you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Harvard’s Affirmative Action Rationale Is Bogus: Defending its race-based admissions, the college attempts to appeal to originalists on the Supreme Court.

Harvard seems to be refuting this principle of colorblindness, writing that the “collective understanding” of the 39th Congress “chose ‘equal protection’ over language SFFA would have preferred and authorized numerous race-conscious measures incompatible with SFFA’s absolutist view.” But if colorblindness—that is, the removal of all distinctions based on race—is not the ideal for which the Court and the nation should strive, then what alternative does Harvard propose?

The answer is: we don’t know. More precisely, we don’t know when or under what conditions Harvard, if left to its own devices, would finally remove the racial classifications from its admissions process. Ten years from now? Twenty? A century from now? A skeptic would note that prestigious traditions tend to die hard—and that, after nearly 30 years of alleged racial discrimination against Asians, Harvard’s racial “balancing” has in fact become such a tradition.

It has long been established that Asian-Americans and whites suffer disproportionately due to Harvard’s race-based admissions, which have created an upswell of resentment from frustrated Asian and white college applicants. In his expert witness testimony, Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono estimates that an Asian-American with a 25 percent chance of admission to Harvard would have a 33 percent chance if he or she were white, a 75 percent chance if Hispanic, and a 95 percent chance if black. Furthermore, the average Asian-American admittee to Harvard had SAT scores roughly 120 points higher than blacks admitted and 50 points higher than whites. (This is a low estimate, as a third or more of Asian applicants would have scored higher than the maximum SAT score had the maximum been increased.)

Harvard uses the word “tip” to describe its racial preferences, but the preferences are in fact massive boosts to an applicants’ admission chances. The self-described “tip” for athletes, for example, moves their chances of admission from 6 percent to 86 percent. Another “tip,” for legacy applications, moves their chances from 6 percent to 34 percent, and one for Dean’s interest list students (most likely children of significant donors to Harvard) moves their chances from 6 percent to 42 percent. And applicants receive a comparably large boost for being the right race. Harvard’s “tip” system certainly contravenes Justice Harlan’s notion that the “race line” should be removed from our institutions. If Harvard is sincerely interested in what it calls in its brief “a genuinely diverse environment,” it should consider eliminating the legacy and child-of-donor incentives that benefit children from wealthy backgrounds before it seeks to deny merit-based opportunity to Asian students.

So long as Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court case now at issue, remains precedent, Harvard will be free to discriminate on the basis of race. The Supreme Court should strike down that precedent and get America’s colorblind ideal back on track.