No wonder, discriminating against asians, white, men, high iq, christians is considered acceptable in todays world.
We are getting to a point where even violence against "non-woke" becomes acceptable. See antifa or the recent violence against butchers from radical vegans in France.
I read that Harvard is bringing back segregated graduation ceremonies. As a lifelong non-white let me just say, that’s pretty disturbing if true. All the progress of the last 50 years discarded in an instant.
> especially in the context of a far-right that routinely murders people.
And you just repeated the exact same silly claim you disputed, but you switched the political affiliation!
Is every single act of violence by a liberal "antifa"? Of course not. Therefore, it seems silly to pretend every act of violence by a conservative is "the far right" which are a particular (abhorrent) set of political views.
Maybe the "terrible personalities" is an observation of a symptom, which is triggered by being at Harvard, or from the process of getting into Harvard? NOT some universal truth about all Asians. Maybe not even all Asians at Harvard. Maybe its not even a truth at all.
The issue discussed is that Harvard consistently rates Asian candidates as having "poor personality". They never got into the school, because of that assessment.
That low rating is relative to other ethnic groups.
Are you suggesting that submitting an application to Harvard somehow makes Asians (but not other ethnicities!) have bad personality?
Can we just call a spade a spade? "Terrible personality" is a euphemism designed to give plausible deniability for admission decisions. The metric itself is fungible and subjective enough that they could ascribe any number they please to any individual.
There was a systemic effort decades ago to reduce the Jewish admission rate, and now there's a systemic effort to reduce the Asian admission rate. History may not repeat but it certainly does rhyme
The Asian admission rate reduction at Harvard has been going on for almost 20 years now. At least since I was in high school. I had an asian friend who didn't get into Harvard because they had admitted his older brother two years before _and they told him this in his rejection letter_...
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up 25% of their admissions. They don't collect statistics on white, those who choose not to identify or other. Kind of hard to argue a bias. It seems like if anything the school is actively trying to be less homogenous, not more.
More realistic than the notion that Harvard wrote the reason for a rejection in any of the tens of thousands of rejection letters they send every year. Sounds very much like a “friend of a friend” story.
> History may not repeat but it certainly does rhyme
“'When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ' Bannon said, trailing off. 'A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society'" [1].
> "To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way, which is at the same time straightforward and effective,” wrote A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the 1920s, “and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admission authorities"
I don't necessarily disagree with the idea that Harvard's admission practices should include other factors, but if they are receiving tax breaks there should be a federal / state-level monitor to evaluate the admissions practices. It's ridiculous to apply arbitrary criteria while they enjoy tax exempt status.
If an educational institution wishes to apply capricious standards, let them pay taxes.
From reading HN the last time this controversy came up, I've come with a possibility.
I think a portion of it is that if you judge based solely on academics then you will only get a certain type of person who is focused on scores in academics. You could easily fill your class with the top X% of scorers but that won't necessarily make an interesting group of graduates in the real world. It especially won't make an interesting group of people to interact with. I don't think I'd go to that school even if I had been admitted.
I think part of it is that they're hoping to find people who will end up being important people in the world. Not necessarily just those who perform well academically.
Academic performance is mostly a disqualifier to figure out if someone would be successful enough. Harvard, doesn't really care about the GPA of its existing students which is why they also don't care about grade inflation. They're looking for signals that you'll succeed outside of academia. If you want to go to Harvard, stop looking at the application as a checklist. The best applicants are differentiated beyond the classroom.
Harvard has around 1000 admissions spots in any year. I think there are roughly 30,000 people who score a SAT 2200+ in a given year. Say half of those a have A level GPA. At that point there's more significant non-academic differences, than academic differences.
I think we would agree that non-academic considerations are important. I wouldn't say that academic performance is a disqualifier, which makes it sounds like there's an inverse correlation between academic performance and success.
