The Supreme Court has struck down affirmative action, which was widely expected by people who pay attention to such things but Supreme Court decisions are in general hard to predict so even the “expected” is a bit unexpected. Because I expect the Dobbs decision and abortion rights to feature heavily in Democrats’ 2024 campaign, I expect there will be considerable pressure to fold this decision into a broader critique of right-wing judicial overreach and it’s important to understand that
re: maya's point, that's fine...but harvard has very few conservatives and in particular very few white evangelicals. but they're a big part of the country. isn't the discussion impoverished that way too? who cares? no one really
I love talking to conservatives at Harvard and am probably friends with way more right-leaning people than the average liberal college girl. Also Harvard essentially does rural/small state affirmative action too, so I think this point is overstated. It has more to do with the fact that young educated people are liberal -- many of my friends are left-wing kids from right-wing states! Also, college campuses do play a role in silencing conservatives (although this is overstated IMO). As a former debater, I'm very very pro-free speech and open discussion.
I think political ideology is pretty different from race though. Being conservative is a choice; being Black is not. I can't imagine discussing politics and history without hearing from a wide variety of lived experiences. How can we talk about policing without hearing from Black students? Female labor participation without female students? The Holocaust without Jewish students? As I said, the discussion becomes intellectually impoverished. Diversity matters.
You seem to assume that personal experience is the most important element in intellectual discussion. What about you ability to think critically? To read and analyze ideas of people who aren't currently 18? Even the kind of knowledge and preparation you have to engage with certain materials effectively?
P.S.
A secondary point is to wonder whether the blunt category of "race" which would consider e.g. MY as representative of the "Hispanic experience" isn't insultingly reductive to achieve diversity of experiences?
Intellectual abilities are also super important, and are most of the reason for admission to Harvard. I have never met a Black or Hispanic student who was not extremely qualified at the school. This is the whole point of holistic admissions -- consider everything
As a teacher in one of your schools "sisters" i concur that excellent students come from all backgrounds. At the same time, however, not all ivy students are equally good. Some are better than others. I wonder whether more exclusively academic criteria wouldn't help produce a class that's even stronger, academically, overall? To use a rough approximation, what would happen if Harvard was composed exclusively of the students currently getting straight As at Harvard? Wouldn't that improve the level of the average class, and hence improve the Harvard educational experience overall?
Who's "stronger" academically - a kid from a private school from a family that makes six figures that got all straight A's, and a 1600/2400 on their SAT's or a kid from an economically desolate area who has a single monther, but got nearly straight A's, and a 1450/2300 on their SAT's?
The problem is that we need not resort to such hypotheticals; we know what the median black kid with those states who attends Harvard looks like!
They’re the academically capable but not brilliant child of middle-to-professional class parents.
If you want to actually help the latter kid, who is deserving regardless of race, then you need to mechanistically give *poor* children an advantage, full stop. Without regard to other characteristics.
You need to distinguish the question of potential and actual abilities. How would you answer the question with regards eg to swimming ? Acting?
To my mind I’d want to take those who’ll do best, at least by senior year. If the gaps are too large for a student to do well at a rigorous environment, even though in a hypothetical better world they could have had they the resources - then that’s a genuine tragedy, not just for them personally but for the whole of society deprived of this lost potential. But it’s not something we can always fix when they’re 18. We need to fix k-12 education. We need massive wealth redistribution etc. and I’m for all of that, but there are no shortcuts, and attempting them may well do more harm than good.
I work at another Ivy... I wouldn't say that the straight A students are necessarily the ones that are the most talented.
I suppose if we are to define academic success as the ability to get straight As at Harvard, then your idea holds up based on pure tautology. But I don't think the classroom made up of all the straight A students is going to be a classroom of better thinkers.
I said "rough approximation". I wouldn't literally go by that, but, ideally, grades should reflect the quality of the work, and, at least in more advanced classes in the humanities, the quality of the work ought ot refelect the qulaity of the thinking (or at least the one the student is currently able and willing to share with the class - shouldn't that be the one that matters for the academic experience?)
P.S.
I have no problem with the suggestion that intersting life experience might help you become a kore interesitng thinker. My point is that we should judge people, directly, on how good/interesting they are as thinkers, no rely on some a priori assumption based on, at best, extremely rough correlations.
I went to Northwestern for undergrad and Oxford for grad and I was far, far, far more impressed with Oxford's undergrads' depth of intellect/substance than I was NU. On the other hand, NU's grads are gonna rule the world of business so...
Academic excellence is not the only thing that matters at college imo. There is so much learning that happens at a community level - in the dorm, among student-friend groups, in extracurricular activities, at parties etc.
So taking away institutions curation of diversity is, imo, a significant loss of educational freedom, both for those who would like to attend such institutions and for those who would like to educate in them, or those like myself who would like to support and promote such educational institutions focused on promoting cooperation rather than competition
Sure they’re learning in the form etc , but it would benefit from selecting people based on the sharpest intellect rather than a “holistic” approach that dilutes that in favor of tons of irrelevant stuff (race being just one, if the most morally egregious).
Would Tim Scott have the same beliefs about policing if he didn't have the experience of regularly being pulled over for no reason? Intellect helps you navigate the world of ideas but those ideas have nothing to do with reality unless you also have life experience to shape them. That's the difference between a thought experiment and a real one.
Is race all they’re looking at? A lot of people talk as though that’s the case, but I was under the impression that they actively consider geography, family wealth, and family educational background (ie, first generation student status).
If the goal is having variety of voices, you would only need 5 or 6% of the undergraduate class to be black, in which case most 30 student classes would have a black voice.
That is a legitimate goal, but it hardly requires proportional admissions
the political point is (to me) not that important, so i'll move to something where i think there is a major issue: religion. though i'm an atheist, i think cultural elites underweight the importance of religion in most societies because of their strong secularity. i don't think this matters for MIT or caltech, but since harvard educates ppl who go into gov. i think this probably a major problem if you care more than just 'book learning.'
i would argue religion is more important to most religious people than their race, and has just as much or more impact on their life and worldview. but perhaps others disagree and think white supremacy uber alles, idk
I think we all need to be really careful about this. There are some religious people for whom religion shapes their lives and there are people who will answer "Christian" when asked, but who have never actually read the Bible, never go to church and for whom you wouldn't know until you asked.
Getting a fair representation of the variety of religious commitment is, well, the same sort of problem as Matt expressed in regard to race - it's very easy to recruit people who are Christian (or Muslim, or Hindu, or whatever) in the same way that Matt is Hispanic.
It isn't even really at a denominational level, either. The denominations that believe that splitting (schism) is wrong - the episcopalians and the Catholics - have it worst, but most denominations have a mix of more liberal and more conservative/evangelical members.
Look at the Southern Baptists kicking out churches with female pastors - and the interesting fact that they had those churches inside the fold for 20+ years. It's genuinely hard to even identify the diversity of experience and commitment that there is in American religion, much less to generate a representative diverse sample of it.
Plus there's the secret (at any rate my suspicion) that many pastors are more liberal than they let on to their congregations because 1) they've studied the Bible and religion academically, even in conservative seminaries and 2) they are dealing face-to-face with day-to-day struggles of their church members and pretty much have to learn the caring and supportive sides of their theology. (Although I'm not sure what the heck is going on with those SBC pastors. I think that's going to backlash in the next five years or so.)
Harvard is also religiously diverse, although there's a lot of atheism b/c like w/ politics, young educated ppl are more atheist on average. This isn't a conspiracy; the school is pretty representative. Not sure what your point is? Diversity is generally important.
Is it really all that diverse? How many that think LGBT+ is sinful? Lots of women wearing niqab? Lots who are not having sex before marriage? It's not just Christians or Muslims or Hindus, it's people who take the religion seriously, who attend a religious service multiple times a week and who try to live their lives by the demands of their faith.
I suspect that there is a much bigger percentage of Americans, even of young Americans who regard their faith in that manner than there are of Harvard students. It's not the atheists that I think people are concerned about, but rather the religious people who don't take it as seriously.
Anecdata so take it with a grain of salt, but there's roughly 12-15 practicing Catholics at my (small, Northeastern, liberal arts) college of 3,000. Of the 12-15 of us there's probably three that do anything more than attend Mass weekly, though I'm not one of them so it's hard to say. I have to imagine that on both counts the college population is hugely out of whack with the country.
As an aside it's considered kinda gauche to say you're Catholic on our campus, so I wouldn't know the numbers if I wasn't regularly attending Mass and therefore wouldn't even really be able to guess at any other sect/religion's following.
This is the sort of thing I mean when I talk about religious diversity. There may well be a reasonable proportion of Catholics in the sense of people who check the "Catholic" box on surveys, but not in the sense of people who actually attend Mass.
Most educated young people in the US are pro LGBT and generally have more liberal attitudes, which makes sense that this is reflected in Harvard's student body. Also yeah I'm probably one of said "religious people who don't take it as seriously," a relatively secular Jew, and there's a lot of people like me in the Harvard applicant pool and at Harvard! literally nothing wrong with that; there's also plenty of Orthodox students
Sure. But diversity would mean including some who don't.
There is a conflict in diversity here: if you want viewpoint diversity (and religious diversity, if it is to mean anything more than a nominal tickbox, has to create viewpoint diversity) then you will be faced with the problem that some viewpoints are hostile to some people. Can you include both someone who hates group X and a member of group X? But if you can't, then you weaken your viewpoint diversity.
Can you include both racists and black people? I think not. But that doesn't mean that you aren't losing something from your discussions by excluding racists. Can you include both homophobes and LGBT+ people? I think not, but you certainly are losing some diversity by excluding homophobes.
And you lose just as much diversity in a classroom discussion by allowing racists and homophobes as long as they keep quite about their racism and homophobia.
Finally, of course, there is one form of diversity that Harvard intentionally excludes: poorly educated people.
I think what Just Some Guy, Richard, and myself are on about is that there is indeed nothing wrong with that but that we should also stop calling it religious diversity.
You've mentioned "young educated people" a few times in this thread but I think it's also doing a lot of work here in terms of mopping up the lack of view-point diversity. As Razib pointed out, that's probably fine at places like MIT and CalTech, but I think he's right that it creates some pretty big problems for society when government-centric schools do it. Perhaps we need to round up a bunch of evangelicals and keep them in a laboratory at Harvard's social sciences department... so that they can be observed and interacted with. I only partially joke.
Moving from teaching at USC to Texas A&M I’ve discovered a huge change on the religion issue. Even in upper division philosophy classes, where the students are mostly endorsing liberal/progressive political views, there are still a lot of highly religious people, in a way that there hasn’t been at other institutions I’ve been affiliated with.
What do you mean by "young *educated* people are more atheist on average" Isn't that petitio principii? Are you claiming that the religious people are significantly more likely to be high school dropouts? If not, how, precisely, are they less "educated" than other college applicants? The fact is that the class at Harvard is , presumably, far more secular than the age-cohort as a whole, but the cause remains to be determined, and the fact that "elite educated" 22 year olds consequently are more secular cannot be used to reverse-engineer an explanation for this.
It's not actually true that more-educated people are less religious; that's a widespread myth. Education is correlated with religiosity; people with graduate education are more religious than people with BAs, who are more religious than people with high school degrees, who are more religious than people who didn't graduate from high school.
The reason that it seems that it's true is that Harvard draws students from a very small social and geographic subset of the country. Harvard Law, which is more selective but draws more broadly across the country, is significantly more religious.
Religious diversity is important to me because I'm concerned about cultural hostility to religion. This has been around for a couple of centuries with the rise of rationalism, but currently the more thoughtless among the population equate "organized religion" with 1) conservative political evangelicals 2) unwanted proselytizing and 3) the experiences of survivors of abusive religious situations.
I was recently informed in a NYT comment thread that the elite schools **are** religiously diverse. I tend to believe this, because any time I visit less illustrious campuses and read their bulletin boards, I see evidence of religious activities and groups.
Diversity doesn't just have to be face-to-face conversations. It can be walking through a campus and seeing posters for community centers for various groups, becoming aware of those groups and then hopefully becoming curious about the kinds of support people seek out and find.
As for religion, one of my "missions" in life is to suggest that people not resist exploring some kind of spiritual path just because it might be mocked by one's friends or because of a culturally preprogrammed internal response like "I can't go there because it would be irrational!" Religion is about a lot more than "believing as fact" some kind of supernatural proposition. (Another misperception floating around out there.)
Your point is valid, but how would this work in practice? Attempting to capture religiosity and not just religious affiliation strikes me as impossible for a secular(ish) institution. Some private religious schools have applicants sign a statement of faith, but they're not shooting for diversity but rather the opposite.
I think this would also be my critique of the Maya's assertion that "Harvard is also religiously diverse." It feels like box-checking. Like the guy whose grandmother is Episcopalian and who went to church on Easter as a kid checks the box for "Christianity". That's fine. I'm not mocking that at all. But it's also not constructive as diversity. He's going to have much more similar opinions to the peers he parties with than a devout Catholic convert who attends church three times a week. If we don't care about religious diversity, we should say that. And that might be okay. But I think we should stop pointing to stats that say "60% of such-and-such are Christians."
To make a point that dovetails well with the theme of this article, there are actually a pretty decent number of evangelicals at all of these schools, but they are disproportionately Asian or black (and even more different from the caricature JSG references than David French is).
The problem is I doubt most Harvard student actually encountered genuine religious diversity or ever interacted with too many seriously religious people. The US is so big, and so "bubbly" that most Harvard students aren't even truly *aware* that religious diversity exists. It's like living in 2d and not being able to even conceive of a third dimension. They think what they were raised to see as "diversity" is all there is, whereas you and I call it box ticking and have experienced some genuinely devout people who in many (not all) cases seriously offend our liberal values.
Brand new subscriber here. Yes, I am an evangelical as well and people assume a lot about us that is not true. Or is not true of many of us. And yes, I have plenty of issues with the evangelical church today.
I think David French and Russell Moore represent Evangelicals more in the way I would like to see us represented.
100% a good thing. It’s certainly given Mr. mel ladi and me more boldness in speaking up amongst our brothers and sisters in Christ. Our new young Pastor is not a nationalist, and that helps.
I mean, considering Russell Moore & David French were both, to differing degrees, pushed out of the modern evangelical movement, I question whose wrong here.
Where you're going wrong here is that because you are enough of a news junkie to subscribe to Slow Boring, you are equating "the evangelical movement" with *political evangelicalism*, but those are not the same thing. Both of those guys are still members in good standing at churches in Nashville that can't possibly be characterized as anything other than evangelical from a theological standpoint (Moore, obviously, is on the pastoral staff at his).
If you want to find out what the "evangelical movement" is, you need to visit a cross-section of evangelical churches and talk to folks, not read about them in The New Yorker.
With due respect to evan bear, yeah, they’ve faced a lot of heat from the religio-political right, up to and including physical and economic threats to their person and their family. Both are seen as traitors by a twitter-loud segment of politicized evangelicals, most particularly the Trump-supporting ones. We could also talk about what Beth Moore (no relation) has faced as well.
R Moore, however, is the EIC of Christianity Today, long-standing flag ship magazine of many evangelicals (founded by St. Billy of Graham). French writes opinions for the NYT. They’ve not been ostracized, and both hold positions of significant cultural media power. As well, both are religiously orthodox in their beliefs.
Like most normal people, most evangelicals don't follow politics at all or even read the news. In any demographic group, voting behavior tends to reflect the masses following the lead of the small subset of politics junkies within the community. This is not to say that there's disagreement between the masses and the opinion-leaders. Just that the masses are generally only superficially engaged with the issues.
Agree. I am married to someone who grew up Southern Baptist in the rural South. There are definitely people who conform to the stereotype, but a lot do not. I have a knee-jerk reaction to religious stereotypes, though, because I am also a relatively progressive person who is also a practicing Roman Catholic for lots of complicated personal reasons.
Exactly Evangelical culture is, well, culture. Religion, including rational secularism, are dominant aspects of culture, and every culture has positive and negative aspects. I just wish people would become aware of our natural tendencies to hypocrisy: If Muslim culture happens to be cool because Trump wouldn't allow anyone from those countries to enter the U.S., then why not adopt an equally open mind towards Evangelical Christianity?
For many of us, Christianity in its myriad forms is our cultural legacy, going back centuries. It makes more sense to at least try to understand it, because it has shaped who we are and what our country is.
Even though there's a kind of overarching culture at those universities, every student's experience will of course be unique. It's interesting that the chief chaplain is an atheist, but a quick look at the Harvard chaplaincy page reveals quite a diverse bunch, with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship rating two chaplains. You can do a lot of personal spiritual exploration without worrying about Biblical inerrancy. (Wonder how those IVC chaplains handle those kinds of questions and conversations though.)
I mean, there's currently pushback against Dearborn as they passed a law banning Pride flags or whatever.
But yes, the Muslim community is small, and the current prominent people in that community are currently progressive (Omar, etc.) However, if the socially conservative parts become more prominent, there will be more criticism of them.
But yes, as long as Evanglical's continue to support laws that limit the rights of young women and LGBT people, you're not going to be popular on a college campus. The other reality is that even a practicing Muslim (no alcohol, prays daily, fasts for Ramadan) on a college campus might have liberal views on laws regarding abortion, LGBT, etc. even if they're personally pro-life, etc.
Haha @ "a niece who went to college who will yell at them about stuff." Very few conservatives nowadays are unaware of their transgressions. It's what makes a lot of conservatives on social media annoying a la vice-signalling.
I've attended both mainline and Evangelical churches at different points and think the difference between them is overstated by both sides. Yes, plenty of each group are loopy in each direction, but among the "normal" ones the main practical difference is high vs. low church, with little difference in teaching (except perhaps on gender issues).
I fear this may sound snotty and that is very much not my intent, but if it's very important to be around a diverse array of students to avoid such intellectual impoverishment, then top white students still have, and will continue to have, the option of voluntarily choosing to attend less elite/selective schools themselves.
That said, as a practical matter, for the reasons The Boss here has articulated, I tend to doubt that the demographic makeup of the student bodies at these elite schools will change very much. The schools will reach similar results using proxies. The result won't be a shift across racial categories, but rather *within* each racial category, you'll get more students who do lots of nutty volunteer work and extracurricular activities (starting their own charitable nonprofits and whatever else), and fewer students who have great stats but opt out of the extracurricular rat race.
This comment struck me: “How can we talk about policing without hearing from Black students?”
Why focus on Blacks in regards to policing? How can we talk about policing without talking to Asians? Why does a Black American have special insights? Particularly when you’re at Harvard? 45% of the Black students are from other countries. Right off the bat, 1/2 the Black students didn’t even grow up with American police.
Wouldn’t be great if we did have stereotypes like Maya has associating Blacks with law enforcement? How do we get there? Probably putting work into changing the data. Unfortunately young people like Maya do not want to take that journey instead they want to double down on the stereotype.
I don't think being conservative is 100% a choice. At least at a population level. Andrew Yang talked a lot about how it's more like 50/50 innate/socialized. In any society you are going to have a significant portion of the population that is conservative in their outlook and it's good to recognize both the universality of that and the deep importance of having those people as part of the conversation in important places (in the same way you suggest having people of different races is also important).
I am more lukewarm than others on AA (helps not to be an American!) - but I do wonder how much diverse opinions you get from someone who is basically the same as you in intelligence, personality types, and socioeconomic status except race.
If the goal is to increase the fractionalization of views - which is what the stated goal was under the policy, its not clear that race as consideration is sufficient (despite the costs).
"How can we talk about policing without hearing from Black students? Female labor participation without female students? The Holocaust without Jewish students?"
