In Harvard case, stereotypical descriptions betray the bias

After months of seeming inactivity, the Harvard University admissions lawsuit sprang back into the news on Oct 1.

You may recall that Harvard University was sued in November 2014 by a group of Asian American students. The group, Students for Fair Admissions, said their applications to the university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had been rejected while students of other ethnicities with lower scores on national tests had been admitted.

The SFFA lawsuit claimed that Harvard discriminates against Asians. It does so by setting a quota on ethnic Asian students it accepts.

Hearings in the case concluded Nov 2 last year, and an unexpectedly lengthy silence followed before the ruling was handed down.

Here’s the opening of The Wall Street Journal’s report on the ruling: “Harvard University can racially discriminate in admissions against Asian-Americans to achieve a more diverse student body. That’s the startling essence of a federal judge’s ruling Tuesday that turns the 1964 Civil Rights Act on its head and seems destined for the Supreme Court.”

The Civil Rights Act outlaws discrimination based on race, religion, gender, national origin and skin color. If the SFFA students were denied admission solely because of their Asian ethnicity, it would appear that Harvard patently broke the law.

But law cases are rarely that cutand-dried.

Competition to get into Harvard is fierce. According to the university, it had more than 43,000 applications for the class of 2022. Only 2,400 were accepted.

It would be safe to assume that prospective students of many ethnic groups — not to mention religions, gender, national origins or color — who had scored as highly as the SFFA students on national tests were also turned away by Harvard.

Harvard says it doesn’t deny anyone admission on the basis of race. It weighs a mixture of factors, such as test scores, general intelligence, range of interests, personality, social background, sociability and special skills.

Harvard representatives testified in court that a student’s race, specifically whether an applicant was of a racial minority in the United States, was a factor that could weigh only in their favor for admission.

Given the history in the United States since the late 1960s of “affirmative action” — a policy of bias in favor of people of the categories protected under the Civil Rights Act when it comes to employment, schooling and housing — that testimony is credible.

Along with her ruling on Oct 1, Federal Judge Allison Burroughs of the US District Court in Boston, Massachusetts, issued a 130-page explanation of her findings, which The Harvard Crimson, the university’s newspaper, analyzed. The following passage from that analysis hits on what to my mind is a crucial factor in the case.

“Burroughs homed in on SFFA’s argument that Harvard disadvantages many Asian American students by evaluating them with negative subjective descriptors like ‘bland’, ‘quiet’ and ‘not exciting’. Though she acknowledged stereotypes faced by many Asian Americans, Burroughs found that SFFA did not prove that Harvard ever described students with words like ‘quiet’ simply because they were Asian American.”

The suggestion is that these descriptions are objectively justified. But the adjectives used in these stereotypes clearly show bias in describing Asian characteristics compared with, say, white American stereotypical characteristics, which might be described as their opposite.

Just to drive home the point, let’s compare them with equally slanted wording for my fellow Americans, say as many Europeans might describe them: Asians — bland, quiet, not exciting; Americans — abrasive, loudmouthed and overthe-top.

Or would those words, too, describe objective realities?

The case is expected to be appealed and to ultimately reach the US Supreme Court.