for that place in Cambridge or anyone associated with it.