These conversations also need to be able to happen *without* any students with personal experience. There are 12000 Rohingya in the US, or about .004% of the US population. Harvard has an undergraduate class of about 7000 students, and (as you note elsewhere on the page) its demographics correspond to the US population as a whole. But the statistically 1/4-person at Harvard who is Rohingya cannot spend their whole time at Harvard offering "local color" to classes on modern Myanmar and the Rohingya genocide.
The 30 Armenians have it a little better — if there's one class a semester, then each Armenian only needs to attend 1.5 semesters on the Armenian genocide. But what if they want to fulfill their Gen. Ed. requirement some other way? Will you *force* them to take the course (and thereby impoverish their education) for the greater good?
Humanities scholars use written descriptions of a person's experiences as a substitute for talking to that person precisely because it doesn't suffer from this problem: one can always copy a text. If Harvard can't teach students to extract lived experience from written texts, then Harvard is incompetent.
Political ideology seems more important to discussions than race, though? People with different political views will have very different perspectives to offer, whereas a black progressive will probably make basically the same points as a white progressive.
> I think political ideology is pretty different from race though. Being conservative is a choice; being Black is not.
In some sense this is correct and I totally hear your point, but in some other sense this feels incorrect. I do actually sometimes wish I had different political opinions than I do or at least that I felt less/more strongly about certain things. But I was pretty much born a neoliberal shill. I could force myself to vote against what I feel is correct I guess, but I don't remember making any choices here.
Hi, Maya. As a university lecturer in the UK in a wildly undiverse department (despite our best efforts; it’s a whole other story), I am actually regularly confronted with the problem of teaching on topics without the benefit of students representative of populations who are disproportionately affected by those topics. I agree that it is good to get input from students with direct experience of various phenomena like the ones you mention, but a) from the instructor’s point of view, we’re really trying to avoid tokenization or making students into avatars of communities they may or may not identify with (and even if they do, may not want to be called on to represent) and b) sometimes (like in my case) we just don’t have the relevant student experiences to draw on. But we can’t make our teaching contingent on the presence of that experience. To use one of your examples, the Holocaust is way too important to not teach it because there are no Jewish students present.
So I would offer a friendly disagreement that discussions on topics like those you mention are “impoverished” in the absence of direct testimony. Is that kind of immediate lived experience valuable? Of course. But it’s ultimately the instructor’s job to find a way of making material accessible to any student with the willingness to engage with it, and for us to have enough awareness of the range of opinions and perspectives that exist so that we can provide an intellectually rich environment for those discussions.
Do you have a citation on the small-state/rural "boost"? The last time I looked into it (and it was a while ago) signs of "rurality" on an application like membership of FFA* usually hurt admissions chances at Ivies and similar schools.
*I'm sure someone will interject that FFA is a vocational program. It isn't - the name is historical. Some kids intend to become farmers, others welders, others geneticists or microbiologists or lawyers or a thousand other things.
Is there a large enough population of non-white students at Harvard right now to avoid tokenization in these discussions? And even if so, is tokenization is better than total lack of representation?
OK cool, I didn't know that. So yeah, this decision is indeed tragic for the student experience at Harvard and other institutions who are good at this.
It is diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography. It heavily skews wealthy, though. The flip side is that the school can offer excellent financial aid to poorer and middle-class students because of the wealth of other students and alums.
Yeah, the %s are pretty on par with the national averages -- I find it to be very diverse. But that is now (potentially) history. We'll see about race-neutral proxies
Maya, the ruling doesn't do what you claim it does. If a black student had an experience with policing, they can put that in their essay and get points for overcoming disadvantage and having potential beyond their measurable stats. What will be banned from here on is using the skin color directly, independent of whether they actually experienced material disadvantage. Universities will be asked to move beyond their shallow preoccupation with optics and do more real work to identify individuals with relevant life experiences.
What is your issue with that?
Also, how does fairness to Asian-American students figure into your view? Would you even have got into Harvard if you were Asian-American? You sound like a lot of progressives, that seem to wholesale ignore that this was a case brought be Asian Americans that were unfairly excluded.
It also has far too few working-class students, whose perspective is likely to be at least as interesting and valuable as that of ultra-privileged kids who happen to have diverse pigmentation. The fact the so many in these institutions are hyper-focused on the supposed educational benefits from diversity deemed exclusively from the most arbitrary and superficial criteria, and care so little about actual differences in lived experience, speak volumes. This ruling is but the first step in a huge correction needed in American society, and especially the blindspots of the elites.
I'm pretty opposed to the decision, but agree with you that we need to also prioritize socioeconomic diversity. Hopefully that will be a silver lining of this ruling as Harvard and other schools look to prioritize race neutral metrics that are socioeconomic proxies
1) The lived experience of black and white people of the same socioeconomic stratum retain differences due solely or mostly to the way culture responds to their race: policing, hiring discrimination, cultural representation, etc etc. Exposing students to others with different experiences is a major goal of diversity programs.
2) Black people in particular experience economic disadvantage because of the particular injustices of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, redlining, and discrimination in nearly every facet of cultural life. That's a generational injustice that simply is not a factor for poor white folks. Does it deserve redress?
1. I’m skeptical of no. 1 esp with regards to far more salient things (eg where you grew up). The differences in experience and perspective between a black and a white child of pmc in an East coast wealthy suburb is negligible in comparison to either and a white person who grew up in Russia or even france.
2. This isn’t, strictly speaking, about race, but about the generational experience of a specific group of people (whose ancestors were victims of specific racist policies). If you want to help that group, for whatever reason (and I can think of many!) target them explicitly and specifically. The wrongs done to generational African Americans don’t justify a leg up for a Nigerian immigrant let alone for our own MY.
P.S.
I'd also repeat what I said elsewhere: "lived experience" is probably overrated in any case, with regards to its benefits for academic work. It has close to nothing to do with your success in STEM, and far less important for academic Humanities than is fashionable to claim in some circles. Moreover, to the extent that your "lived experience" makes you a better scholar, that should already be reflected in your work. In other words, its moot to debate what makes someone good at something. Maybe its "lived experience" maybe its genetics, maybe its a thousand other factors, most never to be disocvered - the point should be whether the work is good or not, whatever the reason.
> Black people in particular experience economic disadvantage because of the particular injustices of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, redlining, and discrimination in nearly every facet of cultural life. That's a generational injustice that simply is not a factor for poor white folks. Does it deserve redress?
No, not "black people in particular", a specific cohort of American black people whose ancestors were subject to these things. My friend whose parents immigrated to Canada from Nigeria, became diplomats, and moved to the US, did not experience any of that.
Couldn't you effectively achieve both through socio-economic weighting though, given the disproportionate representation of black people in the lower rungs and from certain places? I mean Harvard could create quotas for inner-city folks of a certain income and end up with black applicants without ever having to specify an AA quota.
How can race be devoid of experience? Like to the extent things like driving while black is a thing or security following people around a department store is a thing surely they’re not exempting Nigerians.
In talking to African immigrants, at least anecdotally, I've heard that they experience discrimination in very distinct ways, including from US-born black people.
No, not surely. Immigrants very often look and dress differently and if you live in an area with a lot of them you can pick up on it quickly, even wrt Black immigrants. Some immigrant dress is very obvious, but even subtler patterns are noticeable if you know what to look for. A West African IT guy look that I can spot a mile away: wireless headset, 90s style cut of blue jeans, plain t-shirt and just a "different sort of face / hair" than most American Black people.
Of course there's something to the point you're making, and there are times the immigrant will be seen as just "Black". But race and ethnicity are confounded too much in the discourse with all the complexities of ethnicity are subsumed by over-simplistic Black/White thinking.
The president of Northwestern spoke in London on Wednesday to alums and was EXTREMELY (shockingly) candid about these topics. He basically said that test optional is the future (although not indicating his personal view of it), and also that the admissions office was going to do everything they could to continue affirmative action without actually being able to ask for students' races. Using zip codes as proxies, etc. I don't get too worked up about college admissions these days, especially given I live in the UK now, but I'm extremely, extremely disturbed at test optional policies, given how the "holistic admissions process" advantages students from upper middle and upper class backgrounds. Fine, include other stuff, whatever, but please at least consider test scores!
It’s so blatantly unjust, and inefficient that I do believe it will fail, miserably, on all counts. What troubles me though is how we got tot he point that these people have this blatantly horrible obsession, and are unabashed in advocating for it. It’s the kind of jarring bigotry and unlawful conduct that hasn’t really been heard from my those kind of people since the 1930s…
P.S. let me be clearer still. We live in an increasingly global world. The leading position of us academia isn’t set in stone and mandated by heaven. It was hard earned and will be lost if they give up on meritocracy and go full speed on bizarre anti intellectual niche obsessions.
I would not say so. Working class people are generally less intelligent than those in higher classes, and intelligence is quite heritable. A fair and equitable admissions process should not sort people by anything except their capabilities.
I tend to agree that judging purely on aptitude is the best approach, but at the same time argued that to the extent that we care about either "diversity" for its educational benefits (ultimately diversity of perspectives) or we care about justice-considerations in admissions, then in both cases class ought to matter far more than race.
Intelligence has a genetic component, but there are highly intelligent people across the entire spectrum of humanity. What's interesting is discovering this by talking to people from different backgrounds and learning to recognize and appreciate uses of intelligence that might be quite different from those in our immediate culture.
There absolutely are. They're just less common among the working class. I am against affirmative action because I think the most capable people should do the most prestigious things, not because I regard race as being uniquely bad.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no way this could be known, given the cultural aspects of intelligence tests, the huge range of human cognitive capabilities and expressions of intelligence, and the expense of a full-fledged assessments.
It’s untrue that Harvard couldn’t accept more working class students who would excel there because there’s a shortage of an intelligent pool to draw from.
The number of people who could excel at a place like Harvard *vastly* exceeds the size of their admitted class.
Compared with graduates of private middle and secondary schools, it's harder for middle and working class students from public schools to come up to speed in a high-challenge university. In my day it took a couple of years to gain enough self-confidence to speak up in class and to write. These days I suspect advanced reading and concentrated study skills will also be an issue.
And then there's my brother who got into an Ivy League school (probably for geographic and economic diversity even then), majored in Physics and music so he wouldn't have to write, but ended up dropping out and becoming a journalist.
Also, in terms of superficial skin color diversity, the best guesses I've seen are that only 10% of Harvard's Black students are "generational African Americans", the rest being foreign students or children of more recent immigrants. I suspect %s might be similar for the Hispanic and Native American she thinks she's benefitting from.
In other words, the status quo was a very different version of diversity than the one most AA-advocates claimed to be fighting for. If you want to benefit from exposure to underrepresented generational American ethnic groups and that's truly what you care about, Harvard was never the place for you.
I did really enjoy learning about this via thought #11 as a discretely defined thing for the first time. It's something I've thought about in the abstract for a long time, and now I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one.
For this reason I really think that nothing will upend the racial discourse in America more than mass immigration from Africa. Those immigrants' kids are going to do great, and it will totally scramble everything.
Yes. Britain has reached the point where we have to operate two separate ethnic categories on the census and on diversity forms, one for Black (African) and one for Black (Caribbean). We effectively operate a third, which is Black (African) Muslims. Christian Black Africans do very well, Muslim Black Africans don't. This isn't anything intrinsic to the religions, it's that Muslim Black Africans are mostly Somali refugees who were often badly traumatised, while Christians are mostly West Africans (Ghanians and Nigerians, mostly) who arrived with lots of qualifications.
I happen to be writing this from a college campus in a Southern state that is a quarter black. And, while the undergraduate study body comes close-ish to reflecting the state demographics, the black faculty, graduate students and postdocs are mostly (recent) African immigrants. (I am not sure how the HBCUs fit in, since they are relatively small.) The undergraduates are also mostly in-state, while the graduate students, faculty and postdocs are almost entirely from other states or countries, which is true of most public universities.
It seems to me that that difference with places like Harvard is that the student body is also mostly from other states / countries. So, to your point, they engage in the kind of superficial diversity that is driven as much by brand image as anything else.
To re-state the pipeline issue: The real question, I think, is where can one go to learn from a diverse faculty?
One relevant issue here is that academia is very cosmopolitan, and it’s never going to be representative of the region or location it is in. As long as regional minorities who end up in academia end up geographically dispersed like everyone else, it’s going to be very hard for local minorities to have significant representation - especially if they’re at all underrepresented even globally.
Other than the initial chart comparing ucla faculty to students, all of that seems to be about getting more students from diverse California backgrounds into academia - not necessarily ending up in California, but anywhere (though it does seem like one thing they want is to create a reliable pipeline into community college jobs, which might more often hire local people).
I can tell you from extensive first-hand experience that the headline is exactly accurate. They want the diversity of faculty to reflect the diversity of the undergraduate population. On its face is it about recruiting students into academia, because Prop 209 elicits Orwellian phrasing, but the policy directly affects hiring decisions—often over the objection of department hiring committees. Administrators really do view it as a problem that the faculty does not represent the students. As my first post indicates, I don’t disagree with that sentiment, but I also agree with you that academia is a cosmopolitan institution. It’s an intractable problem that puts faculty at odds with administrators.
I think this shows the fatal flaw that Lewis Powell first cast on this subject from SCOTUS when his opinion ended up being the binding one, in limiting affirmative action only on the basis of fostering diversity. Diversity comes in so, so many dimensions, and giving particular focus to only a few of them was always going to be doomed to failure. I appreciate the argument for racial affirmative action on the grounds of reparation much more to its straightforward nature of its goal.
Totally agree, as I responded above -- Harvard isn't discriminating against conservatives, the young educated person pool is just liberal. We should definitely promote free speech on campus though! Debate is good
Maya, you keep stating that Harvard doesn't discriminate against conservatives and religious people. But The Crimson's poll cited above shows that Harvard's student body is DRAMATICALLY unrepresentative on both counts. See, e.g. https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-steady-conservatives-moderates-tie.aspx. Your justification seems to be that "the young educated person pool" is "just liberal" and "more atheistic" on average. That is true but not even close to the extent of Harvard's student body. More relevantly, the "young educated person pool" is not racially representative either. Why is it ok, much less more important, for Harvard to use Affirmative Action to make its student body representative on race but not political ideologically or religion?
Your link doesn't support your claim. 18-29 age group is 23% conservative. That's overall. Given that more educated voters skew left pretty starkly, 13% is not dramatically far off of what we'd expect from a random sample. Sure the plurality are moderate, but "moderates" are a well-established crapshoot.
Because political and religious beliefs are contextual, malleable and nebulous. To wit, if I traveled back in time 30 years and talked to my younger self, we would both view the other's political and religious views as badly misguided.
The shifting definitions and atomization of racial that have accelerated in recent years are, I think, a big driver in the negative public opinions of affirmative action.
I am the person who linked to the Gallup Poll. You didn't read that right in a bunch of ways. That's the 13% difference between "democrat leaners" and "republican leaners". It's also from 2014. It also shows that 19 year-olds were slightly more republican leaning than the overall 18-29 year-old cohort.
I wish I hadn't linked to the gallup poll at all. FIRE and HERI have more recent, much more relevant data: surveys of enrolled college students. Among R1 schools in 2021, the ratios were 53% liberal, 26% conservative, 21% moderate according to FIRE. https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/2021-college-free-speech-rankings. According to the Higher Education Research Institute (whose 2019 survey is broader than R1), the mix was 37% liberal, 20% conservative, and 43% ‘middle of the road.’ https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/TheAmericanFreshman2019.
Agreed, which I was talking about the national pool. College students in general are likely going to have more formed ideology, but it's just not on the mind of most people that age.
"Harvard has few conservatives" is tossed around a bit but I wonder if anyone's interrogated this recently. At least when I was there some 15 odd years ago, conservatives were outnumbered but also extremely vocal and punched well above their representation. The breakdown was something like 10% openly conservative, 25% openly liberal, and 65% indifferent.
Heaven forbid a private university be allowed to value some things (say, racial or ethnic diversity) over others (sufficient numbers of ideological conservatives). Why, it's almost as if they can make their own decisions about what's important!
I think you're right that demanding a seat at the table for ideological or religious conservatives doesn't make sense. To the extent that people are arguing for that (at a private uni) I'd agree with you. But I think a lot of the pushback in this thread is a) against the claim that Harvard is religiously diverse and b) making the point that a disproportionate number of senior civil and government roles are populated by Ivy leaguers and that their unfamiliarity with huge swaths of their subjects could be bad for society. The solution is obviously to round up a bunch of evangelicals and keep them in a lab at Harvard's sociology department.
First thing that I have to say is that I really appreciate Milan and Maya's takes being included as thoughts #4 and #5 that operate as a bit of point/counterpoint. I always like reading when there's respectful disagreements, that ultimately make our views stronger in the end. Thanks for the contributions, both of you!
Young people are pretty cool--almost by the "definition" of the slang term of cool.
And to bring this back around to diversity, I'm guessing with fairly high confidence that the median Slow Borer is Matt's age, someone like myself that's followed his work back to when he was younger. Generation and age also help to add differing perspectives to the table.
"Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person ten times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look."
Somehow I think taking from immigrant Asians to give to immigrant blacks will not heal the wounds of generational blacks who never applied to Havard in the first place.
And indeed I find it a strange ideological stance to pick which disadvantaged kids get help based on the ultimate source of the disadvantage, in all cases being out of their control. What is the reason the black kid who is a victim of red lining is more deserving than the white kid who's grandparents lost everything to some real estate scam or because the industry moved out of their town? I can see the point in differentiating based on ongoing discrimination but this is not the point Coates is making in this quote. Not all who bleed are black.
I agree the issue is complex, but black people in particular were the subject of generations of systematic and deliberate theft of their wealth, and their descendants are absolutely disadvantaged by that theft. How do you address that very particular injustice? Maybe you don't! But then you can't pretend that America in any way embodies its ideals.
First, you realize that generational wealth does not really exist to the extent you think it does. Before Germany and Japan roared to life as the economic powerhouses of the 60s-80s, they were bombed to the stone age, had 5% of their populations killed, disproportionately young men in the early prime of their life, and some multiples of those wounded, and then, at least for Germany, forced to make reparations payments. But in a generation they were arguably wealthier than they had been before WW2.
Most wealth, for most people, is created, generation by generation, not handed down. Asian people who almost all arrived post Slavery / Jim Crow / Redlining are plenty wealthy. Generational wealth doesn't really exist for the vast majority of Americans outside of a tiny sliver of the richest or few single or two child upper-income families that manage to do everything right for several generations in a row.
Except Black Americans were explicitly denied the opportunity to generate wealth for the vast majority of American history or, if they were given that opportunity, it was at a massively smaller scope than that extended to white Americans.
Do you believe for some reason that all white Americans possess intergenerational wealth at all, let alone intergenerational wealth going back 60 years?
And you have no plan to give them wealth in any way that redress what happened to their ancestors or that would improve living standard now. The way to get wealth would be to create it, like Asian, and to some extent African immigrants are doing right now. Do well at school, two-parent household, stay away from criminal activity.
If you could generational black americans, on average, to do as well on those fronts as current West African Immigrants, who currently earn as much, on average, as white people, all these gaps would go away.
63% of college students in the U.S. rely at least partially on funding from their parents to pay tuition and costs. The quality of neighborhood public K-12 schools is directly proportional to the average income in those neighborhoods. It need not be an inheritance we're talking about here. Why now, 10 generations after slavery ended, do the descendants of former slaves still have 10x less family wealth than the descendants of European immigrants from the same period?
