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Military版 - 一篇长的关于大学录取的文章, 值得一看
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1 (共1页)
m******8
发帖数: 1676
W*****B
发帖数: 4796
2
要订阅才能看的

【在 m******8 的大作中提到】
: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/magazine/affirmative-action-asian-
: american-harvard.html

b****d
发帖数: 333
3
截个图?
[在 majia168 (Genuine    Leather  ) 的大作中提到:]
:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/magazine/affirmative-action-asian-
:american-harvard.html
S*******l
发帖数: 4637
4
太长了

【在 b****d 的大作中提到】
: 截个图?
: [在 majia168 (Genuine    Leather  ) 的大作中提到:]
: :https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/magazine/affirmative-action-asian-
: :american-harvard.html

m******8
发帖数: 1676
5
那好像是免费订阅。
我很久以前注册的, 免费, 可以看。
太长没法截图。

【在 W*****B 的大作中提到】
: 要订阅才能看的
h*********4
发帖数: 1
6
我可以看得到,copy paste将就看下吧
Image
CreditCreditPhoto illustration by Joan Wong. Photographs by Ronghui Chen for
The New York Times.
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Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?
A high-profile lawsuit against Harvard is forcing students and their
families to choose sides.
CreditCreditPhoto illustration by Joan Wong. Photographs by Ronghui Chen for
The New York Times.
By Jay Caspian Kang
Photographs by Ronghui Chen
Published Aug. 28, 2019
Updated Sept. 1, 2019
For the purposes of this article, Alex Chen, an 18-year-old senior at the
Bronx High School of Science in New York City, is the “typical Asian
student.” Alex has a 98 percent average at one of the city’s elite public
high schools, scored a 1,580 on the SAT and, as far as he knows, has earned
the respect of his teachers. Alex is also the vice president of technology
for the Bronx Science chapter of the National Honor Society, the director of
graphics and marketing for TeenHacks L.I. (“the first hackathon for teens
in Long Island”), a member of the cross-country team, the vice president of
the school’s painting club, the president of the Get Your Life Together
club (visitors from various businesses come talk to students) and the
senator for his homeroom. In his free time, he plays Pokémon and goes on
long jogs through Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. His parents, Qiao and Su,
emigrated from China in the ’90s and worked their way through commuter
colleges in Queens. They live along with Alex’s little brother in a modest
apartment in outer Queens. In the specific yet ultimately abstracted and
perhaps inhuman calculations particular to selective college admissions,
Alex is a first-generation (considered a plus), middle-class (minus) Chinese
-American (minus, arguably) with two college-educated parents (minus) from a
major American city (minus) with aspirations to study either computer
science (minus, given all the Asians who want to go into STEM disciplines)
or political science (plus).
When I first met him in early August 2018, we struggled to find a time to
meet up to talk about his thoughts on affirmative action and its effect on
Asian-American students. Deep into the summer vacation before his last year
of high school, Alex had been interning in the office of Assemblywoman Yuh-
Line Niou while also completing a study on congressional legislators with a
professor at New York University. There just was no time.
After Alex canceled our first agreed-upon date, I told him that in addition
to writing for The New York Times Magazine, I was also writing a book, ran a
small production company and had an 18-month-old daughter. And yet, despite
these various jobs (as well as the fact that I wasn’t on summer vacation),
I could meet him on any day and at any time for however long he pleased. My
flexible schedule wasn’t a favor to him but simply a reflection of the
life of a relatively productive adult.
“Well, that’s you,” Alex said, a bit scornfully.
We finally settled on a meeting in the financial district. Alex suggested a
Dunkin’ Donuts exactly one door down from his internship office. When I
arrived, I saw that it had no tables or booths, just three stools pushed up
against the front window. I was hungry and slightly irritated, so I texted
him and said I’d meet him at a Cuban lunch counter nearby. He walked
through the front door a moment later — thin, with short-cropped hair, a
neatly tucked button-up shirt and creaseless pants. He had a look of mild
agitation about him, one that never really subsided. We shook hands.
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“This is my list of priorities for the summer,” he said, opening a
document on his phone. “You can see the sociology study is way up high
because it’s really important to me, and cross-country is less high but
still important.”
“Do you enjoy running?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Do you want to see my list of colleges?”
Image
Name: Alex Chen, 18.
Education: Yale University, class of 2023.
Photographed at Yale in New Haven, Conn.
“I believe the existence of affirmative action reflects the countless
historical injustices that have led to such a complex situation, and any
single person or perspective, much less a short photo caption, can’t
possibly capture its nuances. But I absolutely think that our generation’s
willingness to discuss the hard topics of race and class and privilege will
eventually lead to a satisfactory solution for everybody, even beyond
college admissions.”
He pulled up a spreadsheet on his phone with the names of 11 colleges listed
in color-coded columns. “So, Binghamton and Rochester are the safeties,
which is great, because I’d be totally thrilled to go to both. Carnegie
Mellon and Rice are matches where I’m pretty sure I can get in. And these
schools in red are my reaches.” Yale, M.I.T., Cornell, Princeton, Stanford,
Vanderbilt and Brown.
“Would you really be happy going to Binghamton or Rochester?” I asked.
“Yes, because the value would be there for the price I’ll end up paying.
They’re great schools and cheap.”
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“I see Harvard isn’t on your list,” I said. “Are you worried it’ll be
impossible because of ... you know.”
“I’m applying to Yale.”
“Sure,” I said. “But Harvard is Harvard.”
“Yes, and Yale is Yale,” he said.
“Do you want to go to Yale?” I asked.
“Define ‘want,’ ” he said.
It went on like this for a while. After a brief discussion about his
internship and what it taught him about the importance of local political
representation, I finally asked him how he felt about affirmative action.
“It’s complicated,” Alex said. “I understand why it exists and why it
might be necessary to create the society we all want,” he went on. “But I
also understand there are ideas that make it seem like Asians aren’t
discriminated against at all.”
“What ideas?” I asked.
He gave me a look that communicated his deep, and perhaps justified,
frustration with me. These ideas, I gathered, had been implicit in every
conversation Alex had ever had about college admissions, but they rarely
found clear expression. “So how do you feel about affirmative action?” I
asked again.
“I understand the thinking behind affirmative action, but I just wish the
message wasn’t that Asians are all so privileged and rich and buying their
way into colleges,” he said, referring to the perception that Asian parents
in effect buy their kids’ test scores through expensive preparation
programs and private tutoring. “And I wish that it didn’t mean that my
work didn’t count in the same way as other people’s work.”
This was an unsatisfying answer but not an uncommon one. In 2014, an
organization with the cryptic name Students for Fair Admissions filed a
lawsuit against Harvard College on behalf of Asian-American applicants who
claimed they had been victims of discrimination and bias. In August 2018,
the Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in the case, arguing
against Harvard’s motion to dismiss it and claiming that “Harvard has
failed to prove that its use of race survives strict scrutiny.” Following
all the attention that action received, I began asking Asian kids across the
country about affirmative action, which was widely seen to be the real
issue.
The case, which after a lengthy trial last autumn is expected to be decided
by Judge Allison D. Burroughs sometime in the coming months, has pushed many
Asian-Americans into a spotlight they had eagerly been avoiding for the
past 20 years. The students felt uneasy, and perhaps unworthy, discussing
race, especially within a context where they were personally implicated. As
such, many refused to go on the record for fear of saying something
controversial. The opinions ranged from “We shouldn’t be punished for
doing well” to “We all need to sacrifice to make a better, more just
society.” Most of them said they had always known it would be harder for
them to get into college, but only a few called this an injustice. There was
nothing approaching a consensus, but they were, for the most part,
extremely conflicted and embarrassed by the whole business.
Their internal conflict, however inchoate and strangled by euphemism, paled
next to the angst of what I’ll call the upwardly mobile Asian-American
population — the sort of people who had attended Harvard or Yale or
Princeton or Stanford and who, in other circumstances, would have publicly
and loudly supported any goal pursued in the name of diversity. Over the
past year, I found myself constantly talking about the Harvard case with
this cohort, many of them friends and colleagues, not only for journalistic
reasons but also because it was always on our minds. These conversations
usually started with perfunctory statements like “Listen, I know I’m not
supposed to say this” or “This is a complicated issue,” but they almost
always ended with a surprisingly declarative conclusion.
“Look, I support Harvard’s right to pursue the diversity they want,” said
one Asian-American who described herself as a “staunch supporter of
affirmative action.” “But of course they discriminate against Asian kids.”
What a Fraternity Hazing Death Revealed About the Painful Search for an
Asian-American Identity
Aug. 9, 2017
On the first day of the trial for Students for Fair Admissions (S.F.F.A.) v.
the President and Fellows of Harvard College, which took place over three
weeks in late 2018, a problem presented itself: It was almost impossible to
figure out who or what, exactly, was on trial. In his opening statement,
Adam K. Mortara, the lead attorney for S.F.F.A. and a former clerk for
Justice Clarence Thomas, declared, “The future of affirmative action is not
on trial.” Then he added, “Diversity and its benefits are not on trial.”
This came as news to the dozens of Asian-American activists who had
traveled to Boston to support the lawsuit, as well as the gallery of
reporters who piled into the stiff, unyielding press benches in Courtroom 17