Sure that's why they have an entire category called extra curriculars, which Asian applicants also do well on. The only category they score low on is personality, which measures, through a half hour interview, such lofty ideals as courage and leadership. It's obviously just there so Harvard can give a subjective score to balance out their racial ratios.
Because they think a "diverse" student body is better than one comprised of the best possible students, so they tweak the process to admit more blacks and hispanics.
I think it would just be easier to be more honest about it rather than judge by "personality."
One criterion which would actually achieve what they want (and in fact greatly improve the diversity of any university) is to take into account the income/wealth background of applicants. It would not only allow more people of color, it would also open up the application process to poor white folk too who are also in a disadvantaged position in society. If there is anything that Harvard and Ivy's lack, it is the perspective of working people.
The same reason that employers don't give all applicants a standard test and hire the people with the best scores. The culture of a school is something that people think is important and you can't control that culture by accepting people based purely off of academics. That is why things like admission interviews exist and kids have always picked up electives in high school that would "look good on a college application".
This practice has certainly been abused in the past and you can argue it is still being abused, but I don't think that means that judging a kid based on anything beyond academics is a bad move for colleges.
Who of us can really judge another person's personality objectively anyway especially from a short interview. Anyone with a history of high academic performance clearly has the personality to succeed academicly.
Because the postmodernist view is based on "identity" - race, gender, ethnicity - not academic achievement or merit. They see any system that doesn't produce the outcomes they prefer as inherently racist and bigoted.
> She doesn’t see her students as an arrogant, privileged “ethnic group” who think they “own admission” to these high-performing schools, as the new chancellor of New York City Schools, Richard Carranza, recently put it.
This statement was made in response to complaints about "a plan to change the way students are admitted to New York’s elite public high schools" that would correct a perceived overrepresentation of Asian students at the schools [1].
"'I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools,' [Carranza] said on Fox 5 New York."
Is culture fit typically being used to conceal discrimination? I always assumed that "culture fit" was actually about culture and personality. I don't even think it's necessarily an euphemism, I'd probably use these words to describe why I don't belong in a Java shop.
Although, 90% of the time it probably means "must be friends with the CEO or willing to work overtime".
Welp... looks like we solved the crisis. Just stop asking for ethnic status. If the "character" aspect of the application is truly about character they wouldn't need the ethnicity questions
Harvard has good company (quote from the article about Gregory Perelman)
"Leningrad University’s maths department had a quota of two Jews per year among 350 students. Its Moscow equivalent was more zealous and actively investigated all candidates for traces of a Jewish background. Students with Jewish sounding names were refused entry, just in case."
Harvard's admissions policies do not have discrimination as a deliberate goal. Arguments about them are typically about how they can result in effective discrimination or unfairness of some sort.
> At one point, [Harvard President] Lowell wrote to a Harvard philosophy professor to explain that enrolling a high number of Jewish students would "ruin the college" by causing elite Protestant students to attend other schools, according to Karabel's book. Harvard would be ruined "not because Jews of bad character have come; but the result follows from the coming in large numbers of Jews of any kind, save those few who mingle readily with the rest of the undergraduate body," Lowell wrote in the letter.
"Lawrence Lowell, Harvard's president from 1909-1933"
Harvard's current policies do not explicitly have discrimination as a goal. They'd get sued to hell and nobody would go there if they did. Can Harvard's policies have effective bias or be applied in a biased way? Sure. But the Soviet stuff was not remotely as subtle, let alone subject to any kind of legal remedy.
> Harvard's admissions policies do not have discrimination as a deliberate goal.
Apparently this "personality rating" was initially included in the Harvard application process explicitly to discriminate against Jews:
From the OP:
> Harvard has been here before. “To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way, which is at the same time straightforward and effective,” wrote A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the 1920s, “and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admission authorities, based upon the probable value to the candidate, to the College and to the community of his admissions.” The opacity of its admissions procedure could veil what Lowell’s written correspondence would later disclose to be a fully intended policy of discrimination.