That and so much wealth has been created relatively recently. There are some initial positioning advantages granted from certain types of wealth (land) but so much wealth today is the result of current activity not the past.
I don't think justice for the dead from the dead is even possible. I don't know which American ideal it is thst we should bring racial grievance into the future. We definitely didn't fully embody our ideals during redlining and less so during the travesties that preceded it. But race blindness seems to me to be a movement towards our ideals and not away from them.
"for the dead from the dead." Here's another Coates quote:
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In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times , affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”
“We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times . “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”
This seems like straightforwardly somewhere where we can punish wells and reward it's victims. Justice that doesn't need any complicated elements, assuming Coates has accurately reported this case. We have systems, and where they are lacking we should address those lacking, for this sort of thing. What we don't have, and I don't think can be had, are systems that address grievances of one race against another.
The reason Black people are ‘more deserving’ is because many of their ancestors were stolen from overseas and forced into slavery so white Americans could benefit from the wealth they produced and build a racial hierarchy that has only begun to be dismantled in the past few decades. And rather than compensate these descendants or make any kind of reparation, (white) America insists that it’s colour-blind now, so all of that stolen labour and wealth remains stolen.
Stolen from individuals by individuals who are no longer among us. And to my understanding of the economics this stealing left the united states and its citizens as a whole poorer and not richer.
But you've avoided my point. What your demand cashes out to isn't a righted wrong because we are incapable of righting historical wrongs, it cashes out to helping some people and not others on grounds neither person had any hand in. The slavers of the past will be no worse off because you decided not to help someone who looked like them and the enslaved will not have had their condition improved at all because some member of a tribe from an entirely different part of Africa is given a leg up.
I would wholeheartedly support a 100% inheritance tax and a college admission system that required proportional admissions from each economic wealth decile coupled with 100% tuition remission.
“Stolen from individuals by individuals who are no longer among us.”
Irrelevant. The United States, which was the institution that sanctioned this violence, is still around and bears responsibility for the ongoing consequences of its decision to endorse slavery.
“And to my understanding of the economics this stealing left the united states and its citizens as a whole poorer and not richer.”
Irrelevant. Most crime tends to create poor outcomes for perpetrators. That doesn’t absolve them of responsibility or mean that victims don’t deserve compensation.
“What your demand cashes out to isn't a righted wrong because we are incapable of righting historical wrongs, it cashes out to helping some people and not others on grounds neither person had any hand in.”
If you were to receive compensation for wage theft that you experienced and i didn’t because I wasn’t a victim, would it be reasonable for me to insist either we both get something or nobody does?
“The slavers of the past will be no worse off because you decided not to help someone who looked like them and the enslaved will not have had their condition improved at all because some member of a tribe from an entirely different part of Africa is given a leg up.”
I’m not really all that focused on improving outcomes for dead people, so I’m not sure what your point is here. My focus is on ensuring that people aren’t worse off today because a bunch of dead guys decided a long time ago their ancestors weren’t human.
This game can be played forever and in all facets. We have all inherited our relative position from incomprehensible numbers of forces far outsider of our control. My position would be very different if 80 generations ago one person did one slight thing differently. We cannot possibly calculate the great ledger of rights and wrongs that have placed us in our positions. But what we can do is evaluate the cumulative effect of those slights and boons and they handily cash out to current day material circumstance exactly. Thus aid should be distributed based on current day material circumstances.
And ironically, the descendants of those stolen and enslaved people are richer and healthier than the descendants of those who did the capturing who still live in Africa.
I'm pro-reparations, but affirmative action is the worst reparations program ever. It barely benefits the intended recipients and amplifies the insult by rendering their own achievements suspect in the eyes of many.
Coates is definitely not a heavyweight but compared to like Ibram Kendi or Robin Diangelo he's a pretty serious person. I guess the better question is why are ideas that are so pervasive amongst academia so poorly defended in the popular discourse. Like there are a lot of smart people who think these things. But where's the equivalent to Slow Boring for them?
I haven't seen mentioned yet, amidst all the comments along the lines of "would you really want to go to a 50% Asian school", is that these are the exact same arguments which were used to justify Jewish quotas a century ago. Turns out that some groups are really strong academically.
Rather, the arbitrariness of the invented category "race" or "ethnicity" means that in any given period this arbitraray category will not perfeclty align with other cateegories (e.g. academic aptitude). However, those misalignments are fluid, since the racial category is arbitrary. To put it in concerete terms - young American Jews today appears to be closer to the Americann meidian compared to their parents and grandparents - probably because they are farther away from the immigrant experience. "Asians" (and other racial groups of a similar immigrant-profile, e.g. Nigerians) are likely to undergo a similar process. It's not something inherent to the race, but each generatino is liekly to have its "Asians" or "Jews" which will change over time provided the system is meritocratic enough.
One has to ask what socioeconomic status Indian immigrants to the US had back in India before they emigrated. (I'm guessing most Indian immigrants to the US come from upper middle class backgrounds in India).
To answer what question? Regardless, whatever their ses background was, I'd be highly surprised if it's vastly different from say, Korean immigrants or Filipinos or Nigerians.
"To put it in concerete terms - young American Jews today appears to be closer to the Americann meidian compared to their parents and grandparents - probably because they are farther away from the immigrant experience."
I disagree with this. Jewish Americans still have higher rates than average of higher educational attainment in the US. 60% of Jewish adults in the US are college graduates, compared to around 40% for non-Hispanic whites. 28% of Jewish Americans have a post-graduate degree, as opposed to 11% overall. Jews are still highly represented in elite universities (Harvard is 10% Jewish, Yale is 12% Jewish, Columbia is 22% Jewish, MIT is 7% Jewish, etc, despite Jews making up around 2% of the population).
"probably because they are farther away from the immigrant experience."
I don't know if you can attribute the "immigrant" experience to the Jewish academic successes in the early 20th century. Otherwise, we'd expect that stereotype to extend to Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans were model minorities with respect to academic achievement, but we don't see that.
Instead, I think you can attribute it to several things specific to Jewish experience. Unlike many other poor immigrant groups arriving to the United States in the late 1800s, early 1900s, Jews were more likely to be urban, literate, and skilled (tailors, carpenters, etc), rather than rural, illiterate and unskilled. Furthermore, they came from a culture in which one of the major avenues to status in the community, other than money or yichus (lineage), was educational attainment in yeshivas (Torah learning academies) for men. Furthermore, the society valued women having employable skills, so that they could work to support their husbands in the Yeshiva. Even as the population secularized, education was considered a route to high status in the Jewish community, in ways that it wasn't in other immigrant communitiues.
I don't think you're really disagreeing with his point, though, right? People bringing over their culture and adapting it is what I understand "the immigrant experience" to mean in this context. Most immigrant groups don't end up overachieving in education due simply to being immigrants, but they all do end up disproportionately in some niches and professions and not in others. And he didn't say American Jews are just like other White Americans, he just said they are trending in that direction.
I think the numbers you're providing also probably underrate that convergence. For example, the 60% / 40% college degree among adults includes senior citizens educated in an earlier generation much closer to the arrival of most Jews. It might looks a lot closer if we narrowed it down to people under 30. And the 10-20% Jews at Ivies might in large part be due to legacy admissions. Notably MIT, which relies the least on legacy, is only at 7%.
Justice Thomas concurrence is 58 pages of fastballs. Straight flamethrower shit.
"The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution.
The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional." ~ Justice Thomas https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
I mean, if there was a single line to sum up all of Thomas's jurisprudence it's that one right there about the misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments.
Taught at a mid-level state university. Many first generation college students, mostly white and Black, because in the Midwest. My former students are flourishing, serving the community, raising their own healthy families. If the role of a college education is to create more elites, then more folks need to go to Harvard. If it is to create a better educated population and enable a stronger middle class, send your kid to a state school. (They'll still get into Harvard Law if they're motivated and smart enough.) And almost by definition, they'll have a more diverse college experience, which is important in the real world.
Also, quality early childhood education is a stepping stone to success in K-12 for many children and families.
I think the lack of explicit discussion about the special status of a few schools in a quasi-aristocratic role in American life makes this debate kind of weird.
Like state schools are just not doing the same thing as like 5-10 special ones that are about who will be in charge.
This is for me yet another argument for making the elite schools much much bigger.
If they were the size of tier-1 state schools (of UT@Austin or Texas A&M or a UF, or OSU, or Minnesota-Minneapolis, or Berkeley, or UCLA) then there would be less competition to get in, but far more competition between the elite graduates.
Sure, it might mean that graduates of the Ivy League plus MIT, Caltech, Stanford and Chicago dominate the upper reaches of American society even more than at present, but they would also be a vastly bigger group of people - 200,000 or more in each class across those elite institutions.
I don't quite know what the mechanism would be to advance such a policy. I've heard Malcom Gladwell talk about tinkering around the tax code to advance similar goals but it sounds awfully complicated and prone to an enormous amount of oversight costs and gaming.
Yeah, I don't know how you do that with private schools either, other than just persuasion.
With public ones, it's easy of course, the elected governments just require them to do so.
I suppose you could put some sort of limits on research grants and make those dependent on numbers of undergraduates per class? And then gradually lower them so Harvard needs to add 1,000 students to each class in order to maintain its research funding.
I mean, by the standards of the rest of the world, we're actually pretty good at this. Like, there hasn't been a non-Oxford/Eton/etc. Prime Minister in UK in seemingly forever, and the elite top schools in France really do run everything, for example.
I mean I get the sense this is true, though admissions to those institutions is a rather contentious public policy debate in almost all societies and our high level of individualism and diversity makes it worse.
Yes, I agree of course you don’t get to be in charge because you went to Harvard. But If you went to two state schools even with all that same drive you would have less chance to get those opportunities that fall into the laps of a small number of elite school students.
This is a lottery within a lottery but going to most state schools is to be denied the opportunity to be so fortunate.
The reason opportunities are given to Harvard graduates is because getting into Harvard is a strong signal of intelligence, ambition, energy and connections but also that means that people with comparable intelligence, ambition, energy and connections who don't get into Harvard don't get so many opportunities. Harvard themselves will tell you that for every student they admit, there are two or three who are just as good. Many of them will get into another elite institution, but the ones that don't are genuinely disadvantaged relative to those of the same abilities that do get into elite universities.
Proposing a system where LeBron James, as one example, gets reparations money from the government while the white steelworker in Milwaukee only pays taxes is a loser for the Party.
I don’t think he means a legal settlement based on a harmful act against an individual, I think he means cutting someone a check because they’re black.
No, what they are saying is if someone of LeBron’s racial background was beat up 100 years ago by police that LeBron does not have a claim to compensation for that past harm done to a third party 100 years ago.
I don’t know what you are arguing. In the USDA case there is explicit harm and harmed individuals who are alive who likely have standing. The passage of the VRA and CRA, coupled with the expansion of social safety net programs have also been compensatory for past injustices and inequities. (And mechanically will not be compensatory once racial inequities are adequately addressed.)
But you seem to be arguing, using these examples, that harms much further back require additional compensation for people generations removed from said harms? Is that correct?
If you are targeting the recipients of reparations by race to make up for specific race-based harms then it doesn’t make sense to have the payers of the reparations being people who did not cause the past repression.
This is such an offensive line of reasoning. No persons alive today are "the people who did cause past repression".
You're whole argument is a "sins of the fathers" one and I can't imagine any worse way to envision a just society moving forward. Specifically on this point you seem to be conflating "white people" with "descendants of slaveholders". It's probable that more white people living today in the US are descendants of people who fought in the civil war against slavery than of slaveholders, and both groups are outnumbered by descendants of latter white immigrant groups anyway.
But anyway, if you're really going down this bizarrely immoral values route, it's likely that many of the West Africans admitted to Harvard to meet AA goals are descendants of slave raiders / traders who sold slaves to the Europeans, so there's another one for that argument.
You're missing the point. I agree that this "sins of the fathers stuff" doesn't make sense. (Look at that recent Reuters report finding that Obama is descended from slaveowners.) But the people who favor affirmative action do, on some level, believe in it, and even under that framework the current system doesn't pass muster.
No they don't, Milan. The original justification for AA was to acknoweldge that *the state* and American insitutions were explicitly racist, creating gaps, and so a proactive approach ("affirmative action") must be taken, on a temporary basis, a redress those wrongs against their specific victims. It has nothing to do with "sins of the fathers" let alone with marking whole races as collectively guilty of anything.
Some of us favor hard AA quotas to bring the level of educational attainment to parity on the belief that this can then rise and fall naturally in subsequent generations.
Often those laws can’t be enforced. There are those studies of identical resumes getting fewer callbacks when they have a black name. How do we enforce against that behavior?
Few people, even on the left, describe the state of current racism as "repression". If the distribution of people who have been treated worse than-average at the customer service desk at Target skews slightly towards Black people, then Target should fix that, but it's not ground for reparations from Harvard.
Yes, it’s not as bad as Jim Crow. But, your Target example is trivializing ongoing racial discrimination. What about the studies that show black names on resumes getting fewer callbacks than otherwise identical ones with white names?
Whites in the south spent enormous amounts of energy on suppressing blacks. That was terrible for blacks, but also for whites! All of that effort could have gone into developing their towns and cities to be better, instead of constantly suppressing members of their community.
Right, based on JE's argument you would think the richest non-blacks in the US would be distributed all around the South, and especially concentrated in the Deep South, but instead the trend runs clearly in the other direction.
This is a bit of a disingenuous comparison because you can connect past harms to current victims. If you argue that the forth generation descendent of someone forced into sharecropping due to a failure to enact land redistribution post civil war deserves compensation, then we are going to need more reasoning why compensation is warranted.
Ya, that sentiment in a vacuum is silly. What if the abuser was a representative agent of the public and those victims can establish credible harm from actions taken?
Public funds, sure. Everyone pays according to their tax liability. The problem is that admission to Harvard is not a spread liability--some individual people who would have been admitted are not and they are the only people paying for Affirmative Action.
It happened that Harvard set up its system so that the people who lost out due to AA were Asian students and downscale white students, the opposite of who would pay the most in a tax-dollar system.
Not necessarily. You have to make the case that the current state 1) inherent’s liability for past harms, 2) living people are directly harmed by distant past harms and this have a claim, and 3) compensation for past harm has not been provided.
None of these aspects are clear or incontrovertible. Hence why reparations is a debated subject.
Twitter is obviously a very strange place but the discussion around this decision has really been something.
One terrible thing that liberal people might do is to push Asian Americans to the right with their reactions to his ruling. Both "Asians" and "White Women" are trending on Twitter.
Firstly, if they wanted all these schools could just set an academic minimum and then have a lottery. They are the ones that decided that they need to be ultra-selective.
The legacy/athlete discussion is very strange because legacy admissions seem very unpopular with all people according this this poll 0% of Dems and 7% of Republics think it is "very fair". If someone were to get rid of them it would likely be very popular.
Also colleges can just get rid of legacy/donor/athlete admissions if they want. If people think they are bad, they should tell Harvard to stop doing them.
There is a lot of discussion about White Women being the main beneficiary of AA. It's unclear if this is meant as a defense of it or not.
Finally, saying that Clarence Thomas sucks, and also that he got into school and the SC because of AA seems like a misguided defense.
Also Harvard should have maybe been less openly racist towards Asian applicants. People are sort of glossing over this in favor of the overall discussion but the practices that Harvard was using seems pretty not cool.
But to the people I've seen on Twitter that believe that AA and legacy admissions are on opposites sites of the political spectrum when really both are pretty unpopular.
Harvard absolutely has "a direct interest in how popular it’s policies are with the general public." As Matt went on about at length above, they care deeply about how they appear to society. Brand is everything to Harvard.
I think, at best, it’s a matter of degree. Harvard’s decision makers are accountable to Harvard’s various stakeholders. But those stakeholders are not in any meaningful sense the general public.
So while the stakeholders may view the general public’s opinion as one factor, to be weighed among many, you’re never likely to see a situation where Harvard’s decision makers say something like “Sorry, donors. I know that you REALLY love [policy XYZ]. But the general public is just not having it, so we’re going to side with them over you.”
Agree that “the brand” is everything. But it’s more a question of “the brand, as perceived by whom?”
> Twitter is obviously a very strange place but the discussion around this decision has really been something.
A lot of the progressive/Academia Twitterati opinion about this is just straightforwardly racist. Not racist through a funhouse mirror, just actually, explicitly racist. I think we on the left who can see this need to stop beating around the bush about it and call it what it is
The legacy discussion (not so much the athletes one) is also very strange, IMO, because the vast majority of universities and colleges in the US don't have legacy admissions at all or it's used at most as a weak tie breaker in their admissions process. (The athletes one is strange for a different reason -- outside of a handful of schools, admissions based on athletic status almost certainly disproportionately benefit black students, not white ones. "What about all the black kids with strong HS grades and great SAT scores getting denied admission for dumb white jocks" is not a thing anyone ever writes with a straight face.)
At elite schools, athletic admissions tends to mean fencing or crew or lacrosse or something to get in white people with the money to do those sports. At tier-1 state schools (which also tend to be the top-tier football schools), it's absolutely getting black people in to play football and basketball.
The White Woman thing might have a point about workplace affirmative action but I don’t think it has ever been much of a thing in higher ed. If it ever was, it’s not currently active and able to be litigated.
I think this talking point is mixing up two different things. It's true that white women benefit massively from government contractor set-aside rules, which are also a category of "affirmative action," but has nothing to do with college admissions.
I genuinely think white women didn’t benefit from AA in education much at all--k12 works better for us than boys so as soon as the barriers went down we flooded in. I think AA in the workplace early and in certain fields today has helped but claiming we are doing well therefore we benefited from AA just... the logic doesn’t fit.
(I also think a preference for a 50:50 class improves everyone’s social life.)
Legislatures can get rid of legacy admissions whenever they like, by prohibiting it for public schools or conditioning private school funding on its abolition. People who are offended by the policy never put any political organizing effort behind their position.
I think it is mostly just used as a whataboutism but there really appears to be very little popular constituency for legacy admissions and it might worth politicians or activists that want them gone to see if they can make it happen. It might be easier than they think.
0. The entire system became untenable and collapsed because Asian students are much stronger than other students (in the pool elite schools draw from) in terms of academic achievements at age 18. Neither side is particularly interested in emphasizing this point
That flies in the face of the reality I see. Every single time I hear the affirmative action argument, the point about Asian students is made on both sides. I think it's more like neither side has a clue how to solve that particular problem within the context of their own self-interest - there's only so many elite college spaces available.
Surely you’re not suggesting that schools be required to rank all applicants by SAT or GPA and then numerically admit them until they reach capacity.
So that means schools will need to consider things other than test scores. Just because those other considerations are less favorable to Asians (or any other group), that doesn’t make it discrimination.
Is that actually true? Asian American students are one of the most broadly sympathetic populations negatively affected by race-based admissions policy, and affirmative action opponents do in fact frequently talk about them (and, I think, were strategically savvy to do so.)
Popular anti-AA discourse emphasizes that Asians are negatively affected by AA, but avoids talking about the fact that Asians are already heavily over-represented relative to population share. You'll note the absence in liberal and conservative publications of the "if Harvard sampled from the top academic decile, it would be 50+% Asian" figure*
Yeah, I do kind of suspect that some significant fraction of white people who dislike affirmative action won’t fully expect this outcome and won’t be happy if/when it actually happens.
Depending on the school, that could be because international students are full payers. Many liberal arts schools are heavily reliant on them. At my undergrad (big-endowment Ivy, not LAC), Asian-Americans definitely significantly outnumbered international students among undergrads. And among the international students, a significant number went to Taipei American School or the like.