of the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse in Boston with
assignments to cover “the affirmative-action trial.”
A thin man sat in the back of the courtroom in a suit two sizes bigger than
what’s fashionable these days. Every now and then he would jot down
something in a notebook and then return to watching dispassionately with his
hands folded in his lap. This was Edward Blum, the 67-year-old president of
S.F.F.A., and paradoxically enough, given that he is a white man with no
direct connection to the school, the only person named on the side of the
plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Harvard. Blum is not a lawyer or a
politician, but he may be the most influential and effective opponent in the
country of any progressive policy that tries to distinguish people by race
and ethnicity. He exerts influence, in large part, because of his
connections to wealthy conservative donors, but also from an indefatigable
resolve to flood the legal system with lawsuits, some of which eventually
make it to the Supreme Court.
In addition to S.F.F.A., Blum also heads the Project on Fair Representation,
the litigation fund behind Fisher v. the University of Texas at Austin, the
last major challenge to affirmative action to reach the Supreme Court, in
which Abigail Fisher, a white woman, was one of two women claiming to have
been rejected from a spot she deserved because of preferences given to
people of color. On two separate occasions within the last decade, Blum and
his attorneys argued that the University of Texas was placing too much
weight on race in nonautomatic admissions. Blum lost this challenge in 2016,
but he has also done quite a bit of winning: In 2013, he won a landmark
decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the key provisions of the
1965 Voting Rights Act by effectively ending federal oversight of elections.
Blum would not be taking the stand in the Harvard case.
A sweeping elimination of affirmative action still requires the cooperation
of the Supreme Court, which was responsible for another odd dynamic in the
trial. A vast majority of the testimony and argumentation was about Asian-
Americans, but the actual lawsuit unfolded in a way that didn’t have much
to do with Asians at all. The inevitability of an appeal, which would then
raise the stakes, made the entire trial feel somewhat like an opening act.
At the #DefendDiversity rally at the start of the trial, Jessica Tang,
president of the Boston Teachers Union and a Harvard alumna, said that “
Edward Blum is not a friend to Asian-Americans” and accused him of using
Asian-Americans as pawns in a vile legal game. S.F.F.A. was making three
broad claims:
One: Harvard’s use of racial preferences far exceeded the Supreme Court’s
allowance of race as “one, nonpredominant factor in a system designed to
consider each applicant as an individual,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy
described it in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003. A landmark affirmative-action
ruling, it involved the University of Michigan Law School and upheld the
principle that race is only supposed to be a “plus” that is considered
when two applicants are otherwise indistinguishable. In those instances,
race can be a “tip” that allows a university to seek the diversity it
desires.
Two: Harvard, by keeping black, Latino and Asian admissions rates at a
relatively steady equilibrium, despite demographic changes in its applicant
pool, had created a de facto quota system. Quotas have been illegal since
the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Regents of the University of
California v. Bakke, the first major challenge to affirmative action in
higher education.
Three: Harvard had not adequately explored race-neutral alternatives
required by the legal parameters of affirmative action. This requirement was
reaffirmed in Fisher v. University of Texas, allowing a school to consider
an applicant’s race only when “no workable race-neutral alternatives would
produce the educational benefits of diversity.”
Despite what Mortara said about affirmative action not being on trial, S.F.F
.A. has been extremely forthright about its expectation that regardless of
Burroughs’s decision, it will eventually be arguing in front of the Supreme
Court. Over the course of the past year, I asked Blum on a few occasions
what he hoped to get out of all this. His stance never changed. His “
mission,” he told me again in August, is to remove race from college
admissions: “We believe that a student’s skin color or ethnic heritage
should not be used to help or harm that student’s prospects of being
admitted to a college or university.” When I asked if the ultimate goal,
then, was to end racial preferences not only in college admissions but also
in all parts of the law, Blum said: “Yes! Absolutely. I won’t deny it.”
To get to the Supreme Court, S.F.F.A. needed to justify the lawsuit both in
the courtroom and to the public. According to Blum, Abigail Fisher, the
daughter of a family friend, had suffered greatly from her years of national
attention as a result of her case against the University of Texas. To avoid
putting another young person through the same thing and to bring a fresh
angle to the fight, Blum and his attorneys decided to represent an anonymous
and amorphous group of plaintiffs. (Every request I made to talk to any of
these unnamed persons was denied by S.F.F.A.’s attorneys.) They chose,
instead, to build a case out of spreadsheets and statistical data obtained
through pretrial discovery, which in turn set up something of a phantom
showdown: Students were discussed almost entirely through the abstraction of
test scores, grades and extracurricular accomplishments. In their opening
and closing statements, the attorneys for S.F.F.A. went through charts and
spreadsheets, many of which were centered on something called the “personal
rating,” a portion of Harvard’s application review that judges traits
like “courage,” “openness to new ideas and people” and “effervescence.”
Image
Name: Catherine Ho, 19.
Education: Harvard College, class of 2021.
Photographed at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass.
“Harvard, and many other institutions of higher education throughout the
country, could not accomplish its mission of educating citizens and citizen
leaders of the world without a diverse student body. As a first-generation,
low-income Vietnamese-American college student, I refuse to allow S.F.F.A.
to paint Asian-Americans with a broad stroke. I refuse to be used as a tool
to further divide communities of color.”
Their charts showed that Asian-American applicants outperformed white
applicants in academics and extracurriculars and lagged behind in athletics
and legacy considerations. When it came to the personal rating, Asian
applicants rated significantly worse. Harvard never convincingly explained
or contested the disparity.
Harvard’s defense, argued by Bill Lee, a 69-year-old Chinese-American
attorney and a graduate of the class of 1972, was mostly predictable, if not
entirely coherent. On one front, Harvard resorted to bureaucratic denial:
It claimed that every piece of information, however damning, had to be
placed within the context of the entire admissions process. And while Lee
took great pains to detail how an application went through an initial reader
and then an alumni interviewer and then a subcommittee and then the final
40-person committee, he never addressed the specifics of how decisions were
made, except to say that the committee considered “the whole person.” In
the end, the only definitive, knowable thing about the admissions process
was that race was said to be only one small part of an opaque process.
On the other front, Harvard and its allies went on an ideological offensive.
The multicultural and empathetic vision of the country — represented on
Harvard’s side by lawyers of all races and a steady stream of Asian, black
and Latino students who gave testimony about why they, despite less than
perfect test scores and G.P.A.s, deserved to be on campus — would not be
possible without the tireless efforts of places like the Harvard admissions
office to change the face of elite society in America. Lee ended his opening
statement with a personal anecdote: Forty-two years earlier, when he argued
his first case in front of a federal judge, every person in the courtroom,
save the deputy, was a white man. “Look around the courtroom today,” Lee
said. “Many institutions, many people have contributed and worked
tirelessly to make this happen. Among them are colleges and universities.”
This could easily have been seen as a shot at S.F.F.A.’s cross-examining
lawyers, who were all white. But Harvard’s story made even less sense than
S.F.F.A.’s. The array of amicus speakers gave breathless testimony about
the dangers of gaslighting and the crippling self-doubt that comes with
being told that your feelings of alienation and racial othering are all
imagined or not worthy of concern. Then Lee stood up and told the judge that
S.F.F.A.’s own claims of implicit racial bias were outrageous, because
Harvard admissions were an unknowably complicated, nuanced and sensitive
process that involved 40 thoroughly trained people.
Lee and the Harvard admissions officers who were called to the stand also
talked about the school’s endlessly adjustable process, which could take
factors like standardized test scores and G.P.A.s and place them within the
proper context. The goal in all this, of course, was to root out systemic
racism and relative privilege. But when it came to explaining away the
disparities in the personal rating, Harvard presented years of data showing
that Asian-American applicants, despite superior academic and
extracurricular ratings, uniformly received worse recommendations from their
teachers and guidance counselors. Lee did not extrapolate on what this
might mean, but there was really only one possible conclusion to draw: If
there was bias in the personal ratings, it came from the teachers and
guidance counselors, not from Harvard’s admissions officers. And Harvard,
despite its complex and sensitive system calibrated to ferret out and
correct bias, apparently took these teachers and guidance counselors at
their word — Asian students, year after year, were just a bit less
personally appealing than white students and significantly less personally
appealing than those who were black or Latino.
When Mortara and S.F.F.A.’s other attorneys asked Harvard admissions
officers on the stand if they believed Asian applicants had less desirable
traits than their white counterparts, they, of course, said no, they did not.
From a letter to The Harvard Crimson by a student named David A. Karnes,
arguing against affirmative action for Asian-American applicants:
“Current U.S. Census figures show that Asian-Americans today penetrate all