Sure. And the Ivies took naked pictures of all incoming students for insane phrenology/eugenics purposes. But the kind of problems reported in the story we're all commenting on are not in the same category as a straightforward 'no Jews'.
Another quote:
"An interesting remark on the subject was made by Israel Gelfand in late 1980-ies, during his pre-seminar schmoozing. He said that, while the discrimination was initially directed against the Jews, it eventually was expanded to include all bright applicants. The reason was that to effect the policy, the admission committees had to be staffed with people willing to be unfair (give super-hard problems to specific individuals) to people they dislike (there was no lack of volunteer anti-Semites). Such people would tend to let their personal feelings affect their fairness across the board, not just towards the "official undesirables". Thus they would let their natural envy towards bright kids negatively affect their fairness. This is why even non-Jewish graduates of the best schools (e.g., 57) found it harder to gain admission."
As someone who was the subject of the quota in USSR, and despite what the article says, I think the story is more nuanced: at least in part, it was an "affirmative action". It's a zero sum game, the number of places was fixed. Good universities were in short supply. Not so good universities normally didn't enforce any quotas (at least in Russia proper; in Soviet Republics like Ukraine, it was more complicated :)
(I cannot prove "affirmative action" part, it's just how I understood it then. Others might disagree)
Right but the parallel here is to Harvard (and top Soviet universities) specifically, not Soviet or American higher education in general. That parallel, while imperfect in many ways, works reasonably well.
In my opinion the situation looks like intentional discrimination. Harvard doesn't want to be too lopsided with Asian students, so they find ways to discriminate against them and keep the ratio lower.
> "Leningrad University’s maths department had a quota of two Jews per year among 350 students. Its Moscow equivalent was more zealous and actively investigated all candidates for traces of a Jewish background. Students with Jewish sounding names were refused entry, just in case."
They also had their own tricky, deniable way to accomplish the their discrimination:
> This is a special collection of problems that were given to select applicants during oral entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. These problems were designed to prevent Jews and other undesirables from getting a passing grade. Among problems that were used by the department to blackball unwanted candidate students, these problems are distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find. Using problems with a simple solution protected the administration from extra complaints and appeals. This collection therefore has mathematical as well as historical value.
It is an odd situation where Asians are academically superior to Westerners, yet Western academic universities are globally considered more "prestigious" than any Asian university.
I don't get why you need to evaluate based on personality to get admission into an educational institution. Just doesn't make sense.
"Harvard’s lawyers will soon tell the highest court in the land that Casey Pedrick’s Asian students are less respected because they are less likable, less courageous, and less kind than all other applicants."
Reminds me of the issues with women being rejected from orchestras because of gender bias. It was improved by introducing blind auditions where all that could be judged was the quality of the performance.
The very idea that anyone could understand a person's personality or character from an essay and 45 minute interview is laughable. On top of this, even trained professionals demonstrate subconscious racial biases in everyday life. This has been confirmed in several psychology studies. It's perfectly valid to question the value of a subjective personality assessment. It opens the door to stereotype-fitting and confirmation bias. I'd also challenge the admissions committee to really observe the way Asian-americans, particularly Asian-american males, are treated on campus at Harvard. It's bizarre and surprising. They're treated with the casual dismissiveness formerly reserved for 1950s housewives. I can't imagine that this attitude doesn't track all the way back through the admissions process.
> I'd also challenge the admissions committee to really observe the way Asian-americans, particularly Asian-american males, are treated on campus at Harvard. It's bizarre and surprising. They're treated with the casual dismissiveness formerly reserved for 1950s housewives.
This.
Microaggressions do exist. I think they are a part of how we naturally arrange ourselves in dominance hierarchies. They are so subtle and natural, it's insane to make such actions a crime, or to create bureaucratic enforcement against them. Those are policies of insanity. That said, I've seen a lot of racially tinged microaggressions as an Asian male.