"I think professors at top universities face a conceptual problem in that they want to affirm values like “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” but the whole point of top universities is to be elitist, hierarchical, and exclusionary."
In my English PhD program in the 00's (which I thankfully eventually dropped out of), my fellow students who most vociferously thought that their future role as professors was to indoctrinate students into their own view of social justice activism with the goal of upending the current social order, also were the ones whose career goals were to get jobs at the most prestigious schools (Ivies and highly rated northeast liberal arts schools like Wesleyan and Amherst). It seemed to never occur to them that their career aspirations would end up placing them in front of almost exclusively elite students. (They also had the least interesting things to say about our putative subject, i.e., literature.)
What is the optimal distribution of races to achieve the best benefits of racial diversity and experiences and how do you come up with that number?
Seriously, this isn't a troll question. I honestly have no idea how people decide if something is "diverse" when the pool of applicants is not uniform.
UC Berkeley’s undergraduate population is made up of 42.2% Asian, 19.7% White, 4.4% Black, and 21% Hispanic students as of 2020.
39% of Californians are Latino, 35% are white, 15% are Asian American or Pacific Islander, 5% are Black, 4% are multiracial, and fewer than 1% are Native American or Alaska Natives, according to the 2020 Census.
I wish the day will come when that question wouldn't occur to anyone, that it will be like asking about the optimal composition of eye colors or hairstyles in the classroom.
Yeah I'd like to see this quantified, since it seems to be the crux of the formal argument from Harvard, et al.
I'd also like to know why "race" as opposed to "ethnicity" is important. I'm pretty sure that to the extent there are measurable benefits to diversity then being exposed to Ukrainian refugees, Pennsylvania Amish, or "white" Latin Americans is good, too, and probably better than being "exposed" to Black people from my own city who I already live around.
I'd like someone to tell me why skin color is the most important thing.
And would it make a difference if the 15% Asian American was 5% Indian/5%Chinese/5%half-Asian vs whatever other combo you could come up with? I think it definitely would.
This is one of the reasons I think AA as practiced was merely box-checking to look good. A serious, rigorous discussion of diversity would consider these ethnic categories and not just hand-wave at them.
This question has an easier answer for gender in the workplace. A typical team size is maybe 8 people. If you have zero women on a team, that’s very bad for diversity. If there is one woman in a group of 8, you risk creating a token minority dynamic. If you have two women on a team, you’re probably getting diverse perspectives. Then getting to 4/8 is a question of fairness and not really about diversity (and fairness is also important!)
This small group setting is also how people tend to interact in a variety of ways - groups of friends, sports teams, school discussion groups, group projects, etc. So I think the logic is generalizable outside the workplace. The denominator just goes up and down depending on the scenario.
Now if you want to balance 5 ethnicities on a team of 8, by the pigeon hole principle someone is going to be the token minority. But obviously if you have 1/1/2/2/2 from each group that’s diverse. At some point you can’t include every finely sliced kind of diversity in a group of people. So for any division of people smaller than say 1/8 (e.g. if 2% of people are trans, or 5% of Californians are black), it’s hard to practice representational diversity, and again it’s back to questions of fairness and discrimination.
Looking at the Berkeley example, the 4.4% black figure is the only one that seems problematic for diversity and representation.
Interestingly, the 4.4% black number seems to be the one that is closest in percentage terms to the population baseline (hard to tell with Native American from what has been said).
Re 15: There isn't a solution to this at the level of the individual, but there is an obvious one at the level of the institution: the best educational institutions should expand until they are the biggest educational institutions. Admit 20,000 students per year and you'll soon have a much more diverse population.
It should be seen as a failure of Harvard that UCF educates more people than Harvard does, and Harvard should have the objective of being the biggest university in the USA as well as being the best.
That's how a "top" university manages to achieve diversity, equity and inclusion - it includes more people, making it more naturally diverse, and far more equitable as it ceases to concentrate on a tiny elite, but creates a much broader equally-educated class: what one might call a "middle class", if you like.
This is standard practice in many other countries - a student who could have benefitted from a Harvard education but wasn't admitted is as much a student failed by Harvard as one admitted and then failed.
They would still be able to be ridiculously exclusive! There’s are thousands of institutions of higher education in the country. Even the largest institutions form a small percentage of the total number of students.
He’s suggesting increasing Harvard’s class size by 10x! Which I think would be great, but would hugely dilute the exclusivity. The whole point is for rich people and academics to brag that their kid go into a school other elite rich people or academics tried but failed to get their kids into. The value is in not knowing multiple people whose kids got in.
Also, the elite job pipeline doesn’t end up looking as great. There aren’t enough Congressmen to take the interns, etc. Suddenly, just going won’t be enough. Students will have competition-it would no longer be enough just to drop the H bomb.
This is interesting. What other countries have their "elite school" as also one of their biggest? I think I probably agree with you that there's capacity there that could create a better educated society but that doesn't because scarcity is really good for business.
Off the top of my head, Italy and the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) all have their elite schools as being among the biggest. The top universities in those countries are the big city universities - München or Berlin or Zürich or Roma or Milano, for instance.
France is the other non-English-speaking country I know well, and it's similar (the best universities are the big Paris ones) except that they have the grandes écoles, which are weird: most students go straight to a regular university after the lycée (high school), but some go to prépas, which is an elite two-year course which prepares you for the entry examinations (concours) for a grande école. The grandes écoles themselves are usually four year programs that start after prépas, and their qualifications are the equivalent of a master's degree, though (because they were founded during the Revolution in opposition to the then church-run universities) they were not formally a master's until the "Bologna" reforms in 1999 - for example, the Ecole polytechnique would give the Diplôme d'Ingénieur (it now also grants a MS in Engineering). Graduates of the grandes écoles don't generally get a bachelor's degree. The grandes écoles are super-elite schools, but the international classification systems (THES, QS, USNWR) really struggle with them because they don't fit into the normal undergraduate/postgraduate schema.
The grandes écoles are very small and very exclusive. If you ignored them, then the best French universities are large (PSL, Sorbonne, etc) but it would be a mistake to do so, as the best French students go to prépas rather than straight to university, and then on to a grande école if they get a high enough grade in the concours.
If they don't, but still receive a passing grade (nearly everyone does; the prépas are highly competitive to get in and a mere pass is nowhere near enough for entry to a grande école), they will usually transfer to a university with lots of credit - usually they'll then graduate after two or three semesters. Lots of people who did prépas and didn't get into a grande école do still go on to do master's and PhDs. Also, there aren't grandes écoles in all subjects (the grandes écoles only cover civil administration, engineering, business, architecture, political science and journalism), so many top students do go to a regular university to study e.g. science or humanities or mathematics.
For many smaller European countries, the most prestigious university is the one in the capital city, which is also often the biggest (e.g. Vilnius University in Lithuania, Charles University in Czechia).
Otherwise, there tends to be a very ancient university located elsewhere (e.g. the Jagiellonian University in Krakow in Poland, Utrecht and Leiden in the Netherlands) with the big capital city university then in second or third place in prestige.
It's an oddity that there wasn't a medieval university in London (the modern University of London is a nineteenth-century foundation), and the English-speaking world developed the concept of the "college town" from Oxford and Cambridge, with America's colonial colleges playing a key part in the development of that idea. Other medieval European major cities and capitals all had universities (including both Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland) and these grew alongside their cities into the massive prestigious universities of most of Europe.
It's perhaps worth pointing out that Columbia University (an Ivy League college in New York City) is both large and highly prestigious at the postgraduate level - it has more postgraduates enrolled than any public university campus. In fact, unless I'm missing one, the only university campuses in the US with more postgraduates are the University of Southern California and New York University (the big university systems like California or CUNY or SUNY have more, but not in any one of their locations and counting e.g. UCLA and Berkeley separately makes more sense than counting them together).
If Columbia had followed the historical path of most European universities, then (a) it would not be a private institution and (b) it would be much bigger at undergraduate level.
The gap between the top tier and mid tier for Canadian universities are far less compared to the US (much less 'concentrated' university sector), but McGill, UofToronto, UBC, and Queens are not that much selective than their co-city universities of Concordia, York, Simon Fraser, and Laurier.
That being said, it is the program within schools that tends to be selective (i.e, Engineering vs English). Likewise, some schools that don't rank high on overall prestige have high prestige for certain programs or at the grad school level, etc.
Now I'm sure part of this may be explained because some of the Canadian uber-elite students go to Harvard themselves
Exactly, your last sentence is the big issue with this setup. The best Canadian students go to the same place as the best US ones, which stinks for Canada
You might want to clarify that #6 switches back to Matt's take. At first I thought it was a continuation of Maya's take (she could have had more than one numbered point to make, after all).
"When my son was five, he asked if the weakest students enroll at the best colleges because they’re the ones who need the most help."
You can't blame children for overgeneralizing from their parents' experience.
Can a supporter of affirmative action explain why they think the old Jewish quotas were bad but the current situation with Asians is ok? I genuinely don’t get it.
My best theory: the difference is that there aren’t literal quotas, and it would actually have been ok if they had just heavily penalized Jewish applicants. Is that it?
I think the answer is that the beneficiaries of the Jewish quotas were white gentiles, which meant those quotas were "punching down." The beneficiaries of the Asian quotas are black students, which means that these quotas are "punching up."
Not trying to be full-on Ken from Mia here, or imply anything about your attitude towards Asians, but it's interesting to me that there's no generally accepted clear answer to that question.
I think it’s sideways. What is salient is that Harvard actively protected (mostly white) legacies--“up” is protected from a full-on slugfest between anyone else.
I odn't think they were literal quotas back then, either. They used very similar techniques, indeed some of those invented then are used now, by the very same harvard! e.g. "personality" scores
As a supporter of educational institutions rights to curate their programs to include diverse student body, I actually don’t have an issue with Jewish quotas at least in certain circumstances.
If these are used to wholesale exclude Jews that is a discrimination, but if used to cap at some level well beyond Jews percent in relevant populations, than it is capping an already over-represented minority group.
In a hypothetical scenario where Harvard would admit say 40% Jews without a quota, far far higher than the amount this minority population is locally, regionally nationally etc, I think Harvard is within its rights to take this into consideration. They would not be discriminating against Jews with a 20% quota, imo, as Jews would still represented far more in the student body than other similar minorities are.
If a 20% quota went in, how you would you expect potential applicants to describe their ethnicity / religion. Would you expect a non-practicing, half-Jewish guy like Matt Yglesias to identify himself as half-Jewish on his application or would it be OK for him to check Hispanic only? Would he count as a half-jew for quota purposes? How would you handle it if many Jewish applicants started omitting that info from their application?
I can see how they lost that case. That seems rather extreme to insist Jewish population is less than 2x national population to curate essentially cracker cultural hegemony rather than diversity,
Well - I'm not exactly sure how many Jews there were but less than 5% of total US population seems like a reasonable guess? In which case they were capping to double their % to prevent 5x representation.
Current soft quotas for Asians are less extreme when viewed in comparison.
Not a supporter of AA but this isn't actually that hard. Penalizing Jewish applicants resulted in a less representative student body (the counterfactual was all WASPs) and hence a less diverse elite. Now the impact of penalizing Asian applicants is exactly the reverse of this.
Thanks. But I’m not sure that’s right; I thought jews were over represented then, and that was the original reasons for the quotas.
Here’s a quote from Wikipedia: “on the number of Jews admitted to the university. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University from 1909-1933,[15] raised the alarm about a ‘Jewish problem’ when the number of Jewish students grew from six percent to twenty-two percent from 1908 - 1922”. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota
Jews are definitely over represented now. So by this logic would it be good to put back into place similar penalties for Jewish applicants now?
I think "lots of _one_ minority and everyone else is a WASP" is more diverse than "100% Exeter students", though of course if a time traveler had convinced Conant to admit a 10% Black class that would be an extremely good thing.
Your question is kind of trolly but I am really struggling with how many progressive commenters / journalists / friends seem to think this is an easy question and the court's ruling was obviously incorrect. Like Harvard was explicitly discriminating against Asians and the court said they couldn't. I'm not sure how the progressive movement is 100% certain it's totally right about this. It's baffling to me
The question was meant sincerely! In my mind there is very little difference between the two situations. (I recognize that my view is unusual, although tbh I’m struggling to figure out why)
I am mostly with you. It feels like progressives and people on the left have staked out their side here and wrapped this in a narrative about a right-wing supreme court, but the issue is genuinely complex and it's not clear to me how a pro affirmative action person thinks this should actually work in the real world. I think if everyone just actually read the emails Harvard admission staff was sending about Asian applicants that would at least give them pause.
"Affirmative action is unpopular" is not exactly untrue...but having elite colleges be majority-Asian and have virtually no black students would also be unpopular. Unless you're paying kind of an insane level of attention to this, you don't realize what an admissions system that just straight used test scores/GPA/advanced classes (or even adding in: legacies, sports etc.) would deliver. I don't think that would look fair to many Americans. And I don't think they're going to get it -- elite private colleges will game out admissions to be more opaque that so that, next time, no one can prove what they're doing.
There is a sort of "pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered" quality to all this. Most people are not absolutists and I think if you applied a modest amount of AA so that, say, the % of black students at Harvard was halfway between the % that gets in with no preferences and the % of blacks in the population of the USA, then the level of opposition would fairly weak. But Harvard for various reasons went whole hog and actually has a student body that's blacker than the general population, which is just asking for backlash.
This is a fair point. If AA were genuinely used as a tiebreaker among equally qualified students, or even used as a *modest* boost, you’d get some grumbles but most people would accept it. But it was worth upwards of 300-400 SAT points at Harvard, which is a completely different caliber of applicant.
While those directly involved in the case are familiar with those details, how true is that of the overall population who are disapproving of AA? Part of the problem is that most people’s opinions are based on a “choose your own adventure” conception of what AA does and so reflects people’s priors about the degree of disadvantage faced by minorities and the fairness and workability of AA.
Why wouldn’t it look fair to most Americans? Most Americans realize that Asian kids on average spend WAY more time on homework and do better in school. These facts aren’t exactly state secrets. Sure, some people will resent it just like they resent Jewish success. That doesn’t mean we should craft policy around bigots.
I'm not arguing for or against this ruling, especially. But when Harvard de-emphasizes test scores in response to this ruling because they are uncomfortable with what the results would be otherwise, they are (and should be) allowed to do that.
When it come to the New York selective public high schools, or TJ, I think there's a real argument that you can't just drop test scores -- particularly if you are extremely clear that you're doing it to accept fewer Asian students. These are public institutions. But if you don't think Harvard should be allowed to say "we're just not taking SAT scores anymore" (assuming they are suitably vague about why), I think we're on pretty different pages about the role of government regulation in private organizations.
If criteria are race-blind and make sense, why would it be unpopular? Fact is racial-blind admissions are super popular in uber-liberal, majority poc california.
It’s quite possible that there’s a near mode vs far mode dynamic operating here.
On the abstract principles level, “race-blind criteria” fits well with most Americans’ moral intuitions, and I think it’s the policy that they would endorse from a Rawlsian veil-of-ignorance perspective. But people’s view on that abstract concept might be different than what they’d feel about say, a fairly small minority group’s population coming to make up a large share of the economic and cultural elite (a situation that’s produced many of the scariest and most violent racist reactionary backlashes in human history.)
California is an optimistic counterexample, though—the top UCs have been 35%+ Asian for many years now and the state seems to be fine with it. If Asian representation rises similarly at other elite institutions, I hope that Americans on the whole will be similarly okay with the situation.
re: maya's point, that's fine...but harvard has very few conservatives and in particular very few white evangelicals. but they're a big part of the country. isn't the discussion impoverished that way too? who cares? no one really
(also, first!?!?!)
I love talking to conservatives at Harvard and am probably friends with way more right-leaning people than the average liberal college girl. Also Harvard essentially does rural/small state affirmative action too, so I think this point is overstated. It has more to do with the fact that young educated people are liberal -- many of my friends are left-wing kids from right-wing states! Also, college campuses do play a role in silencing conservatives (although this is overstated IMO). As a former debater, I'm very very pro-free speech and open discussion.
I think political ideology is pretty different from race though. Being conservative is a choice; being Black is not. I can't imagine discussing politics and history without hearing from a wide variety of lived experiences. How can we talk about policing without hearing from Black students? Female labor participation without female students? The Holocaust without Jewish students? As I said, the discussion becomes intellectually impoverished. Diversity matters.
You seem to assume that personal experience is the most important element in intellectual discussion. What about you ability to think critically? To read and analyze ideas of people who aren't currently 18? Even the kind of knowledge and preparation you have to engage with certain materials effectively?
P.S.
A secondary point is to wonder whether the blunt category of "race" which would consider e.g. MY as representative of the "Hispanic experience" isn't insultingly reductive to achieve diversity of experiences?
Intellectual abilities are also super important, and are most of the reason for admission to Harvard. I have never met a Black or Hispanic student who was not extremely qualified at the school. This is the whole point of holistic admissions -- consider everything
As a teacher in one of your schools "sisters" i concur that excellent students come from all backgrounds. At the same time, however, not all ivy students are equally good. Some are better than others. I wonder whether more exclusively academic criteria wouldn't help produce a class that's even stronger, academically, overall? To use a rough approximation, what would happen if Harvard was composed exclusively of the students currently getting straight As at Harvard? Wouldn't that improve the level of the average class, and hence improve the Harvard educational experience overall?
Who's "stronger" academically - a kid from a private school from a family that makes six figures that got all straight A's, and a 1600/2400 on their SAT's or a kid from an economically desolate area who has a single monther, but got nearly straight A's, and a 1450/2300 on their SAT's?
The problem is that we need not resort to such hypotheticals; we know what the median black kid with those states who attends Harvard looks like!
They’re the academically capable but not brilliant child of middle-to-professional class parents.
If you want to actually help the latter kid, who is deserving regardless of race, then you need to mechanistically give *poor* children an advantage, full stop. Without regard to other characteristics.
You need to distinguish the question of potential and actual abilities. How would you answer the question with regards eg to swimming ? Acting?
To my mind I’d want to take those who’ll do best, at least by senior year. If the gaps are too large for a student to do well at a rigorous environment, even though in a hypothetical better world they could have had they the resources - then that’s a genuine tragedy, not just for them personally but for the whole of society deprived of this lost potential. But it’s not something we can always fix when they’re 18. We need to fix k-12 education. We need massive wealth redistribution etc. and I’m for all of that, but there are no shortcuts, and attempting them may well do more harm than good.
I work at another Ivy... I wouldn't say that the straight A students are necessarily the ones that are the most talented.
I suppose if we are to define academic success as the ability to get straight As at Harvard, then your idea holds up based on pure tautology. But I don't think the classroom made up of all the straight A students is going to be a classroom of better thinkers.
I said "rough approximation". I wouldn't literally go by that, but, ideally, grades should reflect the quality of the work, and, at least in more advanced classes in the humanities, the quality of the work ought ot refelect the qulaity of the thinking (or at least the one the student is currently able and willing to share with the class - shouldn't that be the one that matters for the academic experience?)
P.S.
I have no problem with the suggestion that intersting life experience might help you become a kore interesitng thinker. My point is that we should judge people, directly, on how good/interesting they are as thinkers, no rely on some a priori assumption based on, at best, extremely rough correlations.
I went to Northwestern for undergrad and Oxford for grad and I was far, far, far more impressed with Oxford's undergrads' depth of intellect/substance than I was NU. On the other hand, NU's grads are gonna rule the world of business so...
