Live data from Hacker News

Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

npr.org

171–180 of 660 posts

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#171
post #143

This feels reminiscent of 'diversity hires' where females and/or members of the LGBT+ community are preferred not because of competency/merit but to improve a company's diversity metrics. Disclaimer: I haven't experienced this myself. I only read/heard of these complaints from other people.

This ends up hurting females and L/G/B/T people in our industry because people will have a preconception that they may have been hired for reasons other than merit. To bring it back to the article, imagine being a black harvard graduate. People may judge you as lesser compared to asian harvard graduates, because they know that you've been held to different standards, even if you had the merit and deserved your placem…

> people will have a preconception that they may have been hired for reasons other than merit.

Said people have those perceptions regardless.

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#172
post #14

Harvard does tend to favor wealthy legacies though: "According to The Harvard Crimson, 43.2% of legacy students and 20% of athletes in Harvard’s Class of 2019 come from households that earn more than $500,000 a year, compared to just 15.4% of the overall class. Harvard President Lawrence Bacow said that many of the legacy students applying to the university would be in the most desirable applicant pool regardless of…

I guess, It is part of what makes going to Harvard valuable. You get to go to school with the rich and powerful.

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that white people have inherited a lot of wealth at the cost of black people. Wealth statistics clearly show this. The average black family is 10x poorer then the average white family. The stealing was done through Jim Crow, slavery, red lining, etc. If you inherit money that your parents stole, that money is taken away from you by the police and given back to the person it was stolen from. In this case, w…

"White people" is a vast generalization, it includes people that came in US much later than the history you are talking about. How can you even consider punishing them for something they did not do, just because they are the same race as the people that did something bad a long time ago? This is racism in the purest form.

Most (all?) of Europe benefited from colonialism and slavery, it wasn't just America doing it.

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bakke established that specific quotas are not legal, but race as one of multiple factors is permissible. If Harvard's admissions policies include any kind of quota, they will probably be ruled illegal.

The first line of the opinion's conclusion is that Harvard's admissions process survives strict scrutiny. If it were found to be dependent on quotas, this would likely not be the case, based on the previously mentioned well established precedent.

My understanding is that there was no written evidence of a hard quota presented. However, the rise in the percent of college-bound Asians has grown dramatically in recent years, but the share of Asians at Harvard has not increased commensurately.

An appellate court could find that this fact, combined with other circumstantial evidence, indicates that quotas were used — even if not put in writing.

Also, it is well known that "strict scrutiny" is interpreted differently in the context of affirmative action than "traditional" discrimination. So when a judge says something survives strict scrutiny, the analysis provided may be more akin to intermediate scrutiny (applied to sex-based discrimination) or rational basis (applied to pretty much everything else).

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#175
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Jewish person I feel weird seeing "whites" being broken into Jewish and non-Jewish. What about other religions? Why include religion at all? In particular with respect to Harvard and Boston I'd think Catholicism might deserve a mention if we're going to bring religion into this. In the end I think religious diversity is important but it doesn't belong in the same conversation. You can choose your religion and al…

Aren't Jews a race and a religion? Plenty of non religious Jews out there.

I think this sort of addresses your comment: https://www.jewishgeneticdiseases.org/

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#176
post #36

This specific ruling at the lower court is mostly inconsequential. DOJ will immediately appeal, and I don't think anyone doubts for a second that it will ultimately be decided by SCOTUS.

I didn't think the DOJ was involved here?

It's absolutely hilarious that the person you're replying to is so sure what's going to happen next without even knowing who the plaintiff is.

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#177

Asians should just boycott Harvard. Overall quality of Harvard grads will drop and Harvard will become nothing.

Imagine the uproar if you had instead said > Whites should just boycott Harvard. Overall quality of Harvard grads will drop and Harvard will become nothing.

Why not both?

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#178

Nobody is entitled to go to Harvard and focusing on one institution does a disservice to folks (including Asian Americans like myself) who didn’t get into any elite institutions unlike many of the plaintiffs

Indeed no one is entitled to go to Harvard, but Harvard is also not entitled to federal research grants that are being funded by taxing Asian Americans under the same laws as other Americans, so I guess we are at an impasse.

I wonder how much public support there would be for ending the grants.

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These numbers are next to meaningless, Harvard doesn't just accept people from the US, so we should be looking at population percentages of the world. I assume that people who don't fit in any category are shunted into one of them based on skin color. For example a Jamaican is, I assume, counted in the African American bucket, and compared against the African American population, even though they're neither American…

> While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. > They said th…

Other commenters have attributed that disparity to the African American community's limited access to quality K-12 education rather than a problem of Harvard admissions.

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#180
post #143

This feels reminiscent of 'diversity hires' where females and/or members of the LGBT+ community are preferred not because of competency/merit but to improve a company's diversity metrics. Disclaimer: I haven't experienced this myself. I only read/heard of these complaints from other people.

This ends up hurting females and L/G/B/T people in our industry because people will have a preconception that they may have been hired for reasons other than merit. To bring it back to the article, imagine being a black harvard graduate. People may judge you as lesser compared to asian harvard graduates, because they know that you've been held to different standards, even if you had the merit and deserved your placem…

>People may judge you as lesser compared to asian harvard graduates, because they know that you've been held to different standards, even if you had the merit and deserved your placement in that university.

Sure, but that one is difficult to quantify and express in numbers, while the former is very easy, so let's just slap the sticker "solved" on this one and go along, am i right? /s

Post reply on HN