301–310 of 660 posts
What I don't get is, what happens if you don't declare a race, or declare "Other", during admission? Why wouldn't Asian candidates do that?
Often your name gives it away.
Actual scenario that happened to me: had an asian-american colleague whose first name was a generic western name, while his last name was german (due to someone on his dad's side of the family being german).
Just so people are aware, this doesn't "set a bad precedent." It doesn't set any kind of precedent, because the precedent is extremely well established. This ruling is directly in line with numerous SCOTUS decisions: Fisher v. University of Texas (2016), Grutter v. Bollinger, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, etc... These cases are cited throughout the opinion. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled…
Affirming precedent is a part of setting and establishing precedent. It doesn't set a new precedent, but its absolutely a part of establishing precedent for the future.
That is demonstrably false from general experience in life.
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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.
> the African American community's limited access to quality K-12 education Is that a claim that their schools are worse at educating students than schools in Africa?
Africa is a huge continent of 54 countries with a population of 1.2 billion people, so it makes perfect sense that such a huge geographic area like that would have many excellent schools compared to the areas of concentrated and persistent poverty in the US.
The two areas aren't remotely comparable, unless you were thinking of something else?
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Is it really? Think about the often used phrase in regards to subjects like this: 'equality of opportunity' vs. 'equality of outcome' think of all it would take in America to come close to equality of opportunity: you would need vast levels of education and housing reform at the minimum. That reform would no doubt 'disadvantage' those who have benefited from the discrimination and lack of access that others have deal…
There's no way that you can form a tally from the sum total of a person's entire lineage in order to equalize them according to their ancestors struggles. Attempts to do this seem mostly to act as a laundering scheme for financial privilege. Now all someone from a wealthy family needs to do to justify their admission to elite institutions is to find some great great grandparent who plausibly suffered a systemic injus…
Inherited family wealth nominally does this. There wouldn't be a need for reparations after a generation or two of a 100% inheritance tax.
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Oh come now. Judaism as an identity class has a lot more to it than mere religious affiliation. I have to suspect that if the representation were 0.5x, rather than 5x, then its consideration would strike you as more natural.
I mean grouping Jews together based on a religious affiliation is just weird -- Reform would look at you really funny if you start talking to them about how Hasids and Orthodox view the world. It is as if Christianity was compressed into Amish, Anabaptists and Catholics and someone said "they are the same people"
Practically for much of this history in this part of the world, "Jewish" has been used interchangeably with Ashkenazi. Jewish is not an ethnicity, but Ashkenazi is, and most of the Jewish people at a place like Harvard (or applied-but-denied) have been Ashkenazi. Note this paragraph is descriptive, not normative: this conflating of Jewish and Ashkenazi is a way by which other Jews (many of which face even more racial discrimination) get erased from discourse.
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So, Bill gates, Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page etc etc did not bring their amla mater's any extra fame? Is your bar just "do not besmirch the good name of this institution"? Then I guess nobody should care for or covet International olympiad winners.
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Neither Brin nor Page went to Harvard and are both more famous for their connection to Stanford as graduate students IMO
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Jews were also historically discriminated against, e.g. "Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were remarkably precise: 'Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all.'" (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota#United_States ) Also related: California Alien Land Law of 1913 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1... ), targeting mostly Asian…
Why should historical discrimination matter to the policy? If at all, it should be about discrimination today.