Academic excellence is not the only thing that matters at college imo. There is so much learning that happens at a community level - in the dorm, among student-friend groups, in extracurricular activities, at parties etc.
So taking away institutions curation of diversity is, imo, a significant loss of educational freedom, both for those who would like to attend such institutions and for those who would like to educate in them, or those like myself who would like to support and promote such educational institutions focused on promoting cooperation rather than competition
Sure they’re learning in the form etc , but it would benefit from selecting people based on the sharpest intellect rather than a “holistic” approach that dilutes that in favor of tons of irrelevant stuff (race being just one, if the most morally egregious).
I feel pretty certain we could get better results on that front by eliminating legacy admissions than affirmative action.
Why not both?
Would Tim Scott have the same beliefs about policing if he didn't have the experience of regularly being pulled over for no reason? Intellect helps you navigate the world of ideas but those ideas have nothing to do with reality unless you also have life experience to shape them. That's the difference between a thought experiment and a real one.
> Would Tim Scott have the same beliefs about policing if he didn't have the experience of regularly being pulled over for no reason?
no, but neither would a black 18 year old from a rich town who'd never been pulled over before.
if want you want is diversity of experience, filter on that. don't pretend race is the only possible option.
Is race all they’re looking at? A lot of people talk as though that’s the case, but I was under the impression that they actively consider geography, family wealth, and family educational background (ie, first generation student status).
If the goal is having variety of voices, you would only need 5 or 6% of the undergraduate class to be black, in which case most 30 student classes would have a black voice.
That is a legitimate goal, but it hardly requires proportional admissions
the political point is (to me) not that important, so i'll move to something where i think there is a major issue: religion. though i'm an atheist, i think cultural elites underweight the importance of religion in most societies because of their strong secularity. i don't think this matters for MIT or caltech, but since harvard educates ppl who go into gov. i think this probably a major problem if you care more than just 'book learning.'
i would argue religion is more important to most religious people than their race, and has just as much or more impact on their life and worldview. but perhaps others disagree and think white supremacy uber alles, idk
I think we all need to be really careful about this. There are some religious people for whom religion shapes their lives and there are people who will answer "Christian" when asked, but who have never actually read the Bible, never go to church and for whom you wouldn't know until you asked.
Getting a fair representation of the variety of religious commitment is, well, the same sort of problem as Matt expressed in regard to race - it's very easy to recruit people who are Christian (or Muslim, or Hindu, or whatever) in the same way that Matt is Hispanic.
It isn't even really at a denominational level, either. The denominations that believe that splitting (schism) is wrong - the episcopalians and the Catholics - have it worst, but most denominations have a mix of more liberal and more conservative/evangelical members.
Look at the Southern Baptists kicking out churches with female pastors - and the interesting fact that they had those churches inside the fold for 20+ years. It's genuinely hard to even identify the diversity of experience and commitment that there is in American religion, much less to generate a representative diverse sample of it.
Plus there's the secret (at any rate my suspicion) that many pastors are more liberal than they let on to their congregations because 1) they've studied the Bible and religion academically, even in conservative seminaries and 2) they are dealing face-to-face with day-to-day struggles of their church members and pretty much have to learn the caring and supportive sides of their theology. (Although I'm not sure what the heck is going on with those SBC pastors. I think that's going to backlash in the next five years or so.)
Harvard is also religiously diverse, although there's a lot of atheism b/c like w/ politics, young educated ppl are more atheist on average. This isn't a conspiracy; the school is pretty representative. Not sure what your point is? Diversity is generally important.
Is it really all that diverse? How many that think LGBT+ is sinful? Lots of women wearing niqab? Lots who are not having sex before marriage? It's not just Christians or Muslims or Hindus, it's people who take the religion seriously, who attend a religious service multiple times a week and who try to live their lives by the demands of their faith.
I suspect that there is a much bigger percentage of Americans, even of young Americans who regard their faith in that manner than there are of Harvard students. It's not the atheists that I think people are concerned about, but rather the religious people who don't take it as seriously.
Anecdata so take it with a grain of salt, but there's roughly 12-15 practicing Catholics at my (small, Northeastern, liberal arts) college of 3,000. Of the 12-15 of us there's probably three that do anything more than attend Mass weekly, though I'm not one of them so it's hard to say. I have to imagine that on both counts the college population is hugely out of whack with the country.
As an aside it's considered kinda gauche to say you're Catholic on our campus, so I wouldn't know the numbers if I wasn't regularly attending Mass and therefore wouldn't even really be able to guess at any other sect/religion's following.
This is the sort of thing I mean when I talk about religious diversity. There may well be a reasonable proportion of Catholics in the sense of people who check the "Catholic" box on surveys, but not in the sense of people who actually attend Mass.
Most educated young people in the US are pro LGBT and generally have more liberal attitudes, which makes sense that this is reflected in Harvard's student body. Also yeah I'm probably one of said "religious people who don't take it as seriously," a relatively secular Jew, and there's a lot of people like me in the Harvard applicant pool and at Harvard! literally nothing wrong with that; there's also plenty of Orthodox students
Sure. But diversity would mean including some who don't.
There is a conflict in diversity here: if you want viewpoint diversity (and religious diversity, if it is to mean anything more than a nominal tickbox, has to create viewpoint diversity) then you will be faced with the problem that some viewpoints are hostile to some people. Can you include both someone who hates group X and a member of group X? But if you can't, then you weaken your viewpoint diversity.
Can you include both racists and black people? I think not. But that doesn't mean that you aren't losing something from your discussions by excluding racists. Can you include both homophobes and LGBT+ people? I think not, but you certainly are losing some diversity by excluding homophobes.
And you lose just as much diversity in a classroom discussion by allowing racists and homophobes as long as they keep quite about their racism and homophobia.
Finally, of course, there is one form of diversity that Harvard intentionally excludes: poorly educated people.
I think what Just Some Guy, Richard, and myself are on about is that there is indeed nothing wrong with that but that we should also stop calling it religious diversity.
Maya, just FYI, the percentage of Jews (of all stripes) at Harvard, is the lowest it's been in over a century.
You've mentioned "young educated people" a few times in this thread but I think it's also doing a lot of work here in terms of mopping up the lack of view-point diversity. As Razib pointed out, that's probably fine at places like MIT and CalTech, but I think he's right that it creates some pretty big problems for society when government-centric schools do it. Perhaps we need to round up a bunch of evangelicals and keep them in a laboratory at Harvard's social sciences department... so that they can be observed and interacted with. I only partially joke.
Moving from teaching at USC to Texas A&M I’ve discovered a huge change on the religion issue. Even in upper division philosophy classes, where the students are mostly endorsing liberal/progressive political views, there are still a lot of highly religious people, in a way that there hasn’t been at other institutions I’ve been affiliated with.
What do you mean by "young *educated* people are more atheist on average" Isn't that petitio principii? Are you claiming that the religious people are significantly more likely to be high school dropouts? If not, how, precisely, are they less "educated" than other college applicants? The fact is that the class at Harvard is , presumably, far more secular than the age-cohort as a whole, but the cause remains to be determined, and the fact that "elite educated" 22 year olds consequently are more secular cannot be used to reverse-engineer an explanation for this.
It's not actually true that more-educated people are less religious; that's a widespread myth. Education is correlated with religiosity; people with graduate education are more religious than people with BAs, who are more religious than people with high school degrees, who are more religious than people who didn't graduate from high school.
The reason that it seems that it's true is that Harvard draws students from a very small social and geographic subset of the country. Harvard Law, which is more selective but draws more broadly across the country, is significantly more religious.
Religious diversity is important to me because I'm concerned about cultural hostility to religion. This has been around for a couple of centuries with the rise of rationalism, but currently the more thoughtless among the population equate "organized religion" with 1) conservative political evangelicals 2) unwanted proselytizing and 3) the experiences of survivors of abusive religious situations.
I was recently informed in a NYT comment thread that the elite schools **are** religiously diverse. I tend to believe this, because any time I visit less illustrious campuses and read their bulletin boards, I see evidence of religious activities and groups.
Diversity doesn't just have to be face-to-face conversations. It can be walking through a campus and seeing posters for community centers for various groups, becoming aware of those groups and then hopefully becoming curious about the kinds of support people seek out and find.
As for religion, one of my "missions" in life is to suggest that people not resist exploring some kind of spiritual path just because it might be mocked by one's friends or because of a culturally preprogrammed internal response like "I can't go there because it would be irrational!" Religion is about a lot more than "believing as fact" some kind of supernatural proposition. (Another misperception floating around out there.)
Your point is valid, but how would this work in practice? Attempting to capture religiosity and not just religious affiliation strikes me as impossible for a secular(ish) institution. Some private religious schools have applicants sign a statement of faith, but they're not shooting for diversity but rather the opposite.
I think this would also be my critique of the Maya's assertion that "Harvard is also religiously diverse." It feels like box-checking. Like the guy whose grandmother is Episcopalian and who went to church on Easter as a kid checks the box for "Christianity". That's fine. I'm not mocking that at all. But it's also not constructive as diversity. He's going to have much more similar opinions to the peers he parties with than a devout Catholic convert who attends church three times a week. If we don't care about religious diversity, we should say that. And that might be okay. But I think we should stop pointing to stats that say "60% of such-and-such are Christians."
To make a point that dovetails well with the theme of this article, there are actually a pretty decent number of evangelicals at all of these schools, but they are disproportionately Asian or black (and even more different from the caricature JSG references than David French is).
The problem is I doubt most Harvard student actually encountered genuine religious diversity or ever interacted with too many seriously religious people. The US is so big, and so "bubbly" that most Harvard students aren't even truly *aware* that religious diversity exists. It's like living in 2d and not being able to even conceive of a third dimension. They think what they were raised to see as "diversity" is all there is, whereas you and I call it box ticking and have experienced some genuinely devout people who in many (not all) cases seriously offend our liberal values.
Brand new subscriber here. Yes, I am an evangelical as well and people assume a lot about us that is not true. Or is not true of many of us. And yes, I have plenty of issues with the evangelical church today.
I think David French and Russell Moore represent Evangelicals more in the way I would like to see us represented.
There's a Kellerite/Nationalist schism within the evangelical church that is long overdue and a very good thing.
100% a good thing. It’s certainly given Mr. mel ladi and me more boldness in speaking up amongst our brothers and sisters in Christ. Our new young Pastor is not a nationalist, and that helps.
I mean, considering Russell Moore & David French were both, to differing degrees, pushed out of the modern evangelical movement, I question whose wrong here.
Where you're going wrong here is that because you are enough of a news junkie to subscribe to Slow Boring, you are equating "the evangelical movement" with *political evangelicalism*, but those are not the same thing. Both of those guys are still members in good standing at churches in Nashville that can't possibly be characterized as anything other than evangelical from a theological standpoint (Moore, obviously, is on the pastoral staff at his).
If you want to find out what the "evangelical movement" is, you need to visit a cross-section of evangelical churches and talk to folks, not read about them in The New Yorker.
With due respect to evan bear, yeah, they’ve faced a lot of heat from the religio-political right, up to and including physical and economic threats to their person and their family. Both are seen as traitors by a twitter-loud segment of politicized evangelicals, most particularly the Trump-supporting ones. We could also talk about what Beth Moore (no relation) has faced as well.
R Moore, however, is the EIC of Christianity Today, long-standing flag ship magazine of many evangelicals (founded by St. Billy of Graham). French writes opinions for the NYT. They’ve not been ostracized, and both hold positions of significant cultural media power. As well, both are religiously orthodox in their beliefs.
Like most normal people, most evangelicals don't follow politics at all or even read the news. In any demographic group, voting behavior tends to reflect the masses following the lead of the small subset of politics junkies within the community. This is not to say that there's disagreement between the masses and the opinion-leaders. Just that the masses are generally only superficially engaged with the issues.
Agree. I am married to someone who grew up Southern Baptist in the rural South. There are definitely people who conform to the stereotype, but a lot do not. I have a knee-jerk reaction to religious stereotypes, though, because I am also a relatively progressive person who is also a practicing Roman Catholic for lots of complicated personal reasons.
Exactly Evangelical culture is, well, culture. Religion, including rational secularism, are dominant aspects of culture, and every culture has positive and negative aspects. I just wish people would become aware of our natural tendencies to hypocrisy: If Muslim culture happens to be cool because Trump wouldn't allow anyone from those countries to enter the U.S., then why not adopt an equally open mind towards Evangelical Christianity?
For many of us, Christianity in its myriad forms is our cultural legacy, going back centuries. It makes more sense to at least try to understand it, because it has shaped who we are and what our country is.
Even though there's a kind of overarching culture at those universities, every student's experience will of course be unique. It's interesting that the chief chaplain is an atheist, but a quick look at the Harvard chaplaincy page reveals quite a diverse bunch, with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship rating two chaplains. You can do a lot of personal spiritual exploration without worrying about Biblical inerrancy. (Wonder how those IVC chaplains handle those kinds of questions and conversations though.)
I mean, there's currently pushback against Dearborn as they passed a law banning Pride flags or whatever.
But yes, the Muslim community is small, and the current prominent people in that community are currently progressive (Omar, etc.) However, if the socially conservative parts become more prominent, there will be more criticism of them.
But yes, as long as Evanglical's continue to support laws that limit the rights of young women and LGBT people, you're not going to be popular on a college campus. The other reality is that even a practicing Muslim (no alcohol, prays daily, fasts for Ramadan) on a college campus might have liberal views on laws regarding abortion, LGBT, etc. even if they're personally pro-life, etc.
Like Conservative of "Liberals" :)
Haha @ "a niece who went to college who will yell at them about stuff." Very few conservatives nowadays are unaware of their transgressions. It's what makes a lot of conservatives on social media annoying a la vice-signalling.
I've attended both mainline and Evangelical churches at different points and think the difference between them is overstated by both sides. Yes, plenty of each group are loopy in each direction, but among the "normal" ones the main practical difference is high vs. low church, with little difference in teaching (except perhaps on gender issues).
I fear this may sound snotty and that is very much not my intent, but if it's very important to be around a diverse array of students to avoid such intellectual impoverishment, then top white students still have, and will continue to have, the option of voluntarily choosing to attend less elite/selective schools themselves.
That said, as a practical matter, for the reasons The Boss here has articulated, I tend to doubt that the demographic makeup of the student bodies at these elite schools will change very much. The schools will reach similar results using proxies. The result won't be a shift across racial categories, but rather *within* each racial category, you'll get more students who do lots of nutty volunteer work and extracurricular activities (starting their own charitable nonprofits and whatever else), and fewer students who have great stats but opt out of the extracurricular rat race.
This comment struck me: “How can we talk about policing without hearing from Black students?”
Why focus on Blacks in regards to policing? How can we talk about policing without talking to Asians? Why does a Black American have special insights? Particularly when you’re at Harvard? 45% of the Black students are from other countries. Right off the bat, 1/2 the Black students didn’t even grow up with American police.
Wouldn’t be great if we did have stereotypes like Maya has associating Blacks with law enforcement? How do we get there? Probably putting work into changing the data. Unfortunately young people like Maya do not want to take that journey instead they want to double down on the stereotype.
Or sons and daughters of cops?
I don't think being conservative is 100% a choice. At least at a population level. Andrew Yang talked a lot about how it's more like 50/50 innate/socialized. In any society you are going to have a significant portion of the population that is conservative in their outlook and it's good to recognize both the universality of that and the deep importance of having those people as part of the conversation in important places (in the same way you suggest having people of different races is also important).
I am more lukewarm than others on AA (helps not to be an American!) - but I do wonder how much diverse opinions you get from someone who is basically the same as you in intelligence, personality types, and socioeconomic status except race.
For example, one wonders how many Black students at Harvard expresses the view on racism that Lil Baby does in his BLM song 'the Bigger Picture' (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/atlanta-rapper-lil-baby-bigger-picture-song-1027815/), which is probably much more common in how working-class Black American men define and view racism.
If the goal is to increase the fractionalization of views - which is what the stated goal was under the policy, its not clear that race as consideration is sufficient (despite the costs).
"How can we talk about policing without hearing from Black students? Female labor participation without female students? The Holocaust without Jewish students?"
These conversations also need to be able to happen *without* any students with personal experience. There are 12000 Rohingya in the US, or about .004% of the US population. Harvard has an undergraduate class of about 7000 students, and (as you note elsewhere on the page) its demographics correspond to the US population as a whole. But the statistically 1/4-person at Harvard who is Rohingya cannot spend their whole time at Harvard offering "local color" to classes on modern Myanmar and the Rohingya genocide.
The 30 Armenians have it a little better — if there's one class a semester, then each Armenian only needs to attend 1.5 semesters on the Armenian genocide. But what if they want to fulfill their Gen. Ed. requirement some other way? Will you *force* them to take the course (and thereby impoverish their education) for the greater good?
Humanities scholars use written descriptions of a person's experiences as a substitute for talking to that person precisely because it doesn't suffer from this problem: one can always copy a text. If Harvard can't teach students to extract lived experience from written texts, then Harvard is incompetent.
Political ideology seems more important to discussions than race, though? People with different political views will have very different perspectives to offer, whereas a black progressive will probably make basically the same points as a white progressive.
> I think political ideology is pretty different from race though. Being conservative is a choice; being Black is not.
In some sense this is correct and I totally hear your point, but in some other sense this feels incorrect. I do actually sometimes wish I had different political opinions than I do or at least that I felt less/more strongly about certain things. But I was pretty much born a neoliberal shill. I could force myself to vote against what I feel is correct I guess, but I don't remember making any choices here.
Hi, Maya. As a university lecturer in the UK in a wildly undiverse department (despite our best efforts; it’s a whole other story), I am actually regularly confronted with the problem of teaching on topics without the benefit of students representative of populations who are disproportionately affected by those topics. I agree that it is good to get input from students with direct experience of various phenomena like the ones you mention, but a) from the instructor’s point of view, we’re really trying to avoid tokenization or making students into avatars of communities they may or may not identify with (and even if they do, may not want to be called on to represent) and b) sometimes (like in my case) we just don’t have the relevant student experiences to draw on. But we can’t make our teaching contingent on the presence of that experience. To use one of your examples, the Holocaust is way too important to not teach it because there are no Jewish students present.
So I would offer a friendly disagreement that discussions on topics like those you mention are “impoverished” in the absence of direct testimony. Is that kind of immediate lived experience valuable? Of course. But it’s ultimately the instructor’s job to find a way of making material accessible to any student with the willingness to engage with it, and for us to have enough awareness of the range of opinions and perspectives that exist so that we can provide an intellectually rich environment for those discussions.
Do you have a citation on the small-state/rural "boost"? The last time I looked into it (and it was a while ago) signs of "rurality" on an application like membership of FFA* usually hurt admissions chances at Ivies and similar schools.
*I'm sure someone will interject that FFA is a vocational program. It isn't - the name is historical. Some kids intend to become farmers, others welders, others geneticists or microbiologists or lawyers or a thousand other things.
Is there a large enough population of non-white students at Harvard right now to avoid tokenization in these discussions? And even if so, is tokenization is better than total lack of representation?
Yes, Harvard is legitimately very diverse, the admissions office is good at achieving its goal.
OK cool, I didn't know that. So yeah, this decision is indeed tragic for the student experience at Harvard and other institutions who are good at this.
It is diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography. It heavily skews wealthy, though. The flip side is that the school can offer excellent financial aid to poorer and middle-class students because of the wealth of other students and alums.
