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Unease sweeping the halls of Harvard on eve of race-based admissions suit
As Harvard University prepares to defend its selective, highly secretive admissions process in a Boston courtroom Monday, outside groups are marshaling their forces, with protesters descending on the city, and a rally planned outside the university’s iron gates.
The high-stakes case accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants has reopened a sharp national debate over race, equity, and merit. And on campus, it has forced students to confront uneasy and intensely personal questions about racial diversity, privilege, and their place at the Ivy League institution.
“It’s forcing me to talk about race in a way that I’ve not done,” said Priyanka Kaura, 27, an Indian-American graduate student from Pennsylvania at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Kaura said she supports affirmative action, and is careful about acknowledging there may be concerns about bias against Asian applicants, especially when discussing the issue with other Asian-Americans. “I haven’t lost any close relationships yet.”
“It’s on everybody’s mind,” added Victor Agbafe, 22, a senior whose parents emigrated from Nigeria, and who grew up in Dallas and Wilmington, N.C. “I think the case has the potential to be huge.”
In animated — sometimes fraught — conversations among friends in dining halls and dorm rooms, in Facebook groups and private texts, in classroom discussions and group gatherings, Harvard’s students are grappling with the issues raised by the lawsuit.
Unlike previous affirmative action lawsuits that primarily hinged on if race-conscious admissions practices benefited black and Hispanic students while hurting white students, this case pivots on Asian-American applicants.
The lawsuit was filed by Students for Fair Admissions, a group representing Asian-Americans who allege Harvard’s admissions policy discriminates against them. As proof, the organization points to six years of Harvard admissions data that its experts argue indicates Asian-Americans were rated lower on personal qualities, such as courage and kindness, which hurt their chances of gaining admission. The group also alleges Harvard limits the number of Asian-American students it admits every year, a practice called racial-balancing, which is unlawful.
Harvard denies any discrimination and insists its admissions practices are legal and ensure that all students learn on a diverse campus and are exposed to different ideas and classmates from various backgrounds.
At Harvard, 21 percent of students are Asian, nearly 12 percent are Hispanic, 8 percent are black; the majority of the campus is white.
The university is also quick to point out that Students for Fair Admissions is led by Edward Blum. He is a conservative white scholar who unsuccessfully challenged the University of Texas admissions process and led an effort that unraveled parts of the Voting Rights Act.
Yet Harvard administrators worry the trial could open up fault lines among students and alumni at the country’s oldest and most prestigious institution of higher education. The trial is likely to raise questions about who is deemed worthy and special enough for one of the few slots at a university heralded for educating future presidents, corporate titans, poets, and prizewinners. Of some 42,000 applicants, Harvard enrolls just 1,600 or so freshmen every year. Entry itself is a privilege and viewed as a ticket to future success.
Students for Fair Admissions “is likely to make provocative assertions that will receive public attention and cause some to question our admissions practices,” Harvard president Lawrence Bacow wrote in an e-mail to the Harvard community last week. “I would hope all of us recognize, however, that we are members of one community — and will continue to be so long after this trial is in the rearview mirror. What kind of community we will be, however, will be determined by how we treat each other the next few weeks.”
Some Asian-American students say they already feel conflicted about the lawsuit. They support diversity on campus, but some say the case has reinforced warnings they received from parents and counselors in high school that they had to get far better grades than their peers, jump into leadership roles, and appear less stereotypically Asian in their applications to earn a spot in the most elite colleges.
Rainbow Yeung, a senior majoring in molecular and cellular biology at Harvard who rushes between post-graduate job hunting and her leadership responsibilities at her house, said she worries Asians have been neglected in US history and American media. And she doesn’t want their concerns about potential bias in admissions to also be silenced. ‘It’s forcing me to talk about race in a way that I’ve not done.’
— Priyanka Kaura, a graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School
“I am scared of what the results of the suit might mean for affirmative action,” Yeung said. “However, I just don’t want Asian students to be suffering from negative consequences due to our race.”
