You are right. Some things go way back, like Harvard’s antisemitic institution of a “character” rating in the '20s, in order to exclude those pesky smart Jewish boys who were outcompeting the good old WASP boys. That heavily weighted “Personal” rating is being used to the same effect even now, although now it is the Asians who (at least as of the 2018 lawsuit) are being dinged. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html
This is why I say it may get more interesting, depending upon how the Supreme Court rules in June 2023.
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Harvard’s history of systematic bias is undeniable, shameful for its time and even more so with the comfortable and omnipotent benefit of hindsight. In that shame Harvard does not stand alone or uniquely in the constantly evolving institutions of American life, but such failings might usefully be seen in the context of efforts to do better over time. The Harvard of today is not the Harvard of the 1920s, and the Harvard of 2120s will not be the Harvard of today. Let’s hope for, and more importantly, work for the better!
In the current case (orchestrated and funded by a person with a particular political ax to grind), it’s useful to note without rehashing the entire matter that the plaintiffs lost their case on the merits and also on appeal and that of those admitted to the recent Harvard class of 2026, 27.8% are self-identified as Asian-American. This already exceeds the marginal deficit that the plaintiffs had attributed to Harvard’s alleged bias. Moreover, it is perhaps useful to apply a sense of scale: the plaintiff’s own claim was that the average number of students denied because of bias amounted to a grand total of 47 per year not offered admission, a number of Asian American candidates that Harvard has at this point already far exceeded in adding.
Was it the court case or some other factor? No one outside of admissions knows. And no one knows what happened to those theoretical 47 students a year. Even if that number were real, did they end up at Yale, or Princeton, or maybe at their state flagship? If so, what is the real level of harm suffered compared to the harms Harvard and other schools are trying to address with engineering access for underrepresented minorities and those from challenging economic circumstances? It seems to me that these days, students good enough to get into Harvard but who don’t probably land pretty well on their feet elsewhere.
As for SCOTUS, that is an interesting question that I suspect would be difficult to discuss unemotionally in this format.
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Certainly, the students whom Harvard excluded for over 30 years because they were Jewish did land on their feet - they made CCNY their own “Ivy”, and went on to dominate most academic and professional fields in this country for over 50 years. That doesn’t mitigate whatsoever the unaddressed shame of Harvard’s long history of institutionalized antisemitism. Nor does the fact that Asian students, excluded by Harvard’s more recent admissions policies, surely did “land pretty well on their feet elsewhere”, make up for the fact of that racist policy, which has not been totally repealed.
When the UCs first complied with race-blind admissions, nearly half the admitted class at Berkeley was Asian. (This was before the UCs decided to scrap standardized test scores in order to manipulate the racial balance of the class.) The fact that 28% of those admitted to Harvard recently are Asian doesn’t mean that there isn’t an anti-Asian selection bias, if race-blind admissions would have resulted in half the class being Asian. Even Lowell let in 10% Jews under his antisemitic quota.
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I respect your opinion and will just leave it at that.