income levels and, in general, have attained an above-average standard of
living. The barriers to equality which did indeed exist in the past for this
group have largely vanished.”
And a rebuttal, a few weeks later, from a student named Charles D. Toy:
“Mr. Karnes adheres to the same misconception about Asian-Americans which
has plagued them since intelligent people began to recognize and repudiate
the savagery of official discrimination. Because he now perceives some
ostensible penetration by Asian-Americans into various social and economic
levels, Mr. Karnes concludes that most Asian-Americans no longer suffer the
oppression of their status as a minority in this country.”
These two letters were published in the fall of 1976. Earlier that semester,
Josephine M. Lok and Bet Har Wong, Asian-American freshmen roommates at
Radcliffe, tried to attend an orientation banquet for minority students and
found that they were not among the invitees. In a lengthy article about the
beginning of the Asian-American student movement at Harvard published in
March of this year in The Crimson, Lok said she didn’t really make a big
deal of the omission because “we didn’t have that whole awareness.” But
other Asian-American students on campus saw the incident as representative
of their unseen, and largely unwelcome, presence there. This stood in direct
contrast with federal law at the time; in 1977, for example, the Department
of Labor designated minority groups as consisting of “negroes, Spanish-
speaking, Orientals, Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts.”
According to the article describing Wong and Lok’s strange rejection, after
a group of Asian students confronted Fred Jewett, the dean of admissions,
he told The Crimson in 1976 that Harvard did not count Asians as minorities
because their enrollment numbers exceeded their share of the general
American population. The demographics of the Harvard applicant pool, in
other words, overruled everything else, whether common sense or the lived
realities of many of the Asian students who attended Harvard.
Image
Name: Thang Diep, 22.
Education: Harvard College, class of 2019.
Photographed in Los Angeles.
“The case has been divisive, but it’s brought to light a lot of important
issues like meritocracy and the model-minority myth. And for a lot of Asians
, I think it’s opened up their eyes about how to possibly connect with
other minority groups.”
These deliberations over race and privilege did not take place in a vacuum.
In 1975, just a year before Wong and Lok were turned away from the minority-
students banquet, Allan Bakke, a 35-year-old white man, was rejected for the
second time by the medical school at the University of California, Davis.
At the time, under a transparent affirmative-action policy, the school had
reserved 16 of each class’s 100 spots for a “special admissions” program
that considered the applications of “economically and/or educationally
disadvantaged” students. Those applicants deemed disadvantaged were
evaluated by a separate committee with different standards. After Bakke sued
U.C. Davis, a California court ruled that the school’s program violated
the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits racial
discrimination. In 1978, the Supreme Court agreed that Bakke had been
discriminated against.
In the court’s decision in Bakke, Justice Lewis F. Powell cited Harvard’s
admissions plan as the paragon of how diversity could be pursued in college
admissions — because the school acknowledged, he wrote, that “a farm boy
from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot
offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white
person cannot offer.” The Bakke ruling meant that explicit quotas were
unconstitutional, but when confronted with two equally qualified students, a
school could give a “tip” to the one who could bring his or her unique
regional or racial flavor to the college’s melting pot.
The spiritual language of affirmative action — to remedy the nation’s sins
and to help underprivileged minorities who had been the victims of
generational oppression — fell out of the legal conversation around
affirmative action, mostly because any talk of “giving a leg up” to a
certain number of students sounded too much like a quota system. “Diversity
” became the new justification for considering a student’s race. It was no
longer about righting history’s wrongs or ending poverty. It was now about
the “something” a student from a different background could “bring” to
campus.
In 1988, William Bradford Reynolds, who was an assistant attorney general
and chief of the civil rights division in the Reagan administration’s
Justice Department, spoke at a symposium on Asian-American university
admissions sponsored by Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, a Democrat. By
this point, official complaints of discrimination had been filed by Asian-
American students at several top universities. In 1984, after a lengthy
internal review, Brown University concluded that Asian-American applicants
had been “treated unfairly.” By the time Reynolds took the stage to give
his remarks, the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education had
begun investigating admissions at several schools, including Harvard and U.C
.L.A.
Until Reynolds’s speech, the question of discrimination against Asian
applicants had not been explicitly placed within the context of affirmative
action, at least not by someone in such a prominent position. But he noted
“substantial statistical evidence” that Asian-Americans faced “higher
hurdles than academically less qualified candidates of other races,” and he
added that “rejection of such applicants ironically appears to be driven
by the universities’ ‘affirmative-action’ policies aimed at favoring
other, preferred racial minorities.” In this formulation, Asian students
were being pitted against other minority groups for scarce, precious
opportunities.
Over the next two years, the rules of the racial zero-sum game of college
admissions took shape. The solidarity movements that started at Harvard in
the late ’70s were supplanted by an uneasy coalition of conservative white
politicians, writers and attorneys and Asian-American legal activists. In
1990, according to a lengthy study by Dana Y. Takagi, a professor at U.C.
Santa Cruz, the Office of Civil Rights opened an investigation into whether
white applicants had been discriminated against at U.C. Berkeley. One of the
original complainants was Arthur Hu, a Chinese-American software programmer
who, using data made public by the school, had painstakingly charted the
test scores and academic credentials of black, white and Asian applicants.
Thirty years after Reynolds’s speech, Students for Fair Admissions
revisited the 1988 playbook and filed its lawsuit against Harvard, claiming
that its admissions process had discriminated against Asian applicants.
During that time, the Asian population in the United States has grown to
more than 21 million in 2016 from roughly 3.5 million in 1980, and a
relatively narrowly defined group that used to apply mostly to Chinese and
Japanese immigrants has been expanded to include everyone from the Hmong
people to Koreans to South Asians. Attempts to corral all these peoples into
one monolithic identity have become increasingly harder to reconcile.
Asians are found throughout the socioeconomic spectrum. If it’s a silly
endeavor to quantify racial oppression, it’s also absurd to equate the
experience of a Sikh kid in Wisconsin with that of a Korean-American kid in
Los Angeles.
And yet, when it comes to college admissions at elite schools, the
conversation seems stuck in the past. None of the underlying questions have
changed since Wong and Lok were turned away from that freshman banquet. Are
Asians actually minorities? And if diversity — whatever that means — is
the goal of affirmative action, how many Asians does a school really want on
campus?
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I found Alex somewhat annoying at first
. If I had been an alumni interviewer tasked with rating Alex’s personality
on a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 being a student who showed unusual
intellectual curiosity, grit and effervescence and 6 being a mumbling 4chan
troll who would be a nightmare for his roommates, I would have given Alex a
solid 3.
In my early 20s, I taught high-school English, and like many teachers, I
grew to see students as types that recur over and over again. Alex struck me
as the sort who would turn in perfectly competent papers about the assigned
book, whether by Hawthorne or Ellison or Salinger, but wouldn’t engage
with the text on an emotional level, at least not in the “Dangerous Minds”
way that most young teachers want to see. And so I saw in Alex the
stereotype of the Asian grade-grubbing machine. His résumé seemed filled
with dubious positions: Really, what is the vice president of technology for
a National Honor Society chapter?
I don’t say any of this to excuse myself or even say something as banal as
“sometimes stereotypes are real.” I would just like to clear the air
before we go on much more about Alex Chen, affirmative action and the broken
way we talk about race and privilege in this country. The act of reporting
on your “own people,” especially for prestigious outlets, requires a
certain arrogance and presumption — that because you look like your subject
, your perspective carries some revelatory power that might escape a
standard, white journalist. I used to believe this was true, but I am no
longer so certain.
Like Alex, I am a first-generation Asian-American with two college-educated
parents. Unlike Alex, I grew up in majority-white, upper-middle-class
college towns that exposed me to all the pathways to success that lay
outside pure academic achievement. I spent my early childhood in a graduate-
student housing complex just a few blocks from Harvard’s campus, where my
father was getting his post-doctorate degree in organic chemistry. My mother
made ends meet by babysitting for the children of professors. (In my early
20s, I ended up at the Columbia M.F.A. creative-writing program with the
sister of one of these children. Her father was a famous physicist who wrote
best-selling novels, and although I never brought up the fact that my
mother had changed her sister’s diapers, I’ve thought a lot about how
quickly the gap in our backgrounds had been erased.) By the time I graduated
from a very good public high school in North Carolina, I could rattle off
almost all the other very good high schools across the country, whether St.
Mark’s, Isidore Newman, Montgomery Bell Academy, Thomas Jefferson Academy,
Harvard-Westlake, Lexington High School or New Trier. By the time I was in
my 30s, in a professional world stocked with Ivy Leaguers, I realized that