Ivy Yan, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 2015 and is now a graduate student there, has found herself at odds with Harvard administrators. She fought Harvard’s efforts to squash a union for graduate students and as an undergraduate rallied alumni and other student groups after she felt the university’s response to e-mail threats received by many Asian-American female students was inadequate.
But now, Yan is helping organize a rally Sunday in favor of affirmative action and is bringing together many of Harvard’s supporters. “I am firmly anti-Blum, but not pro-Harvard,” she said.
Still, she understands why many Chinese-Americans, especially those who immigrated more recently, are backing this lawsuit. Even her younger sister questioned the need for affirmative action until recently, Yan said.
“The people on the anti-side are my people,” she said. “This is the American dream for many immigrants and the admissions process — it takes into account something you don’t really understand, and it can be alienating.”
The case against Harvard’s affirmative action policy is generally seen as a conservative cause and even gained support from the Justice Department under the Trump administration. Yet some conservative students acknowledge that admission to the elite school is based on a complicated formula, with race just one factor among many. Star athletes, children of financial donors, students whose parents attended Harvard, and applicants from under-represented states all get special consideration.
“Who got here and how they got here — everybody has things that got them here,” said Conor Healy, a senior from Canada who last year invited controversial sociologist Charles Murray to speak at Harvard amid protests from minority students. “It’s personal . . . . I knew that when I applied, nobody was entitled to a spot . . . and they paid a lot of attention to personal details of individuals. It’s just not straightforward.”
Healy said private institutions should be able to dictate their admissions standards.
Some students, though, feel Harvard does too little to encourage diversity and that if it loses the case, there will be even fewer black and Hispanic students on campus.
As Paola Martinez waited last week for a movie screening at Harvard’s newly renovated Smith Campus Center, where red and orange modern couches are surrounded by ceiling-to-floor glass windows, she scoffed at the implication in the lawsuit that Harvard has too few Asian-American students.
Martinez, 37, grew up in the Dominican Republic and takes classes and works at the Harvard Extension School, a program for adult learners. She said black and Latino students and faculty are rarer than white and Asian-Americans.
This lawsuit is an effort to “keep students of color out of environments where they can succeed,” Martinez said. “At least give us a chance to prove that we’re smart enough and that we could do something.”
Andrea Loera, 23, a Latina who grew up in Texas and is a graduate student at Havard Law School, said she worries that many on-campus discussions about the lawsuit are being held among students of color, instead of the broader community.
A teach-in she attended on a rainy evening last week drew more than 50 Harvard students; most were Asian and other minorities, with just a handful of white students.
Loera said she understands that some students of color are concerned about drawing too much attention to themselves, especially around a case that questions whether they belong at Harvard.
“You already feel like an outsider here,” Loera said. “It becomes a personal topic so fast. And it’s so hard to talk about it as a minority, especially in a school that is so white.”
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To be race-blind is to be simply blind
A Leftist elitist rejects Martin Luther King's good dream. Leftists can never let go of their racial obsessions
WITH THE ELEVATION of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, conservatives are closer than ever to a long-cherished goal: outlawing race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
And the case that could end a five-decade experiment in promoting equality, righting past wrongs, and building a fairer society starts Monday, at a federal courtroom in Boston.
At least on paper, the question before a judge is whether Harvard University actively discriminated against Asian applicants. Harvard contends that it follows the law, which allows for schools to consider race as part of a holistic admissions process.
But the plaintiffs in the case aren’t simply asking the courts to right any wrongs committed against Asian applicants. They’re asking the courts to prohibit colleges from ever asking or even learning the race or ethnicity of applicants. This is a breathtakingly aggressive remedy that seems certain to end up before the Supreme Court.
