America’s oldest and most prestigious institution of higher learning, Harvard University, has found itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit filed by a coalition of sixty-four Asian and Asian-American groups
writes
Benny Huang.
The plaintiffs allege that the
university’s admissions policies are discriminatory; which, in fact,
they are. Asian applicants must meet higher academic standards than any
other racial or ethnic group. That’s usually called discrimination.
I will part ways with most
conservatives here and say that I hope the Asian plaintiffs lose their
case, though not because I like Harvard’s discriminatory policy. I hate
it. The only thing more loathsome than their policy, however, is private
sector nondiscrimination laws which are intrusive and arbitrarily
enforced. Granted, I believe that Harvard should lose its federal
funding, though not because it practices racial discrimination. Harvard
should be weaned from the government teet because it’s private. The
taxpayer shouldn’t have to subsidize any private university.
Nonetheless, the lawsuit serves an important purpose—to show the world that affirmative action has real victims.
… The academic metrics of the [various]
racial groups form an embarrassing and (for some) troubling hierarchy,
with Asians on top, followed by whites, then Hispanics, and finally,
blacks. Harvard and many other universities have responded to the tiered
abilities of racial groups with a tiered set of standards. The lowest
performing group is judged by the lowest standard and the highest
performing group is judged by the highest standard.
… Proponents of affirmative action don’t
like to admit that the policy harms anyone. Blacks and Hispanics benefit
because it affords them opportunities they wouldn’t have otherwise
received, while whites and Asians supposedly benefit because they are
exposed to a diverse student body. Everyone’s a winner, so what’s to
complain about?
Plenty, actually. My hope for this lawsuit is that it will force
academia as a whole to come face to face with the real victims of
affirmative action and to admit that they’ve been screwing people for
the last forty years. We don’t all “win” when we hold down some to lift
up others. Admissions standards are, as the black Berkeley professor
Bill Banks once remarked, “an algebraic formula with human casualties.”
University admissions, like so many things in life, are a zero sum
game, a pie that can only be sliced so many ways. A bigger slice for one
group necessarily means a smaller slice for another, although fretting
about one race getting a slice that’s “too big” implies that there’s
some theoretical correct size, a notion born out of the all-too-human
tendency toward tribalism.
We can and should resist the impulse to play us-against-them in
university admissions, but that would require a colorblind, merit-based
admissions process, which some people are just unwilling to accept.
Those words—merit and colorblind—are like fingernails on the chalkboard
to supporters of affirmative action, which explains why they’ve tried,
with some success, to banish them from acceptable discourse. My advice
is to keep using them. They are not racist code words, just concepts
that sore losers don’t like. When we avoid using them we grant the
premise that they are illusory and irrelevant.
The concept of merit and the ideal of colorblindness must also be
counted among the victims of affirmative action. Though not quite dead
and buried, they’ve been fighting for their lives since at least the
1970s. The Indian immigrant Dinesh D’Souza wrote about the demise of
merit in favor of “diversity” in his 1991 book “Illiberal Education.”
… “Basically what [test scores and GPAs] measure is
privilege,” [a black student activist, Kimberly Smith,] said to D’Souza. What she means is that the whole
system is built from the ground up for white people, by white people.
“People of color” can’t compete on the white man’s uneven playing field
and they shouldn’t have to.
That would make more sense if “people of color” weren’t lighting up the scoreboard; it just happens that they’re the wrong
color—mostly yellow with some brown people from the Indian
subcontinent. If academic achievement indicates only “privilege,” as
Smith posited, then Asians must be the most aristocratic of the
aristocrats.