everyone I knew from the D.C. area went to Sidwell Friends or Georgetown Day
or Potomac, and everyone I know from Los Angeles went to Harvard-Westlake.
Perhaps such distinctions seem trivial in the face of every other type of
privilege, but within the context of one Harvard alumnus or alumna
interviewing a prospective one, these references can lay out the common
ground. What might seem like grade-grubbing ambition in a foreign context
gets humanized within familiar spaces.
During that first meeting, I asked Alex if he had ever considered applying
for a scholarship at any of New York City’s elite private schools, like
Horace Mann, Collegiate or Dalton.
“What are those?” he asked. “Are those schools in the city?”
Which is all to say, if we’re going to see how Alex Chen, who would receive
roughly the same credits and debits from affirmative action as I would,
measures up, we should at least give an honest accounting of his past.
So here are some more relevant facts: Alex’s father, Qiao, immigrated to
the United States in 1994, when he was 21. He grew up in poverty in the
countryside of Fujian Province. He describes his hometown as a thoroughly
corrupt place where people like him could not get anything done without
bribing a local official. When Qiao was 18, his father moved to Flushing,
Queens, where he found construction work and began saving up money. Qiao
came three years later, after his father secured a green card, and worked in
restaurants around Queens and Long Island. He spoke no English, but he
enrolled in Queens College, which had an E.S.L. program for international
students.
In 2000, Qiao brought his wife, Su, to the United States, and she moved into
the basement apartment Qiao shared with his father in Flushing. Qiao saw
life in America pragmatically — he acknowledges that he faced
discrimination — and it was hard to go anywhere outside Chinese-speaking
enclaves. He felt that his classmates at Queens College treated him like a
low-rent immigrant. “The bad part,” he said, “was that I didn’t know the
language, so I didn’t feel like I could fight back.” But those
humiliations paled in comparison to life under corruption in China. “
Everything was open in America,” Qiao said. “If I had the right paperwork
for something or if I finished the work I was supposed to do, the right
thing would get done. At least I could trust that.”
Qiao eventually found weekend work selling computer parts until he settled
into a stable job as a technician. Su, who gave birth to Alex a few years
after arriving in Flushing, struggled with life in the United States. She
had been a middle-school teacher in China, but now she bounced between car
dealerships, restaurants and, finally, an ice-cream parlor.
Alex was a bright and self-motivated student, someone whom Su “never had to
worry about.” In the eighth grade, he came home and asked his parents if
he could take the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), the
multiple-choice examination that determines entry into the city’s top
public high schools. Su and Qiao were not planning on pressing Alex to take
the SHSAT. And he did not enroll in an intensive prep course. “We are not
tiger parents,” Su said. “Alex cares so much about his schoolwork, and we
just supported him. But really, we did not know too much about any of this,
and so he figured it out himself.”
Alex got into Bronx Science, widely considered the second-best of New York
City’s three original specialized high schools. Qiao and Su, eager to help
their son, but like so many immigrants hampered by the barriers of language
and an unfamiliarity with the American school system, joined a group on the
Chinese social-media service WeChat in which Chinese parents at Bronx
Science talked about their children’s homework and their concerns about the
school.
In the summer of 2018, the parents in the WeChat group began talking about
proposed changes to the admissions criteria at the city’s specialized
schools. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Richard Carranza, his schools chancellor,
had proposed a new system that would phase out the SHSAT over two years and
replace it with a University of Texas-style admissions program that would
award seats to top students at all of the city’s middle schools. These
changes would result in a radical shift in the racial demographics of the
specialized high schools. At Stuyvesant, regarded as the most prestigious of
the three specialized high schools, black and Hispanic students made up
roughly 14 percent of the student population in 1976; Asians accounted for
16 percent. By 2017, black and Hispanic students had dropped to just 4
percent; Asians, by contrast, were now 74 percent of the student body. By
spreading out admissions to the entirety of the city’s middle schools, many
of which are overwhelmingly black and Latino, enrollment of
underrepresented minorities was projected to go from its current 10 percent
to nearly 50 percent. After presenting the plan, Carranza said, “I just don
’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admissions to
these schools,” a clear reference to Asian-American students and their
parents.
Qiao and Su’s WeChat group quickly turned into a political organizing
platform. Participants began reaching out to other groups, including ones
that supported the affirmative-action lawsuit against Harvard. The Chinese-
language news broadcasts they watched every night provided blanket coverage
of the SHSAT issue. “Many of our friends work in restaurants and are very
poor,” Su said. “They don’t know anything about how to make their kids
successful except SHSAT and then study hard to go to an Ivy League school.
They feel like if you take that away, you are taking away their hope,
because they don’t speak English well and have a hard time understanding
how else to succeed in this country.” In mid-June, Qiao attended his first
protest, which reconnected him with other parents who hadn’t found the same
route to the middle class.
This past February, a workshop on the subject of race was offered to middle-
school parents; it was run by the Center for Racial Justice in Education, a
training organization. When Ingrid Flinn, a white mother of an adopted Asian
child, questioned a white, male presenter from the center about the dearth
of attention given to Asian-Americans in his presentation, he said that
Asians benefited from white supremacy because of their proximity to white
privilege. (The center denies that its workshop said Asians benefited from
white supremacy.) The implication, Flinn felt, was that there was little
need to talk about Asians. Yet they make up about 16 percent of students in
the New York City public-school system, and by every measure, they suffer
the highest poverty rates of any ethnic or racial group in the five boroughs.
I thought back to a morning when I met Alex in Van Cortlandt Park, a stretch
of groomed pasture just about a 20-minute walk from Bronx Science. He and
his cross-country teammates were meeting for their first practice of the
year: South Asians, two girls wearing head coverings and full-length
athletic wear as well as a handful of half-Asian kids. As they stretched,
they joked about being out of shape and complained about the 1 train service
up to the Bronx. According to the racial-privilege hierarchy of the New
York City public schools, all those kids, with all their different
backgrounds, skin tones and countries of origin, are the same as Alex. None
of them warrant a mention in discussions of racial hierarchies.
Image
Name: Kenny Xu, 23.
Education: Davidson College, class of 2019.
Photographed in Washington.
“I think it’s larger than Harvard. The real question is: Do we want to
live in a society where character or skin color is the driving force for our
discussions about merit? In singling out Asian-Americans for exclusion,
Harvard panders to the worst stereotypes about us: that we are math geniuses
with no personality.”
The Rally for the American Dream kicked off in Boston’s Copley Square on
the eve of the trial. The organizers had promised “thousands” of
demonstrators who would be rallying in favor of S.F.F.A.’s lawsuit. This
optimistic projection (only a few hundred showed up) had been made by Yukong
Zhao, a 56-year-old Chinese immigrant from Orlando who is the president of
the Asian-American Coalition for Education and the author of the 2013 book
“The Chinese Secrets for Success: Five Inspiring Confucian Values.” (The
values: “Determination for an Outstanding Life,” “Pursuing an Excellent
Education,” “Saving for a Better Life,” “Caring for Your Family” and “
Developing Desirable Friendships.”) Zhao walks with a bit of a stoop, but
he exudes an optimistic, cheerful energy when talking about America and its
promise.
Zhao had always been involved in politics, but ever since he immigrated to
the United States in 1992 to go to graduate school in urban studies and get
an M.B.A., he has mostly expressed his opinions through writing. In one
piece he wrote for The Orlando Sentinel, titled “Immigrants Can Add
Valuable Ingredients to Melting Pot,” Zhao posed this question: “Why do so
many immigrants prosper in America? Because we have suffered many life
challenges from where we started to become Americans, we have valuable
experiences we can share with struggling families, our spirit to overcome
challenges, and our great cultural heritage on education and money
management.”
Zhao, who became an American citizen in 2009, began his transition from
writer to activist in October 2013, when Jimmy Kimmel put together a round
table of young children for his late-night show and asked them what the
United States should do about its $1.3 trillion debt to China. One
suggestion, from a floppy-haired blond kid in a blazer and tie, was “kill
everyone in China.” The joke sparked the expected online outrage among
Chinese-American advocacy groups. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets
of several American cities to call for Kimmel’s firing. Kimmel quickly
apologized, and ABC pulled the segment from its archives and YouTube.
Fresh off what these activists saw as a victory against the Kimmel show, the
nascent movement turned its attention to Senate Constitutional Amendment 5
(SCA-5), a proposal in the California State Legislature that would have
significantly scaled back Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot initiative that
effectively ended affirmative action in California state universities. They
followed up with civil rights complaints, including one that involved Zhao’
s son. An informal partnership with Edward Blum soon followed.
Zhao has a complicated relationship with Blum. He says he appreciates all
Blum has done for the cause, but he resists what he sees as the white-savior
narrative. Asians, without any help from white people, had been challenging
elite colleges since the 1980s. He understood that Blum’s money and