Yeah, the %s are pretty on par with the national averages -- I find it to be very diverse. But that is now (potentially) history. We'll see about race-neutral proxies
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
Maya, the ruling doesn't do what you claim it does. If a black student had an experience with policing, they can put that in their essay and get points for overcoming disadvantage and having potential beyond their measurable stats. What will be banned from here on is using the skin color directly, independent of whether they actually experienced material disadvantage. Universities will be asked to move beyond their shallow preoccupation with optics and do more real work to identify individuals with relevant life experiences.
What is your issue with that?
Also, how does fairness to Asian-American students figure into your view? Would you even have got into Harvard if you were Asian-American? You sound like a lot of progressives, that seem to wholesale ignore that this was a case brought be Asian Americans that were unfairly excluded.
It also has far too few working-class students, whose perspective is likely to be at least as interesting and valuable as that of ultra-privileged kids who happen to have diverse pigmentation. The fact the so many in these institutions are hyper-focused on the supposed educational benefits from diversity deemed exclusively from the most arbitrary and superficial criteria, and care so little about actual differences in lived experience, speak volumes. This ruling is but the first step in a huge correction needed in American society, and especially the blindspots of the elites.
I'm pretty opposed to the decision, but agree with you that we need to also prioritize socioeconomic diversity. Hopefully that will be a silver lining of this ruling as Harvard and other schools look to prioritize race neutral metrics that are socioeconomic proxies
Why not adopt socioeconomic metrics for their own sake, regardless of race? How does race matte *per se* devoid of experience?
For several reasons:
1) The lived experience of black and white people of the same socioeconomic stratum retain differences due solely or mostly to the way culture responds to their race: policing, hiring discrimination, cultural representation, etc etc. Exposing students to others with different experiences is a major goal of diversity programs.
2) Black people in particular experience economic disadvantage because of the particular injustices of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, redlining, and discrimination in nearly every facet of cultural life. That's a generational injustice that simply is not a factor for poor white folks. Does it deserve redress?
1. I’m skeptical of no. 1 esp with regards to far more salient things (eg where you grew up). The differences in experience and perspective between a black and a white child of pmc in an East coast wealthy suburb is negligible in comparison to either and a white person who grew up in Russia or even france.
2. This isn’t, strictly speaking, about race, but about the generational experience of a specific group of people (whose ancestors were victims of specific racist policies). If you want to help that group, for whatever reason (and I can think of many!) target them explicitly and specifically. The wrongs done to generational African Americans don’t justify a leg up for a Nigerian immigrant let alone for our own MY.
P.S.
I'd also repeat what I said elsewhere: "lived experience" is probably overrated in any case, with regards to its benefits for academic work. It has close to nothing to do with your success in STEM, and far less important for academic Humanities than is fashionable to claim in some circles. Moreover, to the extent that your "lived experience" makes you a better scholar, that should already be reflected in your work. In other words, its moot to debate what makes someone good at something. Maybe its "lived experience" maybe its genetics, maybe its a thousand other factors, most never to be disocvered - the point should be whether the work is good or not, whatever the reason.
> Black people in particular experience economic disadvantage because of the particular injustices of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, redlining, and discrimination in nearly every facet of cultural life. That's a generational injustice that simply is not a factor for poor white folks. Does it deserve redress?
No, not "black people in particular", a specific cohort of American black people whose ancestors were subject to these things. My friend whose parents immigrated to Canada from Nigeria, became diplomats, and moved to the US, did not experience any of that.
Couldn't you effectively achieve both through socio-economic weighting though, given the disproportionate representation of black people in the lower rungs and from certain places? I mean Harvard could create quotas for inner-city folks of a certain income and end up with black applicants without ever having to specify an AA quota.
How can race be devoid of experience? Like to the extent things like driving while black is a thing or security following people around a department store is a thing surely they’re not exempting Nigerians.
In talking to African immigrants, at least anecdotally, I've heard that they experience discrimination in very distinct ways, including from US-born black people.
Different in many ways, but also overlapping in many ways.
No, not surely. Immigrants very often look and dress differently and if you live in an area with a lot of them you can pick up on it quickly, even wrt Black immigrants. Some immigrant dress is very obvious, but even subtler patterns are noticeable if you know what to look for. A West African IT guy look that I can spot a mile away: wireless headset, 90s style cut of blue jeans, plain t-shirt and just a "different sort of face / hair" than most American Black people.
Of course there's something to the point you're making, and there are times the immigrant will be seen as just "Black". But race and ethnicity are confounded too much in the discourse with all the complexities of ethnicity are subsumed by over-simplistic Black/White thinking.
And the best way to discover lower-class but college-ready students is universal SAT/ACT testing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/upshot/how-universal-college-admission-tests-help-low-income-students.html
Except now all the elite schools are shunning the sat because it exposes all their malpractices. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better, I fear.
The president of Northwestern spoke in London on Wednesday to alums and was EXTREMELY (shockingly) candid about these topics. He basically said that test optional is the future (although not indicating his personal view of it), and also that the admissions office was going to do everything they could to continue affirmative action without actually being able to ask for students' races. Using zip codes as proxies, etc. I don't get too worked up about college admissions these days, especially given I live in the UK now, but I'm extremely, extremely disturbed at test optional policies, given how the "holistic admissions process" advantages students from upper middle and upper class backgrounds. Fine, include other stuff, whatever, but please at least consider test scores!
It’s so blatantly unjust, and inefficient that I do believe it will fail, miserably, on all counts. What troubles me though is how we got tot he point that these people have this blatantly horrible obsession, and are unabashed in advocating for it. It’s the kind of jarring bigotry and unlawful conduct that hasn’t really been heard from my those kind of people since the 1930s…
P.S. let me be clearer still. We live in an increasingly global world. The leading position of us academia isn’t set in stone and mandated by heaven. It was hard earned and will be lost if they give up on meritocracy and go full speed on bizarre anti intellectual niche obsessions.
I would not say so. Working class people are generally less intelligent than those in higher classes, and intelligence is quite heritable. A fair and equitable admissions process should not sort people by anything except their capabilities.
I tend to agree that judging purely on aptitude is the best approach, but at the same time argued that to the extent that we care about either "diversity" for its educational benefits (ultimately diversity of perspectives) or we care about justice-considerations in admissions, then in both cases class ought to matter far more than race.
Intelligence has a genetic component, but there are highly intelligent people across the entire spectrum of humanity. What's interesting is discovering this by talking to people from different backgrounds and learning to recognize and appreciate uses of intelligence that might be quite different from those in our immediate culture.
There absolutely are. They're just less common among the working class. I am against affirmative action because I think the most capable people should do the most prestigious things, not because I regard race as being uniquely bad.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no way this could be known, given the cultural aspects of intelligence tests, the huge range of human cognitive capabilities and expressions of intelligence, and the expense of a full-fledged assessments.
When I read comments like this I am reminded why Christopher Lasch is ultimate correct in his judgments.
It’s untrue that Harvard couldn’t accept more working class students who would excel there because there’s a shortage of an intelligent pool to draw from.
The number of people who could excel at a place like Harvard *vastly* exceeds the size of their admitted class.
Compared with graduates of private middle and secondary schools, it's harder for middle and working class students from public schools to come up to speed in a high-challenge university. In my day it took a couple of years to gain enough self-confidence to speak up in class and to write. These days I suspect advanced reading and concentrated study skills will also be an issue.
And then there's my brother who got into an Ivy League school (probably for geographic and economic diversity even then), majored in Physics and music so he wouldn't have to write, but ended up dropping out and becoming a journalist.
Also, in terms of superficial skin color diversity, the best guesses I've seen are that only 10% of Harvard's Black students are "generational African Americans", the rest being foreign students or children of more recent immigrants. I suspect %s might be similar for the Hispanic and Native American she thinks she's benefitting from.
In other words, the status quo was a very different version of diversity than the one most AA-advocates claimed to be fighting for. If you want to benefit from exposure to underrepresented generational American ethnic groups and that's truly what you care about, Harvard was never the place for you.
Really important point about generational African American representation -- huge issue for Harvard
I did really enjoy learning about this via thought #11 as a discretely defined thing for the first time. It's something I've thought about in the abstract for a long time, and now I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one.
For this reason I really think that nothing will upend the racial discourse in America more than mass immigration from Africa. Those immigrants' kids are going to do great, and it will totally scramble everything.
Yes. Britain has reached the point where we have to operate two separate ethnic categories on the census and on diversity forms, one for Black (African) and one for Black (Caribbean). We effectively operate a third, which is Black (African) Muslims. Christian Black Africans do very well, Muslim Black Africans don't. This isn't anything intrinsic to the religions, it's that Muslim Black Africans are mostly Somali refugees who were often badly traumatised, while Christians are mostly West Africans (Ghanians and Nigerians, mostly) who arrived with lots of qualifications.
Something that somebody posted here recently that really gave me a lot to stew on:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/why-are-racial-problems-in-the-united-states-so-intractable/
I happen to be writing this from a college campus in a Southern state that is a quarter black. And, while the undergraduate study body comes close-ish to reflecting the state demographics, the black faculty, graduate students and postdocs are mostly (recent) African immigrants. (I am not sure how the HBCUs fit in, since they are relatively small.) The undergraduates are also mostly in-state, while the graduate students, faculty and postdocs are almost entirely from other states or countries, which is true of most public universities.
It seems to me that that difference with places like Harvard is that the student body is also mostly from other states / countries. So, to your point, they engage in the kind of superficial diversity that is driven as much by brand image as anything else.
To re-state the pipeline issue: The real question, I think, is where can one go to learn from a diverse faculty?
One relevant issue here is that academia is very cosmopolitan, and it’s never going to be representative of the region or location it is in. As long as regional minorities who end up in academia end up geographically dispersed like everyone else, it’s going to be very hard for local minorities to have significant representation - especially if they’re at all underrepresented even globally.
Someone should explain that to the University of California.
https://dailybruin.com/2022/06/04/uc-aims-to-advance-faculty-diversity-to-reflect-california-with-new-initiative
Other than the initial chart comparing ucla faculty to students, all of that seems to be about getting more students from diverse California backgrounds into academia - not necessarily ending up in California, but anywhere (though it does seem like one thing they want is to create a reliable pipeline into community college jobs, which might more often hire local people).
I can tell you from extensive first-hand experience that the headline is exactly accurate. They want the diversity of faculty to reflect the diversity of the undergraduate population. On its face is it about recruiting students into academia, because Prop 209 elicits Orwellian phrasing, but the policy directly affects hiring decisions—often over the objection of department hiring committees. Administrators really do view it as a problem that the faculty does not represent the students. As my first post indicates, I don’t disagree with that sentiment, but I also agree with you that academia is a cosmopolitan institution. It’s an intractable problem that puts faculty at odds with administrators.
Not to mention that Ivy League admitted students from all racial backgrounds tend to come from the same income stratum (i.e. the top one).
Bertrand Cooper wrote a great piece about this a couple weeks ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/failure-affirmative-action/674439/
I think this shows the fatal flaw that Lewis Powell first cast on this subject from SCOTUS when his opinion ended up being the binding one, in limiting affirmative action only on the basis of fostering diversity. Diversity comes in so, so many dimensions, and giving particular focus to only a few of them was always going to be doomed to failure. I appreciate the argument for racial affirmative action on the grounds of reparation much more to its straightforward nature of its goal.
That was 100% not true of the law school. Big Mormon, conservative, and evangelical community.
my understanding is mormons were big in the business school. but sure.
we have surveys of the undergrads tho https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifestyle/
Totally agree, as I responded above -- Harvard isn't discriminating against conservatives, the young educated person pool is just liberal. We should definitely promote free speech on campus though! Debate is good
Maya, you keep stating that Harvard doesn't discriminate against conservatives and religious people. But The Crimson's poll cited above shows that Harvard's student body is DRAMATICALLY unrepresentative on both counts. See, e.g. https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-steady-conservatives-moderates-tie.aspx. Your justification seems to be that "the young educated person pool" is "just liberal" and "more atheistic" on average. That is true but not even close to the extent of Harvard's student body. More relevantly, the "young educated person pool" is not racially representative either. Why is it ok, much less more important, for Harvard to use Affirmative Action to make its student body representative on race but not political ideologically or religion?
Your link doesn't support your claim. 18-29 age group is 23% conservative. That's overall. Given that more educated voters skew left pretty starkly, 13% is not dramatically far off of what we'd expect from a random sample. Sure the plurality are moderate, but "moderates" are a well-established crapshoot.
Because political and religious beliefs are contextual, malleable and nebulous. To wit, if I traveled back in time 30 years and talked to my younger self, we would both view the other's political and religious views as badly misguided.
The shifting definitions and atomization of racial that have accelerated in recent years are, I think, a big driver in the negative public opinions of affirmative action.
The Gallup article linked below shows that ~23% of the age group identifies as conservative.
So they are roughly half as represented as they ought to be.
I am the person who linked to the Gallup Poll. You didn't read that right in a bunch of ways. That's the 13% difference between "democrat leaners" and "republican leaners". It's also from 2014. It also shows that 19 year-olds were slightly more republican leaning than the overall 18-29 year-old cohort.
I wish I hadn't linked to the gallup poll at all. FIRE and HERI have more recent, much more relevant data: surveys of enrolled college students. Among R1 schools in 2021, the ratios were 53% liberal, 26% conservative, 21% moderate according to FIRE. https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/2021-college-free-speech-rankings. According to the Higher Education Research Institute (whose 2019 survey is broader than R1), the mix was 37% liberal, 20% conservative, and 43% ‘middle of the road.’ https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/TheAmericanFreshman2019.
My guess is that the grand, grand majority of the national pool of 18 year olds have no strong ideology whatsoever.
I doubt that is true of Harvard applicants though. Probably true for Middle TN State or CSU San Bernardino but not Harvard.
Agreed, which I was talking about the national pool. College students in general are likely going to have more formed ideology, but it's just not on the mind of most people that age.
No it isn't lmao
It is if you just look at the subset who are strong academically.
This is true. Harvard Law is much more conservative than people imagine. Yale and Stanford are the lefty zones.
"Harvard has few conservatives" is tossed around a bit but I wonder if anyone's interrogated this recently. At least when I was there some 15 odd years ago, conservatives were outnumbered but also extremely vocal and punched well above their representation. The breakdown was something like 10% openly conservative, 25% openly liberal, and 65% indifferent.
Heaven forbid a private university be allowed to value some things (say, racial or ethnic diversity) over others (sufficient numbers of ideological conservatives). Why, it's almost as if they can make their own decisions about what's important!
Sure, but we can give an opinion on whether we think we should support their values or not.
Sure, and the federal government can also decide whether it's comfortable giving gobs of money to private institutions making those decisions.
I think you're right that demanding a seat at the table for ideological or religious conservatives doesn't make sense. To the extent that people are arguing for that (at a private uni) I'd agree with you. But I think a lot of the pushback in this thread is a) against the claim that Harvard is religiously diverse and b) making the point that a disproportionate number of senior civil and government roles are populated by Ivy leaguers and that their unfamiliarity with huge swaths of their subjects could be bad for society. The solution is obviously to round up a bunch of evangelicals and keep them in a lab at Harvard's sociology department.
First thing that I have to say is that I really appreciate Milan and Maya's takes being included as thoughts #4 and #5 that operate as a bit of point/counterpoint. I always like reading when there's respectful disagreements, that ultimately make our views stronger in the end. Thanks for the contributions, both of you!
Thanks City of Trees! You are always very supportive of SB's young people
Young people are pretty cool--almost by the "definition" of the slang term of cool.
And to bring this back around to diversity, I'm guessing with fairly high confidence that the median Slow Borer is Matt's age, someone like myself that's followed his work back to when he was younger. Generation and age also help to add differing perspectives to the table.
What percentage of us were born within 3 years of him?
That's a good question! I was born within half a year of him.
Bottom line treating people differently based on the color of their skin is wrong.
This is a big win!
Also agreed that we need to fix K-12.
Roland Fryer did an excellent Econ Talk podcast where he showed how to do it
https://www.econtalk.org/roland-fryer-on-educational-reform/
"Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person ten times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look."
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
Somehow I think taking from immigrant Asians to give to immigrant blacks will not heal the wounds of generational blacks who never applied to Havard in the first place.
And indeed I find it a strange ideological stance to pick which disadvantaged kids get help based on the ultimate source of the disadvantage, in all cases being out of their control. What is the reason the black kid who is a victim of red lining is more deserving than the white kid who's grandparents lost everything to some real estate scam or because the industry moved out of their town? I can see the point in differentiating based on ongoing discrimination but this is not the point Coates is making in this quote. Not all who bleed are black.
I agree the issue is complex, but black people in particular were the subject of generations of systematic and deliberate theft of their wealth, and their descendants are absolutely disadvantaged by that theft. How do you address that very particular injustice? Maybe you don't! But then you can't pretend that America in any way embodies its ideals.
First, you realize that generational wealth does not really exist to the extent you think it does. Before Germany and Japan roared to life as the economic powerhouses of the 60s-80s, they were bombed to the stone age, had 5% of their populations killed, disproportionately young men in the early prime of their life, and some multiples of those wounded, and then, at least for Germany, forced to make reparations payments. But in a generation they were arguably wealthier than they had been before WW2.
Most wealth, for most people, is created, generation by generation, not handed down. Asian people who almost all arrived post Slavery / Jim Crow / Redlining are plenty wealthy. Generational wealth doesn't really exist for the vast majority of Americans outside of a tiny sliver of the richest or few single or two child upper-income families that manage to do everything right for several generations in a row.
Except Black Americans were explicitly denied the opportunity to generate wealth for the vast majority of American history or, if they were given that opportunity, it was at a massively smaller scope than that extended to white Americans.
Do you believe for some reason that all white Americans possess intergenerational wealth at all, let alone intergenerational wealth going back 60 years?
And you have no plan to give them wealth in any way that redress what happened to their ancestors or that would improve living standard now. The way to get wealth would be to create it, like Asian, and to some extent African immigrants are doing right now. Do well at school, two-parent household, stay away from criminal activity.
If you could generational black americans, on average, to do as well on those fronts as current West African Immigrants, who currently earn as much, on average, as white people, all these gaps would go away.
63% of college students in the U.S. rely at least partially on funding from their parents to pay tuition and costs. The quality of neighborhood public K-12 schools is directly proportional to the average income in those neighborhoods. It need not be an inheritance we're talking about here. Why now, 10 generations after slavery ended, do the descendants of former slaves still have 10x less family wealth than the descendants of European immigrants from the same period?
You believe all white Americans can trace their roots in the US back 10 generations?
That and so much wealth has been created relatively recently. There are some initial positioning advantages granted from certain types of wealth (land) but so much wealth today is the result of current activity not the past.
I don't think justice for the dead from the dead is even possible. I don't know which American ideal it is thst we should bring racial grievance into the future. We definitely didn't fully embody our ideals during redlining and less so during the travesties that preceded it. But race blindness seems to me to be a movement towards our ideals and not away from them.
"for the dead from the dead." Here's another Coates quote:
---
In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times , affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”
“We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times . “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”
This seems like straightforwardly somewhere where we can punish wells and reward it's victims. Justice that doesn't need any complicated elements, assuming Coates has accurately reported this case. We have systems, and where they are lacking we should address those lacking, for this sort of thing. What we don't have, and I don't think can be had, are systems that address grievances of one race against another.
So remedial action against Wells Fargo would be justified.
But that does mean you take action against a different bank
So what? They lent money to people at mutually agreeable terms. That this was illegal at all is absurd.
The reason Black people are ‘more deserving’ is because many of their ancestors were stolen from overseas and forced into slavery so white Americans could benefit from the wealth they produced and build a racial hierarchy that has only begun to be dismantled in the past few decades. And rather than compensate these descendants or make any kind of reparation, (white) America insists that it’s colour-blind now, so all of that stolen labour and wealth remains stolen.
