Harvard faces accusations of race bias
We Americans sometimes refer to the United States as “The Great Melting Pot”, a land of immigrants.
Though we celebrate our ethnic diversity, we have blended into a nation of people with a common sense of values.
It’s a notion many of us hold to be true, but also one sorely tested by ethnic and racial strains and inequities.
A common battleground is education, and a recent filing in a lawsuit has turned up the heat in the melting pot.
An organization representing a group of Asian-American students recently filed new papers in an admissions bias lawsuit against Harvard University alleging a study of university documents reveals a pattern of underappreciation for Asian-American character.
It claims “Harvard consist- ently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like ‘positive personality,’ likability, courage, kindness and being ‘widely respected,’ according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records”, The New York Times reported on June 15.
The lawsuit was brought by Students for Fair Admissions, an organization whose website posts the statement, “A student’s race and ethnicity should not be factors that either harm or help that student to gain admission to a competitive university.”
In itself, that seems more than reasonable, but there is another side to the issue.
All minority groups in the US have faced discrimination, some considerably more than others, and this has caused some longstanding inequities. To address these, the government, businesses and education facilities have adopted “affirmative action” policies.
Regarding education, the thinking is that underprivileged minorities have less chance to gain admission to a top university because of economic and social hardships from discrimination.
So some minorities get slightly preferential treatment in admissions in the hope this will set off a reaction in their communities that ultimately lifts racial statistics to levels that reflect the racial balance of the population.
Such admission policies are controversial and have been challenged in the courts as being themselves intrinsically racist. But the US Supreme Court has upheld the legality of considering race in college enrollment.
A survey of the Ivy League schools (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Princeton, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania) show that Asians — 5.7 percent of the general population — are comparatively well represented. In 2016 and 2017, Asian admission rates at Ivy League schools ranged from 13 to 21.5 percent of the total.
At Harvard, Asians accounted for 13 percent of new students, Hispanics — 18.1 percent of the US population — stood at 7.6 percent, and blacks — 13 percent of the population — at just 5 percent.
In US colleges on the whole, racial inequalities have slowly been diminishing, but are far from resolved. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, from 1977 to 2015, the proportion of whites among recipients of secondary degrees dropped by 23 percentage points to 66.5 percent; blacks rose by 4.1 percentage points to 10.6; Hispanics rose by 9.9 percentage points to 12 percent; and Asian/Pacific islanders rose by 5.4 percentage points to 7.4 percent.
Getting back to the lawsuit, I wonder how on earth could Harvard objectively assess how kind or “well respected” a student is? And why would it? Likability? Courage? What unmitigated gall!