<p>
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Given the choice between the two institutions, students tend to choose to come to MIT. Which means that MIT in someway offers something to the students that Caltech does not… I believe it's the social atmosphere they create here, BY, sure, concocting it a bit during admissions… You can argue all day about whether it's fair or it is not but when it comes down to it it's the results that matter. And MIT or whatever school's methods have produced good results.
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<p>And one reason Harvard is a bigger deal than Columbia is that the former instituted a Jew quota in time and the latter didn't. I'm not suggesting the situations are comparable. But the popularity and prestige of the outcome are not the only qualities by which posterity will judge a policy.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, your cynicism in the last post warms my heart -- it really does. I'm glad that someone pointed out that MIT pursues its interests and students pursue theirs, and that's the way it is. You're just not a very good cynic yet -- you suffer from a little tunnel vision. You forgot that the game has participants beside MIT and its applicants. There are also you and me. And 299,999,998 other people, to estimate conservatively. In the long run, universities -- and other corporations, by the way -- have to care a lot about what these seemingly irrelevant individuals think. So when you say,
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"Fair" is then out of the question.
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you're wrong.</p>
<p>That debate that starts in the freshman dorm hallway where one guy says, "Fairness and justice matter" and the other guy says, "No, only power matters" does have a resolution. Both matter. Power in the obvious way, but fairness and justice matter too, or at least the norms about those things held by the broader society and enforced through political and economic institutions (which are, of course, instruments of power).</p>
<p>I don't mean to get too abstract. Universities, at least ones that get vast amounts of public money, are answerable to society's ideas about what they ought to do -- not in an abstract way, but in a quite concrete Congress-can-regulate-their-behavior kind of way. So the debate about the legitimacy and fairness of MIT's affirmative action policies matters.</p>
<p>While this point is lost on pebbles, it is definitely not lost on MIT. The institution has devoted tremendous resources to making the difficult argument that its self-interested affirmative action policies also mesh with social ideas about fairness. They don't do that because filing Supreme Court briefs is fun (or cheap), but because policies widely considered unfair don't fare well in the long run.</p>
<p>But the policy in question is unfair, and most</a> Americans agree with me and not with you or MIT. It's unfair when student B grows up in a better neighborhood than student A, has richer parents, goes to a better school, and isn't quite as smart -- to the point where not a single professor would say B is smarter than A -- but B gets in and A doesn't; that alone is unfair, but it's more unfair when the reason is race. And the reason, at least as of 1999, often is</a> race:
[quote]
“We do have affirmative action at MIT which means that we will admit every qualified African American, Mexican American, Puerto Rican and Native American student in our pool,” [Dean of Admissions Marilee] Jones said.<a href="But%20I%20don't%20need%20to%20tell%20you%20that%20not%20every%20qualified%20student%20of%20other%20races%20gets%20in.%20Admissions%20says%20that%20plenty.">/quote</a> It's simple. A policy that benefits</a> mostly upper middle class minorities in the name of a crude numerical equality is an offensive, racist anachronism. And an injustice. It's not a massive injustice, but it's an injustice. And it doesn't stop being wrong because it's not big. Nor does it stop being wrong if its perpetrated by a private institution. Nor does it stop being wrong if, as you astutely point out, it serves MIT's interests. </p>
<p>MIT does have the right, for now, to do something self-interested that I and most others think is unfair. But it sure doesn't have a right to a free pass on it. Unsavory conversations like this are part of the price you pay (look! cynicism!). I'm always puzzled by the displeasure expressed by defenders of the policy, and of MIT at large, when people correctly remark that AA benefits some people over others just because of physical traits, in stark and offensive contrast to MIT's and America's broader ideals. (And the less clueless the person saying this, the more offended they get.) What, did you expect us not to notice? To piously accept that the admissions process is complex and so it's fair for you to implement whatever bias is convenient that day, no matter how obviously backwards the results are? I'm sympathetic to the observation that opponents of AA can be unrealistic, but that right there is the la-la land part of your argument. A defective policy deserves no deference. The public has the right to protest a process -- even a private process -- that's unjust. People will watch and read and write and vote to express their discontent with an injustice, private or public. Often, that's the way they stop the injustice.</p>
<p>So that's why, every chance I get, I point out the problems with the patronizing policy of different scales for different colors. It's not much, but it's a way to impose costs, if only small ones, for choosing what's easy over what's right. I think you'd agree that this is the cynical thing to do.</p>