I don't think this is a case of them actually judging Asian applicants as having a bad personality. There's nothing subjective actually going on here. Harvard was using the only subjective factor in the process to achieve their own goals for affirmative action. This was the only place they thought they could hide putting their finger on the scales.
They failed. Hopefully this blows up in their face as it should. The way to end racial discrimination in this country is to stop discriminating based on race.
You know we could probably leave the personality aspect of the admissions process in and allow more Asians in if they just did away with legacy admissions. Ending legacy admissions makes more room for everyone else but still allows Harvard to maintain subjectivity in admissions.
This seems to be against the purported goal of diversity. It also doesn't address the elephant in the room - Asian students are outperforming other students. Do we know why? My guess is that it's cultural. Correct me if I'm wrong.
The Promise: "Come to our country, where everyone is treated equally and we will make a great multicultural society where we can all live together and learn and experience each other's culture"
The Outcome: Asian parents, generally, raise their kids to value hard work and academic excellence. Asian students end up taking this advice and generally outperform their peers from other communities.
Harvard's Solution: "Your culture is giving you an unfair advantage because other kids are not raised this way. Your culture should be more like everyone else's culture"
Is this diversity? Or are you eventually going to homogenize everything via this method? Is the end goal of diversity to become the Borg?
90 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadWe are getting to a point where even violence against "non-woke" becomes acceptable. See antifa or the recent violence against butchers from radical vegans in France.
Googling for news on "france butchers vegan" brings up stories like these:
http://www.france24.com/en/20180626-france-butchers-vegan-ex...
That this is making news suggests that this violence is not "acceptable".
With you so far...
> especially in the context of a far-right that routinely murders people.
And you just repeated the exact same silly claim you disputed, but you switched the political affiliation!
Is every single act of violence by a liberal "antifa"? Of course not. Therefore, it seems silly to pretend every act of violence by a conservative is "the far right" which are a particular (abhorrent) set of political views.
The issue discussed is that Harvard consistently rates Asian candidates as having "poor personality". They never got into the school, because of that assessment.
That low rating is relative to other ethnic groups.
Are you suggesting that submitting an application to Harvard somehow makes Asians (but not other ethnicities!) have bad personality?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334733
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320360
There was a systemic effort decades ago to reduce the Jewish admission rate, and now there's a systemic effort to reduce the Asian admission rate. History may not repeat but it certainly does rhyme
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up 25% of their admissions. They don't collect statistics on white, those who choose not to identify or other. Kind of hard to argue a bias. It seems like if anything the school is actively trying to be less homogenous, not more.
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
“'When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ' Bannon said, trailing off. 'A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society'" [1].
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/steve-bannon-racist-...
> "To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way, which is at the same time straightforward and effective,” wrote A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the 1920s, “and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admission authorities"
If an educational institution wishes to apply capricious standards, let them pay taxes.
Race is a protected class. Converting to a taxable entity would not protect Harvard Admissions from being racist.
I think a portion of it is that if you judge based solely on academics then you will only get a certain type of person who is focused on scores in academics. You could easily fill your class with the top X% of scorers but that won't necessarily make an interesting group of graduates in the real world. It especially won't make an interesting group of people to interact with. I don't think I'd go to that school even if I had been admitted.
I think part of it is that they're hoping to find people who will end up being important people in the world. Not necessarily just those who perform well academically.
I can understand how #2 is important, but #3 is ripe for personal bias.
A high bar, with people passing it entering lottery quotas is a far fairer way of having both diversity, and removing personal bias from the equation.
Academic performance is mostly a disqualifier to figure out if someone would be successful enough. Harvard, doesn't really care about the GPA of its existing students which is why they also don't care about grade inflation. They're looking for signals that you'll succeed outside of academia. If you want to go to Harvard, stop looking at the application as a checklist. The best applicants are differentiated beyond the classroom.
Really?
You mean signals like parental wealth?
