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Unfortunately this is bigger than Harvard and the Asian American students are 'collateral damage'. Fundamentally, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow permeates every facet of American life, education especially. You can't fix hundreds of years worth of discrimination without tipping the scales in a way that seems discriminatory to others, seems like the Judge in this case understands that.
Unfortunately this is bigger than Harvard and the Asian American students are 'collateral damage'. Fundamentally, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow permeates every facet of American life, education especially. You can't fix hundreds of years worth of discrimination without tipping the scales in a way that seems discriminatory to others, seems like the Judge in this case understands that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think that? Discriminating by race for hiring is explicitly illegal, so wherever it's happening, it's already happening despite the law.
Discriminating by race for college admissions is also explicitly illegal. (Edit: see https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/hq43e4.html ) The law only matters inasmuch as it can be enforced. If judges decline to enforce the law when they believe it’s in the interest of diversity to discriminate against a specific race like Asians, it could equally apply to employment where similar diversity initiatives are t…
There is a difference between general admission and "programs or activities that receive Federal financial assistance". While I'm not saying this is right, it appears to be the current letter of the law. If, for example, race were a determining factor in who works on one of the R&D projects at Harvard that is funded by federal money it would be different than this situation.
Does each student at Harvard get federal financial assistance through Harvard? Not state financial assistance but federal. The different matters to the letter of the law.
It looks like the devil is in the details.
For perspective, here are the Harvard vs US demographics, sorted by most to least represented [1,2,3,4]: Jewish: 14.0% vs 2.6% (5.38x) Asian American: 25.3% vs 5.3% (4.77x) Native Hawaiian: 0.6% vs 0.2% (3.00x) Native American: 1.8% vs 0.7% (2.57x) African American: 14.3% vs 12.7% (1.13x) Hispanic or Latino: 12.2% vs 17.6% (0.69x) non-Jewish white: 33.0% vs 58.9% (0.56x) [1] https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/adm…
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?
A long time ago a daughter of a friend of mine received a letter from Congressional Black Caucus congratulating her on a phenomenal achievement. The letter congratulated her, Shoshana, a minority in a prestigious public school of overcoming the adversity caused by her circumstances in becoming one of 50 students in a school with the 99th percentile GPA and how the congressmen and women of the caucus were applauding h…
What "school" inspects every single arriving Freshman? This read like an invented story. Additionally, there is not much overlap between Orthodox Jewish and African-American surnames.
Wow - this sets a bad precedent. This might now encourage companies to now discriminate against Asias in hiring as well. There are already murmurs in the Valley about how there are too many Asians in tech.
Hiring and employment is different from college selection processes. Students attending a university are not employees. There are federal laws on equal opportunity employment and California has enacted additional laws. If anyone is caught discriminating on employment based on race it's directly against federal law.
Those who score higher, pass. Yes, it sounds like a system that favors test takers, but there are so many seats to take that if you don't score enough you really don't deserve the place (I say this as a person who was never smart not good at tests).
Nobody will consider anything else. Sadly, I've noticed a slight shift towards a more american way of talking about things like race and sex, even in universities, but I hope the legal system is strong enough to keep having neutral admissions.
Our economy is already in a bad place, last thing we need is young people being discriminated for anything but their ability to perform a task, even if arbitrary.
Unfortunately this is bigger than Harvard and the Asian American students are 'collateral damage'. Fundamentally, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow permeates every facet of American life, education especially. You can't fix hundreds of years worth of discrimination without tipping the scales in a way that seems discriminatory to others, seems like the Judge in this case understands that.
I'm sorry, is this a judge or a legislator? I don't think their job is to "fix" anything. If the government is going to discriminate against me over my skin color I want to be able to hold them accountable at the ballot box.
This ruling is a travesty and I hope the Supreme Court overturns it when this is appealed. It is very clear that race-conscious admissions are systematically racist and discriminatory. Take a look at the distribution of students by race in the University of California system, where they're not permitted to discriminate in this manner, thanks to Prop 209 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_20..…
Harvard has a 25%+ Asian American undergrad class, (edit)~~2.5x (Harvard's is ~60% of UC's) more than the latest number listed on that wiki page, so your final statement is factually incorrect`~. I quoted wrong number. It's 25% vs 40%. https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics