🎓 Harvard, Affirmative Action, and Asian Americans

Some thoughts and reactions

via Midjourney

This was originally meant to be in fD[91] but it got too long and generally I try not to include my personal opinions in fD so I’ve broken it out here as a separate post. I may continue modifying this into more of a standalone piece.

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I wrote about SFFA v. Harvard and my thoughts on affirmative action five years ago in fD[63] and I’ll go into some of my personal thoughts about it again here.

Affirmative action is something I thought a lot about during high school, while I was at Harvard¹, and on and off since then. To put it simply, this is how I see it now:

1. Is affirmative action well-intentioned and diversity a worthy goal? Yes

2. Were Asian Americans invidiously discriminated against by affirmative action in practice? Yes

3. Did the goal of diversity justify harmful discrimination against a particular minority ethnic group? No

4. Was discrimination against Asian Americans necessary for affirmative action? No

The impact on Asian Americans aside, I have a lot of qualms about affirmative action.² But I think I could support it—as it had been permitted by the courts—as a narrowly tailored program in which race was one plus factor among many in a holistic evaluation process and pursued only when there were no suitable race-neutral alternatives.

In my reading, Harvard and universities like it failed to come close to meeting any of those criteria and instead operated a de facto quota system under which race was always a grossly important factor if not determinative, and in the pursuit of their vastly distorted benchmarks of social engineering, ended up sacrificing the golden goose.³ Instead of maintaining affirmative action while eliminating patent and invidious discrimination against Asian Americans, the programs were defended socially and legally as is, with denial that there was any discrimination going on.⁴

One of the key aspects of this that I think is being ignored, is the facts about how the discrimination was done. The complaint isn’t that qualified Asian American applicants would be evaluated but regrettably rejected for a class-level objective of racial diversity. As Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote last year:

as evidence in the Harvard case in particular suggested, the practice of race-conscious admissions is not what has limited the number of Asian American students; it is instead the parts of the process in which Harvard claims not to think about race at all

It was that individual Asian applicants systematically received lower personality scores (first instituted to keep out Jews)⁵ that included traits such as:

• likability

• integrity

• helpfulness

• courage

• kindness

• effervescence

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands?

I want to highlight this excerpt from Wesley Yang’s excellent essay in The New York Times that I included in fD[63] and I’ll bring up again here because I think it’s a tour de force:

Earlier this month, we learned that a review of more than 160,000 individual student files contained in six years of Harvard’s admissions data found that Asians outperformed all other racial groups on every measure of academic achievement: grades, SAT scores and the most AP exams passed. They had more extracurricular activities than their white counterparts. They were rated by interviewers who had met them as virtually on par with their white counterparts in their personal qualities. Yet Harvard admissions officers, many of whom had never met these applicants, scored them collectively as the worst of all groups in the one area — personality — that was subjective enough to be readily manipulable to serve Harvard’s institutional interests.

The mechanism of how this program worked was by labeling Asian American applicants with these harmful and dehumanizing stereotypes.

In the abstract it’s almost comical, and how you get baldly hilarious headlines like the one assigned to Yang’s essay (“Harvard Is Wrong That Asians Have Terrible Personalities”). But then you remember the opening of that essay:

There’s a moving passage contained in a deposition taken in the major class-action lawsuit accusing Harvard University of racial bias against Asian-Americans. An attorney for Students for Fair Admissions, the nonprofit group representing a dozen Asian-Americans denied admission by Harvard, confronts the assistant principal of Stuyvesant High School with evidence that white students applying to Harvard in 2014 from her school were more than twice as likely to be admitted to the university as were her Asian-American students.

The assistant principal, Casey Pedrick, starts to cry.

(Witness crying.)

Q. I’m sorry this is upsetting to you. Do you want to take a break?

A. (Witness shakes her head no.)

Q. You want to keep going? Do you want to tell me why this is so upsetting to you?

A. Because these numbers make it seem like there’s discrimination, and I love these kids, and I know how hard they work. So these just look like numbers to all you guys, but I see their faces.

It pains me because I think the particular flavor of racism that Asian Americans often experience is one that effaces our individuality.⁶ What is personality if not individuality?

Parties on all sides emphasize how elite universities serve as pipelines to leadership. Is it hard then to imagine the corrosive effect disseminated by university administrations engaging in this behavior, into the classes they shape and into the elite pools they claim to feed? Is it hard to imagine how these exact harmful stereotypes circulated by these university admissions programs might seep into polite society and end up collecting in the damp, unlit gutters of American racial consciousness, where questions about Asians having worse personalities are heard… only to be answered in turn by another unsettling question: well, don’t they?

It’s a question I think asked by more than care to admit, including Asian Americans, but one that deserves to be asked in the open, in the light, and not masked by contorted logic and willful blindness.

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On another note, it’s not historically unusual that Asian Americans would have to champion their own fight against discrimination and demand for fairness. Of course, there’s fair room for disagreement among Asian Americans on affirmative action but there’s an aspect to this debate that I find frankly painful and embarrassing.

That’s the remarkable prevalence of false social “leadership” on the part of Asian American activists and groups who decry any opposition or discomfort with affirmative action as a sort of internalized white supremacy or worse, that Asian Americans are being manipulated by white supremacist forces (led of course here by the Jewish American, Edward Blum) to act against our own self-interest and as a “wedge” among minorities.

It’s odd that an ideological group in favor of a more substantive conception of pan-Asian American identity (e.g. Asian American ethnic studies majors) couldn’t possibly identify an Asian American agency and collective interest in this case. While socioeconomic class and recency of immigration predictably divide internal opinions, I think it’s a shame that Asian Americans in our country’s cultural elite would go to such lengths to mischaracterize and malign the community they purport to represent. As for concerns about Asian Americans finding a place in the American left, there should be more courage in offering internal critique. Any true coalition of minority⁷ interest groups fighting for common causes would be stronger for the honesty.

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Finally, I thought the Christopher Caldwell essay in the NYT raised interesting questions about demographics and history:

But something is different. When majorities discriminate against their own kind, as largely white universities did in the early days of affirmative action, it may not feel like a bad kind of discrimination. It may not feel like discrimination at all. It may even feel like magnanimity. But the biracial historical context that used to tug at consciences, pushing admissions officers (and the parents of rejected students) to a more indulgent understanding of affirmative action, is gone.

After half a century of high immigration, the United States has become a multiracial country, and affirmative action has turned into a different kind of program. Building diverse student bodies now requires treating Asian overrepresentation as a problem to be solved. This means discriminating by race in a way that is radically more direct and intrusive.

The first intuition of course is that it’s wrong for Asian Americans, who have their own history of discrimination in the US, to face further discrimination to set right historical wrongs that happened long before most Asian immigrants arrived.

I think the way affirmative action was practiced was wrong, but not because Asian Americans have no connection to that part of American history.⁸ In the context of our nation, Asian Americans carry not just a literal ancestry as Asians. We obtain the civic ancestry of this country as Americans, an inheritance that not only guarantees our individual freedoms and equal treatment before the law but also confers a collective American responsibility to redress the legacy of slavery.⁹

1. My application year is included in the data submitted into discovery

2. I think you can see the downstream effects of an affirmative action culture in society such as the rise in race-based rationing of medical care

3. Yes the Court effectively overturned Grutter but the majority basically found that the rules laid down in Grutter were being violated as well

4. I got an email from the university the day of the decision that achieved the impressive feat of including that “the Court held that Harvard College’s admissions system does not comply with the principles of the equal protection clause” without mentioning the word “Asian” once

5. Sociologist Jerome Karabel, who wrote an authoritative book on the history of admissions in the Ivy League, will disagree with me here. I think his argument is worth reading but I find it unpersuasive in light of some of the facts I highlight here and in fD[91]. Certainly, the motivations behind using the personality scores now are nobler than when they were first used to exclude Jews but nonetheless, they’ve had the same effect when it comes to Asian Americans, especially in the perpetuation of stereotypes. Furthermore, Karabel points out that the scores were effective in dramatically reducing Jewish matriculation after their introduction whereas recent Ivy classes have high percentages of Asian American students. Karabel fails to consider that there was no regime under which Asians were admitted without personality scores that would allow us to make a similar before/after comparison. And then there’s the fact that the rate of Asian admission remained steady for decades as the population of Asian Americans doubled and suspiciously started rising after Harvard was sued by SFFA. And as mentioned, I also have problems with his claim that the number of amicus curiae briefs submitted by Asian American groups in favor of Harvard somehow represents a consensus about, much less approval of, affirmative action among Asian Americans.

6. A startling excerpt from a Gersen essay published last fall in The New Yorker

In constitutional debates about the issue, both sides like to lay claim to Justice John Marshall Harlan’s celebrated dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson—the 1896 case that notoriously held that requiring separate train cars for Black and white passengers did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, and that was eventually overruled in Brown v. Board of Education. Harlan wrote, “In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”…

But read just a bit further in Harlan’s famous dissent, and you’re hit with a meaning that’s not so debatable, in lines that are not so frequently quoted: “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race”…

In the Senate, lawmakers supporting the exclusion of Chinese called them a “degraded and inferior race,” and said that their “machine-like” ways made it difficult for U.S. laborers to compete. (The law was repealed in 1943, just in time for the Court to hold that the internment of Japanese Americans did not violate the Constitution.)

7. It won’t be long before America will become “minority white” and it already is in the younger, and I’d say here relevant, age cohorts (Brookings)

the nation will become “minority white” in 2045… for youth under 18–the post-millennial population–minorities will outnumber whites in 2020. For those age 18-29–members of the younger labor force and voting age populations–the tipping point will occur in 2027.

8. On the history of Asian Americans in the Civil War. Interesting on both sides

9. “Black and White Americans are far apart in their views of reparations for slavery” (Pew Research)