connections might go further with the press and even the courts, but he saw
this latest lawsuit and S.F.F.A. as a natural outgrowth of his grass-roots
movement. “Asian-Americans filed all the complaints and stopped SCA-5,” he
said. “This is not about conservatives or Republicans. We are not their
tools. We are fighting for our children.”
I met Zhao at his hotel overlooking the Charles River on the morning of the
Rally for the American Dream. He hadn’t been sleeping well, and his left
eye had exploded into a deep, concerning shade of red. He asked if I wanted
to hear him practice his speech — there were some passages where the
English might need a little help. Zhao paced between the two queen beds and
ran through his speech in his thick accent but practiced delivery. It was
long and filled with purple phrases about freedom, fairness and the American
dream. I could sense the hours he had spent on the speech, fine-tuning
every phrase and making sure he gave proper credit to everyone who had put
together the rally. On his first run-through, he asked me if it was “IN-
actment” or “EN-actment,” and then a few moments later, was it “unethic
” or “unethical”? Toward the end, I told him he had wrongly said “risen
up” rather than “rising up.”
He asked if he should lose the kicker: “God bless America. And God bless
Asian-American children.” I told him that I thought it would be a bit off
to end with a phrase that made it seem as if Asian-American children needed
a separate blessing from God. He puzzled over it for a bit, his glasses
pushed far down on his nose, and ultimately agreed. As we crossed over a
bridge into Boston, Zhao said, “Jay, I am frustrated with my pronunciation.
If I had better pronunciation, I could make a much bigger impact on
American society. I can work on everything else — ideas and writing — but
the pronunciation is so hard to improve.”
I did not agree with much of Zhao’s speech, but I felt a connection with
him, unexpected but undeniable. How many times had my own parents asked for
help with emails or letters to school? And how had their limitations and
perpetual foreignness affected their ability to stand up for themselves?
Zhao kept telling me that he was fighting for me and my young daughter. It
was hard to know what to make of this declaration, but I never doubted that
he believed it. Whenever he hears talk about relative privilege or white
supremacy or all the advantages Asians have over other minorities, he
considers his own childhood under the Cultural Revolution, his own path to
the United States and his struggles with learning the language, and fails to
see why the spoils of that work, which include a big house in a gated
community, couldn’t be achieved by anyone else.
This need to be seen — to have the struggles of Asian-Americans and the
discrimination they faced be recognized — was echoed by Mortara in his
closing statement for the S.F.F.A. lawsuit. “Someday this will be written
about in the history books, and those books will say: There was Asian
discrimination at Harvard,” Mortara said in court. Choking back tears, he
said, “Of that I’m confident.” And while I might have been surprised by
the outpouring of emotion and skeptical of his methods, I did not doubt
Mortara’s sincerity either.
During the time I spent talking to Asian-American students about affirmative
action, I noticed that many of them wanted to talk, instead, about their
immigrant parents. For them, the issue was relatively simple. “The way they
see it, they came to this country with nothing and went through a lot of
discrimination,” a student at an elite, high-profile public high school in
New York told me. “They don’t understand why the system says they have an
advantage over anyone else. I disagree with them on a lot of it, but I
understand why they feel that way.”
For many of these parents, the Harvard case, with its revelations about
personal ratings, as well as what many of the parents in New York see as the
erasure from the city’s Department of Education, has created a binary
choice. They can choose the side that is trying to get more of their
children into Harvard and other elite schools, or they can choose the side
that will not even bother mentioning them. Qiao Chen, despite the
protestations of his son, voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
Although he now regrets the choice, he told me that he did it because
liberals do not care about Asian-Americans.
Image
Name: Sally Chen, 22.
Education: Harvard College, class of 2019.
Photographed in San Francisco.
“Race-conscious admissions for me meant acknowledging the full human
dignity of my story and my achievements in context. I will never forget the
diversity of perspectives and experiences that my peers bravely shared on
campus and in this trial, all of which are incredible assets in this
multiracial world we will go on to work and live in. Regardless of how this
case is decided, the educational landscape is much bigger than just Harvard
— I hope that as a society we look toward increasing educational
opportunities that are accessible for all.”
“Sparse country” is the term Harvard uses to describe the geographic areas
of the United States that are underrepresented in the student body. This
includes the usual suspects — Wyoming, Alaska, Montana — but also states
with large metropolitan areas like Nevada, Arizona and Oklahoma. To
geographically diversify its incoming freshman class, Harvard gives a bump
to promising students from sparse country. It also recruits heavily to
ensure that the top students in Arizona and Alabama and Maine consider
coming to Harvard over their local state colleges and universities.
Recruitment certainly does not equal admission, but Harvard starts to shape
its incoming class through these early encounters and follows up diligently
and often through email, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.
This process begins with sophomores and juniors who take the PSAT, and later
the SAT. Harvard purchases scores from the College Board and mails
invitations to apply to students with strong scores relative to their
demographic group, whatever that might be. In sparse country, the admissions
office extends an invitation to any white student who scores above 1,310 on
the tests and any black student who scores above a 1,100. Male Asian
students from the same places need to score a 1,380 on the tests to receive
an invitation to apply. For female Asian students, the cutoff is 1,350.
For the past four decades, these types of decisions have been the purview of
William R. Fitzsimmons, a graduate of the class of 1967 and Harvard College
’s dean of admissions. Fitzsimmons, who goes by Fitz, grew up in his family
’s gas station in Weymouth, a working-class suburb on Boston’s South Shore
. In the parlance of his office, he was a “first-generation college student
” from an “economically disadvantaged” background, as well as a star
hockey goalie. Although he wasn’t an “economically disadvantaged”
minority, he understands what it’s like to be different at the most elite
educational institution in America.
Fitz, with his strong, square jaw, carefully measured Boston accent and
tweed jackets, perfectly fills the role of the Harvard man. Over four days
of testimony, he laid out his legacy — he came to the Harvard admissions
office in 1972, took over a few years later and has been the dean since 1986
. This presented something of a problem for the defense because every bit of
mail, every spreadsheet, every memo or communiqué issued by the Harvard
College admissions office since the Nixon administration reflected on
Fitzsimmons’s office.
During a bizarre section of Fitzsimmons’s testimony in which he claimed a 1
,100 on the PSAT was only “slightly lower” than a 1,380, an S.F.F.A.
lawyer named John M. Hughes posed the following hypothetical: Let’s take
two students at the same high school in Las Vegas. One white, the other
Asian. The white student scores a 1,310. The Asian student receives a 1,370.
According to Fitzsimmons’s testimony, the white student would be invited
to apply to Harvard while the Asian student would not. How, the attorney
asked, could Fitzsimmons begin to explain this?
In response, Fitzsimmons talked about his own days at Harvard and a roommate
from Mitchell, S.D., home of the celebrated Corn Palace, and how he had
been a “great ambassador” for his home state. “There are people who, let
’s say, for example, have only lived in the sparse-country state for a year
or two,” Fitzsimmons noted.
The implication, of course, was that an Asian applicant from Oklahoma or
Nebraska or South Dakota or Alaska does not count when it comes to “
geographic diversity.” In Harvard’s eyes, this Asian, even if his family
settled in Nevada after helping build the transcontinental railroad, could
never be an “ambassador” for his plot of “sparse country.” He was,
instead, an Asian-American like other Asian-Americans. The white student’s
family, by contrast, could have recently moved to Las Vegas to work in the
emerging tech field, and he would still be assumed to be a fitting
representative of the Silver State.
When Harvard went looking for a South Dakotan, did it just look for a white
kid who grew up on a ranch and worked the concession stands at the Corn
Palace? When it wanted an Oklahoman, was it really seeking out a cowboy who
also liked high-school debate and biology? Harvard’s vision of diversity
seemed stuck in a time before immigration and demographic change. During his
cross-examination, Fitzsimmons was asked several times if the Harvard
admissions process had changed at all in the 46 years he had worked in the
admissions office. Fitzsimmons, every time, said the system had remained
almost exactly the same.
Image
Name: Roman Khondker, 19.
Education: University of Rhode Island, class of 2023.
Photographed in West Haven, Conn.
“The current practice of affirmative action is discriminatory and unfair to
everyone. Education is a right, and the race of someone should not
determine whether or not someone should get into school.”
On the third day of the trial, I had dinner with Sally Chen and her friend
Thang Diep, both in Harvard’s graduating class of 2019, at a Japanese-
barbecue restaurant in Harvard Square. Thang, a senior neurobiology major
and one of the main voices testifying in support of Harvard at the trial,
had been repeatedly misidentified in media reports about the trial as a “
refugee.” This, he said, was “really annoying,” and he requested I not
make the same mistake. Thang’s grandparents were the actual refugees —
they were the ones who fled Vietnam and settled in Reseda, a middle-class
suburb in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. When Thang was 8, he and his
parents immigrated to join them in California. Thang spoke almost no English
, but through a self-imposed regimen of assimilation, he worked his way into