Stolen from individuals by individuals who are no longer among us. And to my understanding of the economics this stealing left the united states and its citizens as a whole poorer and not richer.
But you've avoided my point. What your demand cashes out to isn't a righted wrong because we are incapable of righting historical wrongs, it cashes out to helping some people and not others on grounds neither person had any hand in. The slavers of the past will be no worse off because you decided not to help someone who looked like them and the enslaved will not have had their condition improved at all because some member of a tribe from an entirely different part of Africa is given a leg up.
I would wholeheartedly support a 100% inheritance tax and a college admission system that required proportional admissions from each economic wealth decile coupled with 100% tuition remission.
I would agree that caring much more about parental wealth than racial democraphics would be good. I don't want to broach those other subjects.
“Stolen from individuals by individuals who are no longer among us.”
Irrelevant. The United States, which was the institution that sanctioned this violence, is still around and bears responsibility for the ongoing consequences of its decision to endorse slavery.
“And to my understanding of the economics this stealing left the united states and its citizens as a whole poorer and not richer.”
Irrelevant. Most crime tends to create poor outcomes for perpetrators. That doesn’t absolve them of responsibility or mean that victims don’t deserve compensation.
“What your demand cashes out to isn't a righted wrong because we are incapable of righting historical wrongs, it cashes out to helping some people and not others on grounds neither person had any hand in.”
If you were to receive compensation for wage theft that you experienced and i didn’t because I wasn’t a victim, would it be reasonable for me to insist either we both get something or nobody does?
“The slavers of the past will be no worse off because you decided not to help someone who looked like them and the enslaved will not have had their condition improved at all because some member of a tribe from an entirely different part of Africa is given a leg up.”
I’m not really all that focused on improving outcomes for dead people, so I’m not sure what your point is here. My focus is on ensuring that people aren’t worse off today because a bunch of dead guys decided a long time ago their ancestors weren’t human.
This game can be played forever and in all facets. We have all inherited our relative position from incomprehensible numbers of forces far outsider of our control. My position would be very different if 80 generations ago one person did one slight thing differently. We cannot possibly calculate the great ledger of rights and wrongs that have placed us in our positions. But what we can do is evaluate the cumulative effect of those slights and boons and they handily cash out to current day material circumstance exactly. Thus aid should be distributed based on current day material circumstances.
And ironically, the descendants of those stolen and enslaved people are richer and healthier than the descendants of those who did the capturing who still live in Africa.
Interesting that your argument here is basically the same as the one that slavery advocates were professing in the 19th century!
I'm pro-reparations, but affirmative action is the worst reparations program ever. It barely benefits the intended recipients and amplifies the insult by rendering their own achievements suspect in the eyes of many.
If there was one positive to the Trump years, it was how they demonstrably showed Coates to be the intellectual lightweight he is.
Coates is definitely not a heavyweight but compared to like Ibram Kendi or Robin Diangelo he's a pretty serious person. I guess the better question is why are ideas that are so pervasive amongst academia so poorly defended in the popular discourse. Like there are a lot of smart people who think these things. But where's the equivalent to Slow Boring for them?
Even if we fixed all of k12 tomorrow we would still be punishing 13 years more students with unfair exclusion from elite institutions.
Nobody is being excluded.
There are still plenty of ways to help the disadvantaged. For example, low income based preferences.
You just can't do it on the basis of race.
Oh and they eliminated the racial achievement gap in just a couple of years. Including at the high school level
I haven't seen mentioned yet, amidst all the comments along the lines of "would you really want to go to a 50% Asian school", is that these are the exact same arguments which were used to justify Jewish quotas a century ago. Turns out that some groups are really strong academically.
Rather, the arbitrariness of the invented category "race" or "ethnicity" means that in any given period this arbitraray category will not perfeclty align with other cateegories (e.g. academic aptitude). However, those misalignments are fluid, since the racial category is arbitrary. To put it in concerete terms - young American Jews today appears to be closer to the Americann meidian compared to their parents and grandparents - probably because they are farther away from the immigrant experience. "Asians" (and other racial groups of a similar immigrant-profile, e.g. Nigerians) are likely to undergo a similar process. It's not something inherent to the race, but each generatino is liekly to have its "Asians" or "Jews" which will change over time provided the system is meritocratic enough.
I’ve been saying “Indians are the new Jews” for a while now
They are also kicking-ass in stand-up comedy, which is very much what Jews in the 60s-80s were doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
Indian-American income levels are off the charts
One has to ask what socioeconomic status Indian immigrants to the US had back in India before they emigrated. (I'm guessing most Indian immigrants to the US come from upper middle class backgrounds in India).
To answer what question? Regardless, whatever their ses background was, I'd be highly surprised if it's vastly different from say, Korean immigrants or Filipinos or Nigerians.
"To put it in concerete terms - young American Jews today appears to be closer to the Americann meidian compared to their parents and grandparents - probably because they are farther away from the immigrant experience."
I disagree with this. Jewish Americans still have higher rates than average of higher educational attainment in the US. 60% of Jewish adults in the US are college graduates, compared to around 40% for non-Hispanic whites. 28% of Jewish Americans have a post-graduate degree, as opposed to 11% overall. Jews are still highly represented in elite universities (Harvard is 10% Jewish, Yale is 12% Jewish, Columbia is 22% Jewish, MIT is 7% Jewish, etc, despite Jews making up around 2% of the population).
"probably because they are farther away from the immigrant experience."
I don't know if you can attribute the "immigrant" experience to the Jewish academic successes in the early 20th century. Otherwise, we'd expect that stereotype to extend to Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans were model minorities with respect to academic achievement, but we don't see that.
Instead, I think you can attribute it to several things specific to Jewish experience. Unlike many other poor immigrant groups arriving to the United States in the late 1800s, early 1900s, Jews were more likely to be urban, literate, and skilled (tailors, carpenters, etc), rather than rural, illiterate and unskilled. Furthermore, they came from a culture in which one of the major avenues to status in the community, other than money or yichus (lineage), was educational attainment in yeshivas (Torah learning academies) for men. Furthermore, the society valued women having employable skills, so that they could work to support their husbands in the Yeshiva. Even as the population secularized, education was considered a route to high status in the Jewish community, in ways that it wasn't in other immigrant communitiues.
I don't think you're really disagreeing with his point, though, right? People bringing over their culture and adapting it is what I understand "the immigrant experience" to mean in this context. Most immigrant groups don't end up overachieving in education due simply to being immigrants, but they all do end up disproportionately in some niches and professions and not in others. And he didn't say American Jews are just like other White Americans, he just said they are trending in that direction.
I think the numbers you're providing also probably underrate that convergence. For example, the 60% / 40% college degree among adults includes senior citizens educated in an earlier generation much closer to the arrival of most Jews. It might looks a lot closer if we narrowed it down to people under 30. And the 10-20% Jews at Ivies might in large part be due to legacy admissions. Notably MIT, which relies the least on legacy, is only at 7%.
Justice Thomas concurrence is 58 pages of fastballs. Straight flamethrower shit.
"The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution.
The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional." ~ Justice Thomas https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
He’s been waiting most of his life to write that opinion.
Broken clock theory proven true!
I mean, if there was a single line to sum up all of Thomas's jurisprudence it's that one right there about the misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments.
He, and maybe Gorsuch, believes the Priveleges and Immunities Clause actually means something.
https://overcast.fm/+QLhXBAtSg
This episode is also great.
Taught at a mid-level state university. Many first generation college students, mostly white and Black, because in the Midwest. My former students are flourishing, serving the community, raising their own healthy families. If the role of a college education is to create more elites, then more folks need to go to Harvard. If it is to create a better educated population and enable a stronger middle class, send your kid to a state school. (They'll still get into Harvard Law if they're motivated and smart enough.) And almost by definition, they'll have a more diverse college experience, which is important in the real world.
Also, quality early childhood education is a stepping stone to success in K-12 for many children and families.
I think the lack of explicit discussion about the special status of a few schools in a quasi-aristocratic role in American life makes this debate kind of weird.
Like state schools are just not doing the same thing as like 5-10 special ones that are about who will be in charge.
This is for me yet another argument for making the elite schools much much bigger.
If they were the size of tier-1 state schools (of UT@Austin or Texas A&M or a UF, or OSU, or Minnesota-Minneapolis, or Berkeley, or UCLA) then there would be less competition to get in, but far more competition between the elite graduates.
Sure, it might mean that graduates of the Ivy League plus MIT, Caltech, Stanford and Chicago dominate the upper reaches of American society even more than at present, but they would also be a vastly bigger group of people - 200,000 or more in each class across those elite institutions.
I agree with you. But these elite universities get their elite status from exclusivity: low enrollment and high rejection.
I don't quite know what the mechanism would be to advance such a policy. I've heard Malcom Gladwell talk about tinkering around the tax code to advance similar goals but it sounds awfully complicated and prone to an enormous amount of oversight costs and gaming.
Yeah, I don't know how you do that with private schools either, other than just persuasion.
With public ones, it's easy of course, the elected governments just require them to do so.
I suppose you could put some sort of limits on research grants and make those dependent on numbers of undergraduates per class? And then gradually lower them so Harvard needs to add 1,000 students to each class in order to maintain its research funding.
I mean, by the standards of the rest of the world, we're actually pretty good at this. Like, there hasn't been a non-Oxford/Eton/etc. Prime Minister in UK in seemingly forever, and the elite top schools in France really do run everything, for example.
I mean I get the sense this is true, though admissions to those institutions is a rather contentious public policy debate in almost all societies and our high level of individualism and diversity makes it worse.
Almost like we shouldn’t have them.
One of my major criticisms of Obama was his idea that somehow putting only Ivy grads in charge that everything could be fixed.
Yes, I agree of course you don’t get to be in charge because you went to Harvard. But If you went to two state schools even with all that same drive you would have less chance to get those opportunities that fall into the laps of a small number of elite school students.
This is a lottery within a lottery but going to most state schools is to be denied the opportunity to be so fortunate.
It's both.
The reason opportunities are given to Harvard graduates is because getting into Harvard is a strong signal of intelligence, ambition, energy and connections but also that means that people with comparable intelligence, ambition, energy and connections who don't get into Harvard don't get so many opportunities. Harvard themselves will tell you that for every student they admit, there are two or three who are just as good. Many of them will get into another elite institution, but the ones that don't are genuinely disadvantaged relative to those of the same abilities that do get into elite universities.
As much as I appreciate Milan and Maya, I would dearly love it it Matt walked the walk and SB's next intern came from a fine state school.
“we weren’t the ones doing slavery or Jim Crow”
I fully support the people who did slavery and Jim Crow having to surrender their slots in Harvard’s freshman class of 2024.
Proposing a system where LeBron James, as one example, gets reparations money from the government while the white steelworker in Milwaukee only pays taxes is a loser for the Party.
I don’t think he means a legal settlement based on a harmful act against an individual, I think he means cutting someone a check because they’re black.
No, what they are saying is if someone of LeBron’s racial background was beat up 100 years ago by police that LeBron does not have a claim to compensation for that past harm done to a third party 100 years ago.
I don’t know what you are arguing. In the USDA case there is explicit harm and harmed individuals who are alive who likely have standing. The passage of the VRA and CRA, coupled with the expansion of social safety net programs have also been compensatory for past injustices and inequities. (And mechanically will not be compensatory once racial inequities are adequately addressed.)
But you seem to be arguing, using these examples, that harms much further back require additional compensation for people generations removed from said harms? Is that correct?
If you are targeting the recipients of reparations by race to make up for specific race-based harms then it doesn’t make sense to have the payers of the reparations being people who did not cause the past repression.
This is such an offensive line of reasoning. No persons alive today are "the people who did cause past repression".
You're whole argument is a "sins of the fathers" one and I can't imagine any worse way to envision a just society moving forward. Specifically on this point you seem to be conflating "white people" with "descendants of slaveholders". It's probable that more white people living today in the US are descendants of people who fought in the civil war against slavery than of slaveholders, and both groups are outnumbered by descendants of latter white immigrant groups anyway.
But anyway, if you're really going down this bizarrely immoral values route, it's likely that many of the West Africans admitted to Harvard to meet AA goals are descendants of slave raiders / traders who sold slaves to the Europeans, so there's another one for that argument.
You're missing the point. I agree that this "sins of the fathers stuff" doesn't make sense. (Look at that recent Reuters report finding that Obama is descended from slaveowners.) But the people who favor affirmative action do, on some level, believe in it, and even under that framework the current system doesn't pass muster.
No they don't, Milan. The original justification for AA was to acknoweldge that *the state* and American insitutions were explicitly racist, creating gaps, and so a proactive approach ("affirmative action") must be taken, on a temporary basis, a redress those wrongs against their specific victims. It has nothing to do with "sins of the fathers" let alone with marking whole races as collectively guilty of anything.
Eh.
Some of us favor hard AA quotas to bring the level of educational attainment to parity on the belief that this can then rise and fall naturally in subsequent generations.
Do you think racial discrimination in housing, employment, policing, the justice system, customer service, etc etc is just not a thing anymore?
There are laws against such discrimination and they can be enforced to the benefit of the people harmed.
Often those laws can’t be enforced. There are those studies of identical resumes getting fewer callbacks when they have a black name. How do we enforce against that behavior?
Few people, even on the left, describe the state of current racism as "repression". If the distribution of people who have been treated worse than-average at the customer service desk at Target skews slightly towards Black people, then Target should fix that, but it's not ground for reparations from Harvard.
Yes, it’s not as bad as Jim Crow. But, your Target example is trivializing ongoing racial discrimination. What about the studies that show black names on resumes getting fewer callbacks than otherwise identical ones with white names?
Everybody who isn't black has been helped by the centuries and continued anti-black racism in American society.
No!
Whites in the south spent enormous amounts of energy on suppressing blacks. That was terrible for blacks, but also for whites! All of that effort could have gone into developing their towns and cities to be better, instead of constantly suppressing members of their community.
Right, based on JE's argument you would think the richest non-blacks in the US would be distributed all around the South, and especially concentrated in the Deep South, but instead the trend runs clearly in the other direction.
This is a bit of a disingenuous comparison because you can connect past harms to current victims. If you argue that the forth generation descendent of someone forced into sharecropping due to a failure to enact land redistribution post civil war deserves compensation, then we are going to need more reasoning why compensation is warranted.
Ya, that sentiment in a vacuum is silly. What if the abuser was a representative agent of the public and those victims can establish credible harm from actions taken?
Public funds, sure. Everyone pays according to their tax liability. The problem is that admission to Harvard is not a spread liability--some individual people who would have been admitted are not and they are the only people paying for Affirmative Action.
It happened that Harvard set up its system so that the people who lost out due to AA were Asian students and downscale white students, the opposite of who would pay the most in a tax-dollar system.
The Constitution requires the opposite of that.
It is if you interpret the Constitution as written.
Not necessarily. You have to make the case that the current state 1) inherent’s liability for past harms, 2) living people are directly harmed by distant past harms and this have a claim, and 3) compensation for past harm has not been provided.
None of these aspects are clear or incontrovertible. Hence why reparations is a debated subject.
Twitter is obviously a very strange place but the discussion around this decision has really been something.
One terrible thing that liberal people might do is to push Asian Americans to the right with their reactions to his ruling. Both "Asians" and "White Women" are trending on Twitter.
Firstly, if they wanted all these schools could just set an academic minimum and then have a lottery. They are the ones that decided that they need to be ultra-selective.
The legacy/athlete discussion is very strange because legacy admissions seem very unpopular with all people according this this poll 0% of Dems and 7% of Republics think it is "very fair". If someone were to get rid of them it would likely be very popular.
https://www.newsweek.com/affirmative-action-legacy-admissions-very-unfair-college-poll-1466652
Also colleges can just get rid of legacy/donor/athlete admissions if they want. If people think they are bad, they should tell Harvard to stop doing them.
There is a lot of discussion about White Women being the main beneficiary of AA. It's unclear if this is meant as a defense of it or not.
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11682950/fisher-supreme-court-white-women-affirmative-action
Finally, saying that Clarence Thomas sucks, and also that he got into school and the SC because of AA seems like a misguided defense.
Also Harvard should have maybe been less openly racist towards Asian applicants. People are sort of glossing over this in favor of the overall discussion but the practices that Harvard was using seems pretty not cool.
Harvard doesn’t have a direct interest in how popular it’s policies are with the general public.
Getting rid of legacy admissions would probably be very unpopular with the subset of people that Harvard sees itself as accountable to, however.
Sure.
But to the people I've seen on Twitter that believe that AA and legacy admissions are on opposites sites of the political spectrum when really both are pretty unpopular.
Harvard absolutely has "a direct interest in how popular it’s policies are with the general public." As Matt went on about at length above, they care deeply about how they appear to society. Brand is everything to Harvard.
I think, at best, it’s a matter of degree. Harvard’s decision makers are accountable to Harvard’s various stakeholders. But those stakeholders are not in any meaningful sense the general public.
So while the stakeholders may view the general public’s opinion as one factor, to be weighed among many, you’re never likely to see a situation where Harvard’s decision makers say something like “Sorry, donors. I know that you REALLY love [policy XYZ]. But the general public is just not having it, so we’re going to side with them over you.”
Agree that “the brand” is everything. But it’s more a question of “the brand, as perceived by whom?”
> Twitter is obviously a very strange place but the discussion around this decision has really been something.
A lot of the progressive/Academia Twitterati opinion about this is just straightforwardly racist. Not racist through a funhouse mirror, just actually, explicitly racist. I think we on the left who can see this need to stop beating around the bush about it and call it what it is
Oh thank god, someone else sees it.
The legacy discussion (not so much the athletes one) is also very strange, IMO, because the vast majority of universities and colleges in the US don't have legacy admissions at all or it's used at most as a weak tie breaker in their admissions process. (The athletes one is strange for a different reason -- outside of a handful of schools, admissions based on athletic status almost certainly disproportionately benefit black students, not white ones. "What about all the black kids with strong HS grades and great SAT scores getting denied admission for dumb white jocks" is not a thing anyone ever writes with a straight face.)
At elite schools, athletic admissions tends to mean fencing or crew or lacrosse or something to get in white people with the money to do those sports. At tier-1 state schools (which also tend to be the top-tier football schools), it's absolutely getting black people in to play football and basketball.
The White Woman thing might have a point about workplace affirmative action but I don’t think it has ever been much of a thing in higher ed. If it ever was, it’s not currently active and able to be litigated.
I think this talking point is mixing up two different things. It's true that white women benefit massively from government contractor set-aside rules, which are also a category of "affirmative action," but has nothing to do with college admissions.
It's been a common talking point that I have seen today. It seems that currently men receive a boost.
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11682950/fisher-supreme-court-white-women-affirmative-action
|https://time.com/4884132/affirmative-action-civil-rights-white-women/
I genuinely think white women didn’t benefit from AA in education much at all--k12 works better for us than boys so as soon as the barriers went down we flooded in. I think AA in the workplace early and in certain fields today has helped but claiming we are doing well therefore we benefited from AA just... the logic doesn’t fit.
(I also think a preference for a 50:50 class improves everyone’s social life.)
Legislatures can get rid of legacy admissions whenever they like, by prohibiting it for public schools or conditioning private school funding on its abolition. People who are offended by the policy never put any political organizing effort behind their position.
I think it is mostly just used as a whataboutism but there really appears to be very little popular constituency for legacy admissions and it might worth politicians or activists that want them gone to see if they can make it happen. It might be easier than they think.