Building a class of freshman is a zero-sum exercise. There are only so many seats. But college admissions society-wide is not a zero-sum exercise, where one group’s advancement comes only at the expense of another’s. We all benefit from generations of business leaders, politicians, teachers, doctors, lawyers, scientists, and academics that reflect the diversity of our nation.
A ruling against Harvard on the terms the plaintiffs seek also threatens to muzzle students and shackle college administrators. Harvard supporters contend that admissions officers potentially couldn’t learn the name of applicants, interview or recruit them, or watch videos of athletic or dramatic performances. To be race-blind is to be simply blind.
MAKE NO MISTAKE, Students For Fair Admissions, the plaintiff, is being used by its founder, Edward Blum, a long-time conservative activist, who has fought to end race-based affirmative action through a variety of cases. In the most famous, Fisher v. University of Texas, a divided Supreme Court upheld the rights of universities to consider race as a part of the admissions process.
The courts should respect this precedent for several reasons. Diversity on a college campus is important not just for its own sake — it also enriches the educational experience, strengthens communities and workplaces, and enhances economic competitiveness in a globalized world. Beyond all that, though, is the fact that race-based affirmative action is a necessary — though politically unpopular — instrument to address the inequity among many groups of Americans.
While Harvard makes for a high-profile defendant, it is a bad representation of higher education nationwide. There are more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States, and the vast majority are nonselective. Of the 1,254 schools ranked by US News and World Report in 2016, for instance, nearly 80 percent admitted more than half of the students who applied.
High stakes admissions is limited to the country’s top-tier schools. And even there, the use of race in admissions is only a small part of the equation. The most important factor for any applicant is the one thing that they have full control over yet can’t change by the time they apply: their high school grades.
MORE PEOPLE GO to college now than ever before. When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, 14 percent of whites 25 to 29 years old had attained a bachelor’s degree. Only 6 percent of blacks were able to do so. By 2014, 41 percent of whites that age had a degree. Yet only 22 percent of blacks had one.
Of the 21 million students in the higher ed system, 58 percent are white, 17 percent are Hispanic, and 15 percent are black. But those raw numbers are also misleading. At the country’s top schools, black students make up only 4 percent of undergraduates. In the Ivy League, that number jumps to 9
percent.
These numbers put the lie to a central thesis of white-grievance politics — that white people are the true victims of discrimination. Surveys show that some 55 percent of white Americans believe there’s discrimination against whites, and 11 percent claim to have been boxed out of a college spot because of it.
Appeasing angry whites is almost certainly behind the Trump Justice Department’s siccing the Civil Rights Division on colleges like Harvard and Yale for using race in admissions. The Department of Education rescinded its endorsement of race-based admissions this summer.
But if the Trump administration were really interested in stopping colleges from giving one group an unfair hand up, they’d prohibit them from considering gender. Women have better grades, higher test scores, and make better college applicants than men. Indeed, they make up 57 percent of all college students. In the interests of relative gender parity on campus, many colleges admit lesser-qualified men and reject more qualified women.
Schools do this in part because college is about more than just the classroom. It is about creating a community of people who study together, live together, fall in love with each other, play sports together, and form bonds that will stay with them for a lifetime.
Sometimes more than a lifetime: Often called “white affirmative action,” colleges give special preference to legacy students — the children of alumni — and the children of big donors. This practice disproportionately helps rich white students to the exclusion of black and brown students who are more likely to be the first in their families to attend college.
A COLLEGE DEGREE adds millions of dollars to a person’s lifetime earnings, and policies like legacy admissions cascade those benefits down through the generations. How much does it pay to have had a relative go to Harvard? According to documents filed in the case, the admission rate for legacy students was 34 percent, while the admit rate for non-legacy students was 6 percent. More than 21 percent of admitted white students were legacies, compared with 6 percent of Asian students and 5 percent of black students.
Another generational factor that plays into who gets a seat in Harvard’s freshman class is geography. The richest zip codes have the best schools, and the best schools send the most kids to college. The poorest places often have the worst schools, and that’s an impossible fact to separate from race. Decades of discriminatory housing policies have concentrated poverty — and the poor schools that follow from that — in black communities.
