Yesterday, a Wall Street Journal
article entitled "Harvard's Asian Problem" whose last paragraph stated:
"Let's hope that day is getting closer. . . the Supreme Court has allowed schools to pursue diversity on campus in what it called a "holistic" way. Now we see that in pursuit of diversity, schools treat some minorities as less equal than others based solely on race. Nothing holistic-or constitutional-about that." (emphasis added by S. B.)
Today, NY Times, nation's
most prestigious liberal newspaper, came out with this op-ed article: "Is Harvard Unfair to AsAms?",
written by Yascha Mounk who teaches at Harvard. He plainly states that Asian Am. students have been racially discriminated just
like the Jews of the past years. Read it for yourself:
"NEARLY a
century ago, Harvard had a big problem: Too many Jews. By 1922, Jews
accounted for 21.5 percent of freshmen, up from 7 percent in 1900 and vastly
more than at Yale or Princeton. In the Ivy League, only Columbia and the
University of Pennsylvania had a greater proportion of Jews.
Harvard's president, A. Lawrence
Lowell, warned that the "Jewish invasion" would "ruin the
college." He wanted a cap: 15 percent. When faculty members balked, he
stacked the admissions process to achieve the same result. Bolstered by the
nativism of the time, which led to sharp immigration restrictions, Harvard's
admissions committee began using the euphemistic criteria of "character
and fitness" to limit Jewish enrollment. As the sociologist Jerome
Karabel has documented, these practices worked for the next three
decades to suppress the number of Jewish students.
A similar injustice is at work
today, against Asian-Americans. To get into the top schools, they need SAT
scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white
peers. In 2008, over half of all applicants to Harvard with exceptionally high
SAT scores were Asian, yet they made up only 17 percent of the entering class (now
20 percent). Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in America, but their
proportion of Harvard undergraduates has been flat for two decades.
A new lawsuit filed on behalf of
Asian-American applicants offers strong evidence that Harvard engages in racial
"balancing." Admissions numbers for each racial and
ethnic group have remained strikingly similar, year to year. Damningly, those
rare years in which an unusually high number of Asians were admitted were
followed by years in which especially few made the cut.
The most common defense of the
status quo is that many Asian-American applicants do well on tests but lack
intangible qualities like originality or leadership. As early as 1988, William
R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions, said that they were
"slightly less strong on extracurricular criteria."
Even leaving aside the disturbing
parallel with how Jews were characterized, there is little evidence that this
is true. A new study of over 100,000 applicants to the University of
California, Los Angeles, found no significant correlation between race and
extracurricular achievements.
The truth is not that Asians have
fewer distinguishing qualities than whites; it's that - because of a
longstanding depiction of Asians as featureless or even interchangeable - they
are more likely to be perceived as lacking in individuality. (As one Harvard
admissions officer noted on the file of an Asian-American applicant, "He's
quiet and, of course, wants to be a doctor.")
The contribution Jews made to
American life in the decades after they were maligned as unoriginal, grasping
careerists speaks for itself. There is no reason to believe that today's
Asian-Americans will leave less of a mark. . . . .
. . . It's perfectly fair to consider extracurriculars as an
important factor in admissions. But the current system is so opaque that it is
easy to conceal discrimination behind vague criteria like "intangible
qualities" or the desire for a "well-rounded class." These
criteria were used to exclude an overachieving minority in the days of Lowell,
and they serve the same purpose today. For reasons both legal and moral, the
onus is on the schools to make their admissions criteria more transparent - not to use
them as fig leavesfor excluding some students simply because they happen to be
Asian."
(Emphasis added by S. B.)
Wow! Need I
say more?
However, the battle
is NOT won yet. Anyone recently denied admission to a competitive school
please go tell your story on Ed Blum's
website. Together, we shall overcome.
Do You Remember?
A few year back the only AsAm voice in the college admissions debate was from OCA, AAJC (Washington D.C.), JACL, AALDEF (Margaret Fung), & APALC (Stewart Kwoh of LA). They as a group filed repeated amicus briefs in SUPPORT of race preference admissions at the expense of AsAm students.
2.5 years ago,
80-20 took a survey of 50,000 AsAms on this issue, and OPPPOSED race-preference admissions. How things have changed!
Help to keep 80-20 alive and DONATE. Forward
to AsAm students.
S. B. Woo, a volunteer
President, 80-20 Nat'l
AsAm Educational Foundation, Inc.
