Harvard discriminating against Chinese on “personality” grounds is reminiscent of earlier anti-Jewish policies, eg. Feynman’s...
Harvard discriminating against Chinese on “personality” grounds is reminiscent of earlier anti-Jewish policies, eg. Feynman’s adviser assuring people not to worry as he didn’t act Jewish.
really it seems safer for them to openly admit that they want to keep their admissions tracking closer to American national demographics than test scores would give them, and reject people on that basis, than make up some insulting bullshit about how people are inherently unworthy due to their personalities.
but I mean Harvard’s loss is Caltech’s gain, given that there are a ton of over qualified students who have to go somewhere.
there is a weirdly self-referential aspect where if you say Harvard is bad for not taking the top-ranked students well then who is taking the top-ranked students, and why wouldn’t you rather go there.
Top-performing on tests is not the same thing as best. Harvard is big for networking and status, which is both why said asians want in, and why Harvard wants to ignore the SATs to control who gets in.
Which is fine, if they openly discriminate (we only take 10% Asians because we want balanced demographics) instead of insisting that Asians are just inherently lacking “likability,” “helpfulness,” “integrity,” and “courage”.
Plausible deniability is how you maintain that status, browl.
Hence the lawsuit, which busts it wide open. Either ethnoracial criteria for admissions are legal or they aren’t, and if they aren’t then Harvard is screwed unless they can convincingly explain why Chinese and Korean applicants are uninteresting in a way that Indian or black American candidates are not.
the funny thing is modern American affirmative action maps to the “anti-Jewish” tendencies of Soviet Russia that America wedged against them in the ‘70s with Jackson-Vanik, etc.
like all these kids “I was ready to be a mathematician but they made me a plumber”
‘cause yeah they were ready because they grew up in that educated mileiu that traces itself back to Russian or Prussian imperial bureaucracy
But the Soviets were like “oh let’s make sure members of less historically industrialized nations get a chance at university slots so as to maintain political stability, after all that’s what our ideology legitimated itself on”