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Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

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

#191

Post by CobrastanJorji »

tathougies wrote: post #145
akhilcacharya wrote: post #62

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.

Harvard's endowment is around $40 billion. They're awarded about $600M in Federal grants per year. Though I'm sure they'd prefer to keep receiving them, they'd be just fine without them. It seems like turning down Federal grants and handling admissions as they like would satisfy everyone.

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

#192

Post by ravitation »

gnicholas wrote: post #174
ravitation wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kn…

Yeah, I mean all of that's true. I'm just saying A) this is just the latest decision in a long legacy of maintaining race as part of college admissions, and that B) Harvard's specific admissions process survived immediate scrutiny.

Also, I'm saying this mainly because a lot of the comments in this thread are missing that context (especially when speculating on what happens next in this case, or on what implications this might have).

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

#193

Post by zhugeIiang »

I propose creating a school that only looks at quantitative measures, gives a single test once a year that is grueling in mathematics, science, logic, reading, and writing. They just pick the top x-percentile of students. If there is a tie, students are picked randomly. We can call it the HackerNews Academy.

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

#194

Post by wendyshu »

mywittyname wrote: post #171
kache_ wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a study on this?

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

#195

Post by dcolkitt »

cobweb1 wrote: post #122
habosa wrote: 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…

I was under the impression that Jews commonly don't think of themselves as being white whereas the rest of the 'white' groups did. Maybe I'm wrong? Jewishness is a more closely knit identity which Jews are lucky enough to have, whereas even whiteness is an ever expanding identity leaving many white people with nothing but 'American'.

> I was under the impression that Jews commonly don't think of themselves as being white whereas the rest of the 'white' groups did.

In the Anglosphere, Jews have pretty much always been considered "white". For example, both the Confederacy and Apartheid South Africa, two regimes obsessed with racial classification, never even considered that Jews might not be white.

The conception of Jews as a separate race, has historically been an Eastern European idea. Even in 1930s Germany, the Nazi party's base of popularity was always firmly rooted in the most Eastern federal regions.

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

#196

Post by userbinator »

sgustard wrote: post #118

In response to this, schools will continue to devalue the importance of test scores, and lean more on the interview, essay, "personality" and "well-roundedness" of the candidates. Make the process more subjective so that you cannot be shown to be biased according to some numeric criteria.

It will undoubtedly happen that someone hired due to diversity and not skill will do something very wrong, and possibly cause great harm to others. I wonder what the reaction will be then...?

Luckily, the world still follows the laws of physics.

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

#197

Post by charliesharding »

Miner49er wrote: post #129
AdrianB1 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you paying back to? The person who did the crime or some other people based on similarities with the criminal? How about putting on the death row everyone in the neighborhood of a murderer? This is your logic.

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…

Which wealth statistics? From this article, 90% of family wealth is lost by the third generation.

http://money.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/

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

#198

Post by toroszo »

blhack wrote: post #161

How about: who cares? Isn’t this hacker news? Aren’t we all supposed to be hackers who are upending the existing system? How about we build our own Harvards where anybody who wants to study can come and learn whatever they want? And the network comes from being surrounded by other people who cared enough to learn. We don’t need these places anymore. We’ll find our own funding and do our own research and screw the sys…

yes sir!

oops, is that not inclusive enough? I would like to rephrase then:

yes person!

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

#199

Post by defen »

dwoozle wrote: post #157
slg wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the debate from progressives is the definition of the term discriminate. We all agree choosing an unqualified person over a person who is qualified based on their race is discrimination. However is it discrimination to choose the diverse candidate when presented with two candidates that are equally qualified in every other regard? Because that is often the situation. There is no shortage of people who are qua…

Why set a minimum bar at “qualified”? If you try out for an NBA team they won’t say “you are really fucking good at basketball, you’re not as good as these guys but you’re diverse so you’re hired.” You get scarce positions by outcompeting people, not by clearing a bar and then getting selected for your race.

Basketball is zero-sum, undergrad college admissions mostly aren't. As long as Harvard lets in enough students who are "good enough" to not fail out or besmirch their reputation, it can continue indefinitely as a prestige-generating institution. Put another way - the "Michael Jordan" of undergraduate academics doesn't really exist (in other words, there is no individual undergraduate you could admit who would instantly make your college superior to every other one)

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

#200

Post by aviraldg »

umvi wrote: post #19

It's like we have these two irreconcilable ideas: - Diversity is good - Discrimination is bad When 50% of the world's population is from China/India, how do you both promote diversity and not discriminate?

By realising that India is not homogenous at all, and is inherently diverse?
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