One criterion which would actually achieve what they want (and in fact greatly improve the diversity of any university) is to take into account the income/wealth background of applicants. It would not only allow more people of color, it would also open up the application process to poor white folk too who are also in a disadvantaged position in society. If there is anything that Harvard and Ivy's lack, it is the perspective of working people.
This practice has certainly been abused in the past and you can argue it is still being abused, but I don't think that means that judging a kid based on anything beyond academics is a bad move for colleges.
This statement was made in response to complaints about "a plan to change the way students are admitted to New York’s elite public high schools" that would correct a perceived overrepresentation of Asian students at the schools [1].
"'I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools,' [Carranza] said on Fox 5 New York."
Shockingly, he's still in his post [2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/nyregion/carranza-special...
[2] http://schools.nyc.gov/AboutUs/leadership/Richard+A.+Carranz...
Although, 90% of the time it probably means "must be friends with the CEO or willing to work overtime".
I would have been terribly misidentified on name, my name is very rare in my birth country.
"Leningrad University’s maths department had a quota of two Jews per year among 350 students. Its Moscow equivalent was more zealous and actively investigated all candidates for traces of a Jewish background. Students with Jewish sounding names were refused entry, just in case."
Source: https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2012/02/08/ussrs-bans-j...
Soviet discrimination was straight up just that.
Here's a quote from a summary:
> At one point, [Harvard President] Lowell wrote to a Harvard philosophy professor to explain that enrolling a high number of Jewish students would "ruin the college" by causing elite Protestant students to attend other schools, according to Karabel's book. Harvard would be ruined "not because Jews of bad character have come; but the result follows from the coming in large numbers of Jews of any kind, save those few who mingle readily with the rest of the undergraduate body," Lowell wrote in the letter.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-di...
Harvard's current policies do not explicitly have discrimination as a goal. They'd get sued to hell and nobody would go there if they did. Can Harvard's policies have effective bias or be applied in a biased way? Sure. But the Soviet stuff was not remotely as subtle, let alone subject to any kind of legal remedy.
Apparently this "personality rating" was initially included in the Harvard application process explicitly to discriminate against Jews:
From the OP:
> Harvard has been here before. “To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way, which is at the same time straightforward and effective,” wrote A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the 1920s, “and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admission authorities, based upon the probable value to the candidate, to the College and to the community of his admissions.” The opacity of its admissions procedure could veil what Lowell’s written correspondence would later disclose to be a fully intended policy of discrimination.
They also had their own tricky, deniable way to accomplish the their discrimination:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
> This is a special collection of problems that were given to select applicants during oral entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. These problems were designed to prevent Jews and other undesirables from getting a passing grade. Among problems that were used by the department to blackball unwanted candidate students, these problems are distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find. Using problems with a simple solution protected the administration from extra complaints and appeals. This collection therefore has mathematical as well as historical value.
Thanks.
"Harvard’s lawyers will soon tell the highest court in the land that Casey Pedrick’s Asian students are less respected because they are less likable, less courageous, and less kind than all other applicants."
And that's how you lose out on the best.
http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact...
Ironically the link is from Harvard.
This.
Microaggressions do exist. I think they are a part of how we naturally arrange ourselves in dominance hierarchies. They are so subtle and natural, it's insane to make such actions a crime, or to create bureaucratic enforcement against them. Those are policies of insanity. That said, I've seen a lot of racially tinged microaggressions as an Asian male.
They failed. Hopefully this blows up in their face as it should. The way to end racial discrimination in this country is to stop discriminating based on race.
The Promise: "Come to our country, where everyone is treated equally and we will make a great multicultural society where we can all live together and learn and experience each other's culture"
The Outcome: Asian parents, generally, raise their kids to value hard work and academic excellence. Asian students end up taking this advice and generally outperform their peers from other communities.
Harvard's Solution: "Your culture is giving you an unfair advantage because other kids are not raised this way. Your culture should be more like everyone else's culture"
Is this diversity? Or are you eventually going to homogenize everything via this method? Is the end goal of diversity to become the Borg?