one of Southern California’s most prestigious magnet high schools.
People on Harvard’s side testified about Thang’s essay, emphasizing his
divulgence that he placed a pencil between his teeth while practicing his
pronunciation because he heard that was the quickest way to overcome the
steep learning curve that separates a tonal language like Vietnamese from
English. In comments, one of Harvard’s admissions readers wrote, “Essay-
immigrant Vietnamese identity & pencils as tools.” And then, “Add’l-
grappling with sexual identity.”
Thang was valedictorian of his high-school class, but he scored only a
combined 1,360 on the verbal and math sections of the SAT, and his other
standardized test scores weren’t much better. These results most likely
would have put him outside the lower threshold for Harvard, which, as it
said throughout the trial, turns away dozens of applicants with perfect
scores every year.
Sally and Thang were the de facto counterexamples in the trial. Their
smiling photos were shown on the courtroom television screens; their G.P.A.s
and test scores were discussed, at length, by Fitzsimmons and the stream of
pro-diversity speakers backing Harvard. Sally, who grew up in a low-income
immigrant household in San Francisco, proved that highly motivated, poor
Asian students would be admitted to Harvard. Thang, whose low SAT scores
were put on parade throughout the trial, proved that Harvard actually did
care about Asian struggle narratives. But Thang’s and Sally’s stories,
which were pushed out to the media, existed almost as ornamentation to the
actual trial. In fact, it wasn’t clear if Harvard or its experts knew much
about Asians at all. On the second-to-last day of the trial, Mortara went
through a litany of stereotypes about Asian applicants — one-dimensional,
future doctors, children of mathematicians and engineers. He asked David
Card, an economist testifying for Harvard as an expert witness, if he was
aware that they were, indeed, stereotypes. Each time, Card said he wasn’t
sure.
Both Sally and Thang seemed aware of their role in the trial. But they also
don’t see the trial as a fight between concerned Asian parents and Harvard
’s admissions office, but rather as the last defense of affirmative action
against a man who had successfully undercut the Voting Rights Act and who
seems hellbent on ending racial preferences everywhere. “I don’t really
feel like I’m on the side of Harvard,” Sally said. “As someone who
advocates against Harvard on many issues, it’s really hard to give Harvard
this kind of power. So I think of it more as having a broad impact on the
baseline for not just here but a lot of other places, like workplaces and
other universities.”
Sally’s dilemma was shared by many of the alumni, students and faculty who
showed up to the courthouse. It’s difficult to defend a vision of diversity
that has had many of its clearest and most evocative claims of racial and
economic justice stripped away by decades of court challenges, demographic
change in the applicant pool and escalating hypercompetitiveness for a fixed
number of seats. During the trial, the racial and social-justice reasoning
— the spirit of affirmative action — was never really stated. What stood
in its place, mostly because of the legal realities of “diversity,” which
constrained what Harvard could defend in court, was the sense that students
of color on campus needed to have others who looked like them. This
justification exposed one of the puzzling contradictions at the heart of
this case: By law, Harvard cannot have a quota system. But it also looks as
if Harvard believes there is a set range of how many black, Latino and Asian
students ought to be on campus. Roughly 30 percent of the seats in every
Harvard class go to athletes, legacies, the children of faculty and
applicants on the dean’s interest list, composed in large part of the
children of donors. This group, called A.L.D.C.s, get into Harvard at a rate
of about 45 percent, far greater than the 5 percent rate for the rest of
the pool. Two percent of Asian applicants are A.L.D.C.s. The zero-sum view
of this arrangement never asks why the spots for more Asian kids couldn’t
come from the pool of A.L.D.C.s.
S.F.F.A.’s attorneys did not contest the defense of the benefits of
diversity, as displayed in court. There was no need, really. They chose,
instead, to pick out a few contradictions in Harvard’s practices that
implicitly questioned whether the school’s actual practices measured up to
its expressed, righteous defense.
Image
Name: Fatima Shahbaz, 20.
Education: Harvard College, class of 2021.
Photographed in Washington.
“Despite my strong support for diversity policies and race-conscious
admissions, I in no way want to make it seem that Harvard’s admissions
system or treatment of Asian-Americans is perfect. Harvard can and should do
more to make sure that they fight against any implicit biases that may
permeate the admissions system. But the solution to this issue is to not
ignore the racial and financial barriers of access that continue to plague
our country, or to reduce the nuance within an already limited application
— it’s to pay more attention to race.”
In the months after the trial’s conclusion, I asked Harvard on numerous
occasions to explain its admissions process. (I made several requests to
interview Fitzsimmons as well. All of these were denied.) The stock answer,
always delivered from the P.R. office, never deviated from what Harvard has
consistently said: We have a complicated and in-depth process that involves
dozens of people and hundreds of hours, and there’s no way to quantify it.
You just have to trust it.
Some clarity, however dim, can be found in Plaintiff’s Exhibit 555 from the
trial: “Ethnicity was only considered a ‘plus’ when the applicant wrote
about or indicated the significance of his or her heritage, or when there
was some other indicia in the file of the applicant’s involvement with
ethnic community organizations or groups.”
This passage comes from the 1990 report on Harvard’s admissions practices
filed by the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education. In the
28 years since then, the personal essay has become an even larger part of
how Harvard makes its race-conscious decisions, so much so that in a draft
of instructions sent out last year, the admissions office specified that “
the consideration of race or ethnicity should be in connection with the
application’s discussion of the effect an applicant’s race or ethnicity
has had on the applicant, not simply the fact alone.”
When Sally was applying to colleges, she says, her guidance counselor
advised her to not write her essay about her identity, because “nobody
wants to read another Asian immigrant story.” Sally ignored him and wrote
about acting as a translator for her parents as they encountered the
humiliations and hassles of working-class life.
Sally scored a 1,550 on the SAT. She was student-body president at Lowell
and played violin in the school orchestra. But during the trial, Harvard’s
attorneys intimated that she would not have gotten into Harvard without her
personal qualities, calling her admission “a wonderful example of the
consideration of an application by a group of people who ultimately came to
the correct decision and admitted Ms. Chen. But it was only the result of an
iterative and open process.” As proof, they pointed to her application,
which included an interviewer’s report mentioning her ethnicity on two
occasions:
“Categorized as low-income and with Taiwanese-speaking parents, she relates
to the plight of the outsiders in Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner. ...”
And:
“Her claims about making friends across multiple social groups seem
credible. As the youngest of 4 in a culturally Chinese home, she feels a
responsibility to take care of her parents. Recommending a 1 specifically
for Contribution because of her demonstrated energy and specific desire to
connect socially with everybody. As the youngest of 4 in a small apartment,
she has lots of experience with being a roommate in close quarters.”
It’s worth asking if a white student, who did not bear the stereotype of
the shy Asian who only hangs out with other Asians, would need to “credibly
” claim to want to make friends across “multiple social groups.” And
while it’s difficult to read too much into such brief notes, Sally’s top
personality score seemed to come from the fact that she broke the stereotype
and wouldn’t just be quiet and self-segregated. If this is Harvard’s idea
of “diversity,” it’s a white-down vision that rewards students for
acting, in essence, more like wealthy white kids.
But the emphasis on the essay revealed a much more troubling standard.
Harvard, in essence, is saying that if you want your race to count, you need
to prove to us why it matters. Or perhaps, to be more precise, when you
write an essay to present who you are to the most prestigious college in the
country, you should reduce your life to a moment of trauma.
At dinner at the Japanese steakhouse, Thang seemed to understand all this.
While quietly searing his steak on the tabletop grill, he said: “I don’t
want to defend Harvard. But it’s the better of two evils.”
Image
Name: Michael Wang, 23.
Education: Santa Clara University School of Law, class of 2022; Williams
College, class of 2017.
Photographed in Union City, Calif.
“Affirmative action is designed so that for every one person who benefits,
someone else needs to lose. Unfortunately, those losing should not be
another minority. I think that it is important for us to understand that
maintaining diversity is a priority because it is necessary to have multiple
cultures and backgrounds blend together for people to have a well-rounded
education.”
In September 2017, Delmar Fears, a 19-year-old junior at Cornell, walked up
to the office of President Martha E. Pollack. As co-chair of the group Black
Students United, she was accompanied by hundreds of chanting students who
had all come to deliver a set of demands. The list mostly included
administrative and curricular changes, from the creation of a “minority-
liaison-at-large” position to the hiring of psychologists and physicians of
color. But the ninth demand, sandwiched between the creation of a “student
honor board” and a “permanent presidential task force,” set off an
unexpected maelstrom.
“We demand that Cornell Admissions to come up with a plan to actively
increase the presence of underrepresented Black students on this campus. We
define underrepresented Black students as Black Americans who have several
generations (more than two) in this country. The Black student population at
Cornell disproportionately represents international or first-generation
African or Caribbean students. While these students have a right to flourish