That’s just one problem with simply replacing race-based affirmative action with similar preferences based on income. A second problem is the fact that there are more poor white people than poor black people. Putting a thumb on the scale for poverty writ large would simply benefit more whites.
And what of the Asian students at Harvard? If race were totally removed from the admissions process, their share of the freshman class would rise modestly, from 24 percent to 27 percent, according to court filings. White students, meanwhile, would see a bump three times as large — increasing their share of the class from 40 percent to 48 percent. If the goal is to make Harvard white again, stripping race from admissions is the way to do it.
Considering race as one of many factors in admissions can help correct past injustices while enriching the college experience. Continuing its modest deployment in admissions will not overnight remedy the historic inequality currently plaguing American society. But it is an important tool and one that the court should uphold.
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Elite schools still need affirmative action — just not by race
The Left are obsessed with discriminating against people based on the group they belong to
A RECENT WGBH poll found that 86 percent of Americans value having racial and ethnic diversity on college campuses, and yet 72 percent said they disagreed with a Supreme Court decision allowing race to be “one factor in deciding which applicants to admit.” Are Americans nuts in thinking universities can get racial diversity without racial preferences?
Not at all. Because race still matters in American society, blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately poor, and therefore disproportionately benefit from socioeconomic preferences. At the same time, the class-based approach recognizes that disadvantaged whites and Asians deserve a leg up, too, and that privileged underrepresented minorities, such as former President Barack Obama’s daughters, do not.
Needs-based affirmative action makes sense to people. Whereas only 24 percent supported using race as a factor in the WGBH poll, 58 percent said admissions officers should include “overcoming hardships such as poverty or health problems” as an admissions factor — more than supported considering leadership, or athletic or musical talent.
Extensive research finds that if colleges create a genuinely fair admissions system, which factors in economic obstacles students have had to overcome, then African-Americans and Latinos can succeed without racial preferences. New research my colleagues and I conducted as part of a lawsuit by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard affirms these findings.
Using actual applicant data, we were able to test whether socioeconomic preferences would work to produce the educational benefits of diversity, using Harvard’s own system of rating students based on academic, extracurricular, athletic, and personal criteria.
We began by simulating what would happen if Harvard eliminated the blatantly unfair obstacles that it throws in the path of disadvantaged students, such as the substantial preference provided to the privileged children of alumni and faculty children, and a back-door “Z-list” admissions system that favors, among others, those who make it on to a special “dean’s interest” list. We then provided a preference to economically disadvantaged students that is about half the size of the leg up Harvard currently gives to athletes. Students of different races were treated equally.
The result? The admission of African American and Latino and other underrepresented minority students rose from 28 percent to 30 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of first-generation college students increased from 7 percent to 25 percent, a development that would surely make classrooms discussion more interesting at a university where in recent years, the number of high-income students has outnumbered the number of low-income students by 23 to 1.
Harvard nevertheless claimed this alternative system would fail to maintain “the standards of excellence that Harvard seeks in its student body.”
In reality, however, under socioeconomic preferences, the average high school grades of admitted students would be just as high as they are now, and SAT scores would be at the 98th percentile.
Incredibly, officials at Harvard also raised questions about whether the nation’s richest university could afford to provide financial aid under a system socioeconomic preferences. This was a surprising claim from an institution whose $37 billion endowment is larger than the GDP of half of the world’s countries. Indeed, Harvard’s own financial aid director testified that Harvard would have no problem doubling the proportion of disadvantaged students eligible for financial aid programs.
Racial diversity on campus is important, especially in the age of Donald Trump, when our nation is so deeply divided. But there is a better, less divisive way to achieve the goal by opening the doors of elite universities to disadvantaged students of all races who are now largely shut out of elite higher education.
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