0. The entire system became untenable and collapsed because Asian students are much stronger than other students (in the pool elite schools draw from) in terms of academic achievements at age 18. Neither side is particularly interested in emphasizing this point
That flies in the face of the reality I see. Every single time I hear the affirmative action argument, the point about Asian students is made on both sides. I think it's more like neither side has a clue how to solve that particular problem within the context of their own self-interest - there's only so many elite college spaces available.
The solution is to stop discriminating based on race. If that results in asian overrepresentation, so be it.
What do you mean by “discriminating”, though?
Surely you’re not suggesting that schools be required to rank all applicants by SAT or GPA and then numerically admit them until they reach capacity.
So that means schools will need to consider things other than test scores. Just because those other considerations are less favorable to Asians (or any other group), that doesn’t make it discrimination.
where is the problem? how is asian success a problem?
Clearly the only metric for ability should be equestrian sports.
Is that actually true? Asian American students are one of the most broadly sympathetic populations negatively affected by race-based admissions policy, and affirmative action opponents do in fact frequently talk about them (and, I think, were strategically savvy to do so.)
Popular anti-AA discourse emphasizes that Asians are negatively affected by AA, but avoids talking about the fact that Asians are already heavily over-represented relative to population share. You'll note the absence in liberal and conservative publications of the "if Harvard sampled from the top academic decile, it would be 50+% Asian" figure*
*which is an understatement
Yeah, I do kind of suspect that some significant fraction of white people who dislike affirmative action won’t fully expect this outcome and won’t be happy if/when it actually happens.
Yep, Asian students disproprotionately "blow the curve" as the saying goes.
But it’s not primarily Asian people from Asia that are making up the Asian applicant pools, is it?
Depending on the school, that could be because international students are full payers. Many liberal arts schools are heavily reliant on them. At my undergrad (big-endowment Ivy, not LAC), Asian-Americans definitely significantly outnumbered international students among undergrads. And among the international students, a significant number went to Taipei American School or the like.
"I think professors at top universities face a conceptual problem in that they want to affirm values like “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” but the whole point of top universities is to be elitist, hierarchical, and exclusionary."
In my English PhD program in the 00's (which I thankfully eventually dropped out of), my fellow students who most vociferously thought that their future role as professors was to indoctrinate students into their own view of social justice activism with the goal of upending the current social order, also were the ones whose career goals were to get jobs at the most prestigious schools (Ivies and highly rated northeast liberal arts schools like Wesleyan and Amherst). It seemed to never occur to them that their career aspirations would end up placing them in front of almost exclusively elite students. (They also had the least interesting things to say about our putative subject, i.e., literature.)
This was also true of English PhD programs in the 90s.
Question for the group:
What is the optimal distribution of races to achieve the best benefits of racial diversity and experiences and how do you come up with that number?
Seriously, this isn't a troll question. I honestly have no idea how people decide if something is "diverse" when the pool of applicants is not uniform.
UC Berkeley’s undergraduate population is made up of 42.2% Asian, 19.7% White, 4.4% Black, and 21% Hispanic students as of 2020.
39% of Californians are Latino, 35% are white, 15% are Asian American or Pacific Islander, 5% are Black, 4% are multiracial, and fewer than 1% are Native American or Alaska Natives, according to the 2020 Census.
How diverse is UC Berkeley?
I wish the day will come when that question wouldn't occur to anyone, that it will be like asking about the optimal composition of eye colors or hairstyles in the classroom.
A nice line I heard once is that it's good that nobody knows off the top of their head how many black footballers play for England.
Yeah I'd like to see this quantified, since it seems to be the crux of the formal argument from Harvard, et al.
I'd also like to know why "race" as opposed to "ethnicity" is important. I'm pretty sure that to the extent there are measurable benefits to diversity then being exposed to Ukrainian refugees, Pennsylvania Amish, or "white" Latin Americans is good, too, and probably better than being "exposed" to Black people from my own city who I already live around.
I'd like someone to tell me why skin color is the most important thing.
And would it make a difference if the 15% Asian American was 5% Indian/5%Chinese/5%half-Asian vs whatever other combo you could come up with? I think it definitely would.
Probably. I think this is an actual hard question and it would be good for discussions around these issues if we could reach some consensus on it.
This is one of the reasons I think AA as practiced was merely box-checking to look good. A serious, rigorous discussion of diversity would consider these ethnic categories and not just hand-wave at them.
This question has an easier answer for gender in the workplace. A typical team size is maybe 8 people. If you have zero women on a team, that’s very bad for diversity. If there is one woman in a group of 8, you risk creating a token minority dynamic. If you have two women on a team, you’re probably getting diverse perspectives. Then getting to 4/8 is a question of fairness and not really about diversity (and fairness is also important!)
This small group setting is also how people tend to interact in a variety of ways - groups of friends, sports teams, school discussion groups, group projects, etc. So I think the logic is generalizable outside the workplace. The denominator just goes up and down depending on the scenario.
Now if you want to balance 5 ethnicities on a team of 8, by the pigeon hole principle someone is going to be the token minority. But obviously if you have 1/1/2/2/2 from each group that’s diverse. At some point you can’t include every finely sliced kind of diversity in a group of people. So for any division of people smaller than say 1/8 (e.g. if 2% of people are trans, or 5% of Californians are black), it’s hard to practice representational diversity, and again it’s back to questions of fairness and discrimination.
Looking at the Berkeley example, the 4.4% black figure is the only one that seems problematic for diversity and representation.
Interestingly, the 4.4% black number seems to be the one that is closest in percentage terms to the population baseline (hard to tell with Native American from what has been said).
Re 15: There isn't a solution to this at the level of the individual, but there is an obvious one at the level of the institution: the best educational institutions should expand until they are the biggest educational institutions. Admit 20,000 students per year and you'll soon have a much more diverse population.
It should be seen as a failure of Harvard that UCF educates more people than Harvard does, and Harvard should have the objective of being the biggest university in the USA as well as being the best.
That's how a "top" university manages to achieve diversity, equity and inclusion - it includes more people, making it more naturally diverse, and far more equitable as it ceases to concentrate on a tiny elite, but creates a much broader equally-educated class: what one might call a "middle class", if you like.
This is standard practice in many other countries - a student who could have benefitted from a Harvard education but wasn't admitted is as much a student failed by Harvard as one admitted and then failed.
They don’t want to have diversity; they want to appear to have diversity.
They don’t want to be the biggest; they want to be the most elite.
This should happen, but won’t because elite schools aren’t selling great education. They are selling exclusivity.
They would still be able to be ridiculously exclusive! There’s are thousands of institutions of higher education in the country. Even the largest institutions form a small percentage of the total number of students.
He’s suggesting increasing Harvard’s class size by 10x! Which I think would be great, but would hugely dilute the exclusivity. The whole point is for rich people and academics to brag that their kid go into a school other elite rich people or academics tried but failed to get their kids into. The value is in not knowing multiple people whose kids got in.
Also, the elite job pipeline doesn’t end up looking as great. There aren’t enough Congressmen to take the interns, etc. Suddenly, just going won’t be enough. Students will have competition-it would no longer be enough just to drop the H bomb.
This is interesting. What other countries have their "elite school" as also one of their biggest? I think I probably agree with you that there's capacity there that could create a better educated society but that doesn't because scarcity is really good for business.
Off the top of my head, Italy and the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) all have their elite schools as being among the biggest. The top universities in those countries are the big city universities - München or Berlin or Zürich or Roma or Milano, for instance.
France is the other non-English-speaking country I know well, and it's similar (the best universities are the big Paris ones) except that they have the grandes écoles, which are weird: most students go straight to a regular university after the lycée (high school), but some go to prépas, which is an elite two-year course which prepares you for the entry examinations (concours) for a grande école. The grandes écoles themselves are usually four year programs that start after prépas, and their qualifications are the equivalent of a master's degree, though (because they were founded during the Revolution in opposition to the then church-run universities) they were not formally a master's until the "Bologna" reforms in 1999 - for example, the Ecole polytechnique would give the Diplôme d'Ingénieur (it now also grants a MS in Engineering). Graduates of the grandes écoles don't generally get a bachelor's degree. The grandes écoles are super-elite schools, but the international classification systems (THES, QS, USNWR) really struggle with them because they don't fit into the normal undergraduate/postgraduate schema.
The grandes écoles are very small and very exclusive. If you ignored them, then the best French universities are large (PSL, Sorbonne, etc) but it would be a mistake to do so, as the best French students go to prépas rather than straight to university, and then on to a grande école if they get a high enough grade in the concours.
If they don't, but still receive a passing grade (nearly everyone does; the prépas are highly competitive to get in and a mere pass is nowhere near enough for entry to a grande école), they will usually transfer to a university with lots of credit - usually they'll then graduate after two or three semesters. Lots of people who did prépas and didn't get into a grande école do still go on to do master's and PhDs. Also, there aren't grandes écoles in all subjects (the grandes écoles only cover civil administration, engineering, business, architecture, political science and journalism), so many top students do go to a regular university to study e.g. science or humanities or mathematics.
For many smaller European countries, the most prestigious university is the one in the capital city, which is also often the biggest (e.g. Vilnius University in Lithuania, Charles University in Czechia).
Otherwise, there tends to be a very ancient university located elsewhere (e.g. the Jagiellonian University in Krakow in Poland, Utrecht and Leiden in the Netherlands) with the big capital city university then in second or third place in prestige.
It's an oddity that there wasn't a medieval university in London (the modern University of London is a nineteenth-century foundation), and the English-speaking world developed the concept of the "college town" from Oxford and Cambridge, with America's colonial colleges playing a key part in the development of that idea. Other medieval European major cities and capitals all had universities (including both Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland) and these grew alongside their cities into the massive prestigious universities of most of Europe.
It's perhaps worth pointing out that Columbia University (an Ivy League college in New York City) is both large and highly prestigious at the postgraduate level - it has more postgraduates enrolled than any public university campus. In fact, unless I'm missing one, the only university campuses in the US with more postgraduates are the University of Southern California and New York University (the big university systems like California or CUNY or SUNY have more, but not in any one of their locations and counting e.g. UCLA and Berkeley separately makes more sense than counting them together).
If Columbia had followed the historical path of most European universities, then (a) it would not be a private institution and (b) it would be much bigger at undergraduate level.
The gap between the top tier and mid tier for Canadian universities are far less compared to the US (much less 'concentrated' university sector), but McGill, UofToronto, UBC, and Queens are not that much selective than their co-city universities of Concordia, York, Simon Fraser, and Laurier.
That being said, it is the program within schools that tends to be selective (i.e, Engineering vs English). Likewise, some schools that don't rank high on overall prestige have high prestige for certain programs or at the grad school level, etc.
Now I'm sure part of this may be explained because some of the Canadian uber-elite students go to Harvard themselves
Exactly, your last sentence is the big issue with this setup. The best Canadian students go to the same place as the best US ones, which stinks for Canada
You might want to clarify that #6 switches back to Matt's take. At first I thought it was a continuation of Maya's take (she could have had more than one numbered point to make, after all).
"When my son was five, he asked if the weakest students enroll at the best colleges because they’re the ones who need the most help."
You can't blame children for overgeneralizing from their parents' experience.
Can a supporter of affirmative action explain why they think the old Jewish quotas were bad but the current situation with Asians is ok? I genuinely don’t get it.
My best theory: the difference is that there aren’t literal quotas, and it would actually have been ok if they had just heavily penalized Jewish applicants. Is that it?
I think the answer is that the beneficiaries of the Jewish quotas were white gentiles, which meant those quotas were "punching down." The beneficiaries of the Asian quotas are black students, which means that these quotas are "punching up."
Is punching Asians up or down?
Not trying to be full-on Ken from Mia here, or imply anything about your attitude towards Asians, but it's interesting to me that there's no generally accepted clear answer to that question.
I think it’s sideways. What is salient is that Harvard actively protected (mostly white) legacies--“up” is protected from a full-on slugfest between anyone else.
Must... refrain... from making... joke... about... Asians being short.....
Thanks! This seems pretty plausible. Maybe that’s why the argument that affirmative action ended up discriminating against Asians was so salient.
I odn't think they were literal quotas back then, either. They used very similar techniques, indeed some of those invented then are used now, by the very same harvard! e.g. "personality" scores
As a supporter of educational institutions rights to curate their programs to include diverse student body, I actually don’t have an issue with Jewish quotas at least in certain circumstances.
If these are used to wholesale exclude Jews that is a discrimination, but if used to cap at some level well beyond Jews percent in relevant populations, than it is capping an already over-represented minority group.
In a hypothetical scenario where Harvard would admit say 40% Jews without a quota, far far higher than the amount this minority population is locally, regionally nationally etc, I think Harvard is within its rights to take this into consideration. They would not be discriminating against Jews with a 20% quota, imo, as Jews would still represented far more in the student body than other similar minorities are.
If a 20% quota went in, how you would you expect potential applicants to describe their ethnicity / religion. Would you expect a non-practicing, half-Jewish guy like Matt Yglesias to identify himself as half-Jewish on his application or would it be OK for him to check Hispanic only? Would he count as a half-jew for quota purposes? How would you handle it if many Jewish applicants started omitting that info from their application?
I’d expect some would be wholly honest and others would try to game the system.
I really don’t know and haven’t thought about it.
Thanks! What do you think about the actual historical Jewish quotas at Harvard and elsewhere in the 1920s?
I really don’t know much about them to be honest. I sort of assume they were used to viciously exclude Jewish people, but I really dunno.
They kept Jews to around 10% of admissions when they would have been at least 25% and possibly much higher.
I can see how they lost that case. That seems rather extreme to insist Jewish population is less than 2x national population to curate essentially cracker cultural hegemony rather than diversity,
Well - I'm not exactly sure how many Jews there were but less than 5% of total US population seems like a reasonable guess? In which case they were capping to double their % to prevent 5x representation.
Current soft quotas for Asians are less extreme when viewed in comparison.
Not a supporter of AA but this isn't actually that hard. Penalizing Jewish applicants resulted in a less representative student body (the counterfactual was all WASPs) and hence a less diverse elite. Now the impact of penalizing Asian applicants is exactly the reverse of this.
Thanks. But I’m not sure that’s right; I thought jews were over represented then, and that was the original reasons for the quotas.
Here’s a quote from Wikipedia: “on the number of Jews admitted to the university. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University from 1909-1933,[15] raised the alarm about a ‘Jewish problem’ when the number of Jewish students grew from six percent to twenty-two percent from 1908 - 1922”. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota
Jews are definitely over represented now. So by this logic would it be good to put back into place similar penalties for Jewish applicants now?
I think "lots of _one_ minority and everyone else is a WASP" is more diverse than "100% Exeter students", though of course if a time traveler had convinced Conant to admit a 10% Black class that would be an extremely good thing.
Your question is kind of trolly but I am really struggling with how many progressive commenters / journalists / friends seem to think this is an easy question and the court's ruling was obviously incorrect. Like Harvard was explicitly discriminating against Asians and the court said they couldn't. I'm not sure how the progressive movement is 100% certain it's totally right about this. It's baffling to me
The question was meant sincerely! In my mind there is very little difference between the two situations. (I recognize that my view is unusual, although tbh I’m struggling to figure out why)
I am mostly with you. It feels like progressives and people on the left have staked out their side here and wrapped this in a narrative about a right-wing supreme court, but the issue is genuinely complex and it's not clear to me how a pro affirmative action person thinks this should actually work in the real world. I think if everyone just actually read the emails Harvard admission staff was sending about Asian applicants that would at least give them pause.
"Affirmative action is unpopular" is not exactly untrue...but having elite colleges be majority-Asian and have virtually no black students would also be unpopular. Unless you're paying kind of an insane level of attention to this, you don't realize what an admissions system that just straight used test scores/GPA/advanced classes (or even adding in: legacies, sports etc.) would deliver. I don't think that would look fair to many Americans. And I don't think they're going to get it -- elite private colleges will game out admissions to be more opaque that so that, next time, no one can prove what they're doing.
Then non Asians should study harder and do better on tests. Sucks to suck.
But that situation isn't actually a problem, and so isn't in need of a policy solution.
There is a sort of "pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered" quality to all this. Most people are not absolutists and I think if you applied a modest amount of AA so that, say, the % of black students at Harvard was halfway between the % that gets in with no preferences and the % of blacks in the population of the USA, then the level of opposition would fairly weak. But Harvard for various reasons went whole hog and actually has a student body that's blacker than the general population, which is just asking for backlash.
This is a fair point. If AA were genuinely used as a tiebreaker among equally qualified students, or even used as a *modest* boost, you’d get some grumbles but most people would accept it. But it was worth upwards of 300-400 SAT points at Harvard, which is a completely different caliber of applicant.
While those directly involved in the case are familiar with those details, how true is that of the overall population who are disapproving of AA? Part of the problem is that most people’s opinions are based on a “choose your own adventure” conception of what AA does and so reflects people’s priors about the degree of disadvantage faced by minorities and the fairness and workability of AA.
Why wouldn’t it look fair to most Americans? Most Americans realize that Asian kids on average spend WAY more time on homework and do better in school. These facts aren’t exactly state secrets. Sure, some people will resent it just like they resent Jewish success. That doesn’t mean we should craft policy around bigots.
I'm not arguing for or against this ruling, especially. But when Harvard de-emphasizes test scores in response to this ruling because they are uncomfortable with what the results would be otherwise, they are (and should be) allowed to do that.
They should not be allowed to do that.
And we can use access to federal student loans as a cudgel to beat them into shape if we need to.
If they want to forgo all govt $/investment, though, they absolutely should be able to do whatever they want in this regard.
But then we could just consider them for-profit or tax endowment or some other form of punishment, I guess.
(Not that any of that will happen, of course...just that it is feasible)
When it come to the New York selective public high schools, or TJ, I think there's a real argument that you can't just drop test scores -- particularly if you are extremely clear that you're doing it to accept fewer Asian students. These are public institutions. But if you don't think Harvard should be allowed to say "we're just not taking SAT scores anymore" (assuming they are suitably vague about why), I think we're on pretty different pages about the role of government regulation in private organizations.
We already basically crossed this bridge with Title IX, didn't we?
Follow our very specific rules or no federal funding.
I think that's bad, and we ought not to have done that...but we did.
It's ok for them to be uncomfortable with too many Asian kids?
It's legally permissible for private businesses to have a great deal of latitude for how they admit, hire, etc.
But race is a protected class where it's not legally permissible. So I don't see how they should be able to, legally or morally.
If Harvard were to, say, decide they no longer accepted test scores, you don't see how, legally or morally, they should be able to do that?
If criteria are race-blind and make sense, why would it be unpopular? Fact is racial-blind admissions are super popular in uber-liberal, majority poc california.
It’s quite possible that there’s a near mode vs far mode dynamic operating here.
On the abstract principles level, “race-blind criteria” fits well with most Americans’ moral intuitions, and I think it’s the policy that they would endorse from a Rawlsian veil-of-ignorance perspective. But people’s view on that abstract concept might be different than what they’d feel about say, a fairly small minority group’s population coming to make up a large share of the economic and cultural elite (a situation that’s produced many of the scariest and most violent racist reactionary backlashes in human history.)
California is an optimistic counterexample, though—the top UCs have been 35%+ Asian for many years now and the state seems to be fine with it. If Asian representation rises similarly at other elite institutions, I hope that Americans on the whole will be similarly okay with the situation.
Alternatively, it could encourage students to do better!
"having elite colleges be majority-Asian and have virtually no black students would also be unpopular"
Is this actually true?