at Cornell, there is a lack of investment in Black students whose families
were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America. Cornell must
work to actively support students whose families have been impacted for
generations by white supremacy and American fascism.”
Fears and her group received weeks of blowback from conservative websites,
and Black Students United later said it regretted the wording of its
statement. But that year Fears wrote a final paper on the issue titled “Who
Makes Up the 7 Percent of Black Cornellians?” which detailed some of the
demographic change that had taken place on exclusive college campuses. In a
2004 New York Times article, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard
’s African and African-American studies department, and Lani Guinier, a
professor in the law school, pointed out that while Harvard had increased
its black undergraduate population to 8 percent, a majority of those
students — up to two-thirds — were international students, first- or
second-generation immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean or the children of
biracial couples. What was rare, Gates said, was the black student whose
four grandparents lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Mary C
. Waters, the head of Harvard’s sociology department, told The Times, “You
need a philosophical discussion about what are the aims of affirmative
action. If it’s about getting black faces at Harvard, then you’re doing
fine. If it’s about making up for 200 to 500 years of slavery in this
country and its aftermath, then you’re not doing well.”
In 2007, Camille Z. Charles, a professor of sociology and Africana studies
at the University of Pennsylvania, and three co-authors, Margarita Mooney,
Douglas S. Massey and Kimberly C. Torres, published a study in The Journal
of Education titled “Black Immigrants and Black Natives Attending Selective
Colleges and Universities in the United States.” Charles, Mooney, Massey
and Mary J. Fischer followed up that research with a 2009 article, “
Affirmative Action Programs for Minority Students: Right in Theory, Wrong in
Practice.” Both papers reported an “overrepresentation” of black
immigrant students at highly selective colleges and universities compared
with black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved.
Charles’s study drew on data from 28 schools, going back to 1999. Nearly 20
years later, she is confident that the proportion of black immigrants has
increased, but she can’t say exactly how much, because schools do not make
that information accessible to the public. “It’s a way to have some
plausible deniability,” Charles told me. “The schools are purposefully not
paying attention to the backgrounds of the black students they admit. In
the ’80s and ’90s, low-income black students could talk about overcoming
obstacles in their essays, but over time, that narrative has worn thin. But
the immigrant narrative, which is also an American narrative, in some ways
might have become a more appealing story for admissions officers. A student
can write, say, ‘My parents were doctors in Nigeria, but they had to start
all over in the United States,’ and that story doesn’t invoke white guilt.
It doesn’t even tie to affirmative action in the same way, because there
isn’t this assumption of lesser qualifications that still follows black
American students, no matter their backgrounds or their parents’
backgrounds.” Charles continued: “I think there are American blacks whose
families have suffered generationally who are being squeezed out.”
Charles, it should be said, did not undertake her study in order to pit one
group of black people against another. And she emphasizes that she does not
think affirmative-action spots should be taken away from black immigrants.
Edward Blum, Delmar Fears and Yukong Zhao may not agree on much of anything,
but they all have made versions of an argument that the spirit of
affirmative action has been replaced by a largely cosmetic, overly
simplified diversity that allows elite institutions to report gains in black
and Latino student populations without having to engage in the harder work
of undoing systemic inequality. Waters’s question from 2004 has largely
gone unaddressed: If you stop random supporters of affirmative action on the
street and ask why they believe in it, they will most likely discuss the
need to address the harms of historic, institutional racism. They may talk
abstractly about a poor, “inner city” or “urban” kid in, say, Detroit
and how his test scores, grades and accomplishments should be evaluated in
the context of the extraordinary inequality within this country.
The truth at Harvard and other elite private colleges is that the supposed
zero-sum game of admissions slots isn’t really between Asian immigrants and
the descendants of enslaved people, but rather between Asian immigrants,
Latino immigrants and black immigrants. Some inevitable, deeply
uncomfortable questions arise: If you compare an Asian-American student
raised in poverty by parents who fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon with
the son of Chilean doctors who come from generational wealth and sent their
child to 12 years of private school, who is more privileged? If you accept
that the child of, say, solidly middle-class Ghanaian immigrants has to deal
with racism in the work force, profiling by the police and all the harms of
systemic inequality while the same working-class Asian kid gets to slide
into whiteness, how much advantage do you give to ameliorate the
disadvantage between one immigrant and another? What if you replace the
working-class Vietnamese student with the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants
, who, among other things, has had to deal with the profiling of Muslim
communities and Trump’s travel ban? These are not outlier examples used in
bad faith to present a provocative but false choice. At Harvard and other
elite schools, the outlier example is the “inner city” kid from Detroit.
These bizarre, discomforting litigations of race and privilege make sense
only within the context of the most exclusive places in America. But if
Harvard loses in the Supreme Court, Blum will be closer to his goal of
eliminating racial preferences, not only in college admissions but also in
every other corner of federal law. Even if Blum eventually loses this case,
it’s hard to imagine that he will stop. In 2014, S.F.F.A. filed another
discrimination lawsuit, against the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. The U.N.C. case, which has yet to go to trial, is not about Asian-
American applicants, but the goal is the same: end affirmative action
everywhere.
On March 12 of this year, a group of federal prosecutors in the same Boston
building as Judge Burroughs’s courtroom unsealed the indictments in
Operation Varsity Blues, the nationwide college-admissions bribery case that
set off a monthslong media circus involving everyone from the actress
Felicity Huffman to the head coach of Yale’s women’s soccer team. Legally
speaking, Varsity Blues has nothing to do with S.F.F.A. v. Harvard, but the
scandal recast the affirmative-action debate in a bit of a humiliating yet
ultimately necessary context: It felt as if a bunch of minorities were
clawing at one another while a line of entitled, less qualified white kids
walked through the gates of Ivy League schools as their alumni parents
unpacked an S.U.V. filled with weird rackets and skis.
A few weeks later, I met Alex again at a bubble-tea shop in Flushing.
Congratulations were in order — after a somewhat rocky admissions process
in which he had applied early to Yale and been deferred, was accepted to
Binghamton, Rochester and Rice but rejected at Brown, Princeton and Stanford
and was wait-listed at Vanderbilt, Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T. and Duke, Alex
had received some good news. He had been accepted at Yale, his dream school.
“How’s it feel?” I asked.
“I mean, I’m excited,” he said.
“Did you expect to get in?”
“Of course not! I mean, it’s Yale. ...”
“Were you upset that you didn’t get into some of those other schools?” I
asked.
“No, why would I be upset?”
“Like Brown. ... Don’t you think you were qualified to go to Brown?”
“Well, I don’t think I really fit the type of super intellectually curious
student that Brown says they’re looking for,” he said. “I mean, it’s
not that I’m not intellectually curious — I am — but they seem to want
people who don’t really know what they want to do yet and think the entire
world is fascinating. I’m a bit more focused than that.”
He said his opinion of affirmative action had evolved. “My thinking has
really changed,” he said, noting that his government class had discussed
affirmative action and how it connected to white supremacy. He still thought
it was “wrong to have a system where some people’s work was less valued
than others,” but he said he appreciated why it might be necessary to
adjust for differences in background.
My understanding of him had changed, too. Despite all his résumé building
and the involvement in random clubs and his own admitting that some of that
effort had been so much padding, I could see that his was an inquisitive
mind, and he wanted more than simply to disprove the trope of the cynical
Asian grade-grubber. His core interests lay in the sociological data
projects he had done at N.Y.U. and then at the offices of Assemblywoman Niou
. I asked if he had written about his data work for his essay. He said he
had mentioned it, but that he had mostly written about being the child of
immigrants.
“Didn’t you know you weren’t supposed to write about that?” I asked,
thinking of Sally Chen’s guidance counselor.
“What?” he asked.
“I think they’re tired of hearing the immigrant story, especially from
East Asian kids of college-educated parents,” I said.
“What!” he said again, with what sounded like genuine disbelief. He
stirred his bubble tea with a straw and laughed a bit sheepishly. “I wish
someone had told me.”
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer at large for the magazine and the author of the
forthcoming book “The Loneliest Americans.” He previously wrote an
article about a fraternity death and Asian-American identity.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 1, 2019, Page 9 of the
Sunday Magazine with the headline: Love Actually. Order Reprints | Today’s
Paper | Subscribe
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S*******l
发帖数: 4637
7
放到word里11号字28页。
大意就是AA基本是window dressing被各种abuse, 是个非常愚蠢的政策。每个族群里情
况都千差万别.这种blanket policy其实完全没有实现他intended outcome。
亚裔遭受严重的全社会性的stereotype。
本土奴隶后代黑人也抱怨获益的往往是非洲一代移民,其实都是elite家庭,中产家庭
孩子,本土黑人没有被帮到。
比较好玩儿是里面提到53华人组织student for fair admission的老张,后悔选了床铺。
S*******l
发帖数: 4637
8
nyt允许每个月几篇免费全文的。如果这个月还没用完,应该看得到全文。
n********g
发帖数: 6504
9
还好吧。习惯了GRE阅读这种文章不是个事。
我刚来买提的时候也经常发长贴。当时网友给的建议也是太长了。
现在我发的都很简短。

