Harvard Is Wrong That Asians Have Terrible Personalities
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This.
Microaggressions do exist. I think they are a part of how we naturally arrange ourselves in dominance hierarchies. They are so subtle and natural, it's insane to make such actions a crime, or to create bureaucratic enforcement against them. Those are policies of insanity. That said, I've seen a lot of racially tinged microaggressions as an Asian male.
They failed. Hopefully this blows up in their face as it should. The way to end racial discrimination in this country is to stop discriminating based on race.
"Leningrad University’s maths department had a quota of two Jews per year among 350 students. Its Moscow equivalent was more zealous and actively investigated all candidates for traces of a Jewish background. Students with Jewish sounding names were refused entry, just in case."
Source: https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2012/02/08/ussrs-bans-j...
Soviet discrimination was straight up just that.
Here's a quote from a summary:
> At one point, [Harvard President] Lowell wrote to a Harvard philosophy professor to explain that enrolling a high number of Jewish students would "ruin the college" by causing elite Protestant students to attend other schools, according to Karabel's book. Harvard would be ruined "not because Jews of bad character have come; but the result follows from the coming in large numbers of Jews of any kind, save those few who mingle readily with the rest of the undergraduate body," Lowell wrote in the letter.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-di...
Harvard's current policies do not explicitly have discrimination as a goal. They'd get sued to hell and nobody would go there if they did. Can Harvard's policies have effective bias or be applied in a biased way? Sure. But the Soviet stuff was not remotely as subtle, let alone subject to any kind of legal remedy.
Apparently this "personality rating" was initially included in the Harvard application process explicitly to discriminate against Jews:
From the OP:
> Harvard has been here before. “To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way, which is at the same time straightforward and effective,” wrote A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the 1920s, “and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admission authorities, based upon the probable value to the candidate, to the College and to the community of his admissions.” The opacity of its admissions procedure could veil what Lowell’s written correspondence would later disclose to be a fully intended policy of discrimination.
They also had their own tricky, deniable way to accomplish the their discrimination:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
> This is a special collection of problems that were given to select applicants during oral entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. These problems were designed to prevent Jews and other undesirables from getting a passing grade. Among problems that were used by the department to blackball unwanted candidate students, these problems are distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find. Using problems with a simple solution protected the administration from extra complaints and appeals. This collection therefore has mathematical as well as historical value.
This statement was made in response to complaints about "a plan to change the way students are admitted to New York’s elite public high schools" that would correct a perceived overrepresentation of Asian students at the schools [1].
"'I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools,' [Carranza] said on Fox 5 New York."
Shockingly, he's still in his post [2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/nyregion/carranza-special...
[2] http://schools.nyc.gov/AboutUs/leadership/Richard+A.+Carranz...
There was a systemic effort decades ago to reduce the Jewish admission rate, and now there's a systemic effort to reduce the Asian admission rate. History may not repeat but it certainly does rhyme
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up 25% of their admissions. They don't collect statistics on white, those who choose not to identify or other. Kind of hard to argue a bias. It seems like if anything the school is actively trying to be less homogenous, not more.
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
“'When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ' Bannon said, trailing off. 'A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society'" [1].
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/steve-bannon-racist-...
> "To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way, which is at the same time straightforward and effective,” wrote A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the 1920s, “and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admission authorities"
If an educational institution wishes to apply capricious standards, let them pay taxes.
Race is a protected class. Converting to a taxable entity would not protect Harvard Admissions from being racist.
I think a portion of it is that if you judge based solely on academics then you will only get a certain type of person who is focused on scores in academics. You could easily fill your class with the top X% of scorers but that won't necessarily make an interesting group of graduates in the real world. It especially won't make an interesting group of people to interact with. I don't think I'd go to that school even if I had been admitted.
I think part of it is that they're hoping to find people who will end up being important people in the world. Not necessarily just those who perform well academically.
I can understand how #2 is important, but #3 is ripe for personal bias.
A high bar, with people passing it entering lottery quotas is a far fairer way of having both diversity, and removing personal bias from the equation.
Academic performance is mostly a disqualifier to figure out if someone would be successful enough. Harvard, doesn't really care about the GPA of its existing students which is why they also don't care about grade inflation. They're looking for signals that you'll succeed outside of academia. If you want to go to Harvard, stop looking at the application as a checklist. The best applicants are differentiated beyond the classroom.
Really?
You mean signals like parental wealth?
One criterion which would actually achieve what they want (and in fact greatly improve the diversity of any university) is to take into account the income/wealth background of applicants. It would not only allow more people of color, it would also open up the application process to poor white folk too who are also in a disadvantaged position in society. If there is anything that Harvard and Ivy's lack, it is the perspective of working people.
This practice has certainly been abused in the past and you can argue it is still being abused, but I don't think that means that judging a kid based on anything beyond academics is a bad move for colleges.
Although, 90% of the time it probably means "must be friends with the CEO or willing to work overtime".
http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact...
Ironically the link is from Harvard.
The Promise: "Come to our country, where everyone is treated equally and we will make a great multicultural society where we can all live together and learn and experience each other's culture"
The Outcome: Asian parents, generally, raise their kids to value hard work and academic excellence. Asian students end up taking this advice and generally outperform their peers from other communities.
Harvard's Solution: "Your culture is giving you an unfair advantage because other kids are not raised this way. Your culture should be more like everyone else's culture"
Is this diversity? Or are you eventually going to homogenize everything via this method? Is the end goal of diversity to become the Borg?
I would have been terribly misidentified on name, my name is very rare in my birth country.
Thanks.
"Harvard’s lawyers will soon tell the highest court in the land that Casey Pedrick’s Asian students are less respected because they are less likable, less courageous, and less kind than all other applicants."
And that's how you lose out on the best.
The issue discussed is that Harvard consistently rates Asian candidates as having "poor personality". They never got into the school, because of that assessment.
That low rating is relative to other ethnic groups.
Are you suggesting that submitting an application to Harvard somehow makes Asians (but not other ethnicities!) have bad personality?