【在 S*******l 的大作中提到】
: 太长了
n********g
发帖数: 6504
10
其实重点是(文章里小孩的选择):读计算机还是读传统名校(包括传统名校计算机)
才是问题所在。
专业还是学校,这是两个圈子。
毫无疑问,读计算机专业,无论在美国还是中国,是晋升上流社会实现美国梦的敲门砖。
而读传统名校,则是逆水行舟,不折不扣的人生副资产。
一个好爸爸的确能帮小孩看透这些。

铺。

【在 S*******l 的大作中提到】
: 放到word里11号字28页。
: 大意就是AA基本是window dressing被各种abuse, 是个非常愚蠢的政策。每个族群里情
: 况都千差万别.这种blanket policy其实完全没有实现他intended outcome。
: 亚裔遭受严重的全社会性的stereotype。
: 本土奴隶后代黑人也抱怨获益的往往是非洲一代移民,其实都是elite家庭,中产家庭
: 孩子,本土黑人没有被帮到。
: 比较好玩儿是里面提到53华人组织student for fair admission的老张,后悔选了床铺。

相关主题
雪山裸体求置顶,十四日周日中午波士顿反AA大游行 (转载)空说无用,反对AA需要走法律渠道 (转载)
《华尔街日报》和《纽约时报》终于站出来帮亚裔学生了无标题
【转】哈佛申诉组委会行动倡议:个人请愿关于亚裔高校入学的好消息
进入Military版参与讨论
m******8
发帖数: 1676
11
我就是不知道外面公司是看重学校还是专业。
你看电影里说的都是学校。
所以我觉得还是学校重要些。

砖。

【在 n********g 的大作中提到】
: 其实重点是(文章里小孩的选择):读计算机还是读传统名校(包括传统名校计算机)
: 才是问题所在。
: 专业还是学校,这是两个圈子。
: 毫无疑问,读计算机专业,无论在美国还是中国,是晋升上流社会实现美国梦的敲门砖。
: 而读传统名校,则是逆水行舟,不折不扣的人生副资产。
: 一个好爸爸的确能帮小孩看透这些。
:
: 铺。

n********g
发帖数: 6504
12
那是(植入式)广告。如果以为“成功”(或“受人尊敬”)就是劳力士、林宝坚尼、
常春藤、公务机、七星级酒店、金发碧眼模特老婆、十二钗小妾,那智商一定有缺陷。
即使维基百科里也有这样的偏见。在描述上流社会时,写着多见常春藤毕业生。这一点
其实在当代美国并不存在。美国现在和将来的上流社会,烂校乃至没有学历的居多。
毕竟常春藤的毕业生人数占比很少。其中大多数可能只是去镀金的。既然是镀金,有什
么能比挤进去读本科更傻逼的。读个成教不是更简单明快。

【在 m******8 的大作中提到】
: 我就是不知道外面公司是看重学校还是专业。
: 你看电影里说的都是学校。
: 所以我觉得还是学校重要些。
:
: 砖。

n********g
发帖数: 6504
13
当然,虽然大多数亚裔不去常春藤。但我理解有些人去告哈佛。我不要是一回事,你不
卖给我是另一回事。很多人只是去争口气。

【在 m******8 的大作中提到】
: 我就是不知道外面公司是看重学校还是专业。
: 你看电影里说的都是学校。
: 所以我觉得还是学校重要些。
:
: 砖。

C*********e
发帖数: 1
14
哈哈

砖。

【在 n********g 的大作中提到】
: 其实重点是(文章里小孩的选择):读计算机还是读传统名校(包括传统名校计算机)
: 才是问题所在。
: 专业还是学校,这是两个圈子。
: 毫无疑问,读计算机专业,无论在美国还是中国,是晋升上流社会实现美国梦的敲门砖。
: 而读传统名校,则是逆水行舟,不折不扣的人生副资产。
: 一个好爸爸的确能帮小孩看透这些。
:
: 铺。

n********g
发帖数: 6504
15
为什么我强调非名校计算机呢。毕竟计算机毕业并不一定能/要做码工。
计算机系和其它理工科系(包括物理和数学)(文科就不说了)有本质的不同。上的“
数学”课都不一样。计算机系逻辑严谨,不吹自己做不到的牛(物理系的量子计算和应
数系的软人工智能不在此列)。
美国和中国两社会都讲究做人踏实。做人踏踏实实,不骗不抢不贪,失败不到哪里去。
而物理、数学等只能算建筑在沙滩上的神学,连自己都骗不了。

砖。

【在 n********g 的大作中提到】
: 其实重点是(文章里小孩的选择):读计算机还是读传统名校(包括传统名校计算机)
: 才是问题所在。
: 专业还是学校,这是两个圈子。
: 毫无疑问,读计算机专业,无论在美国还是中国,是晋升上流社会实现美国梦的敲门砖。
: 而读传统名校,则是逆水行舟,不折不扣的人生副资产。
: 一个好爸爸的确能帮小孩看透这些。
:
: 铺。

g******t
发帖数: 11249
16
计算机这种应用专业没什么意思
不像当马工又想从事计算机行业,老老实实从数学系本科读起

【在 n********g 的大作中提到】
: 为什么我强调非名校计算机呢。毕竟计算机毕业并不一定能/要做码工。
: 计算机系和其它理工科系(包括物理和数学)(文科就不说了)有本质的不同。上的“
: 数学”课都不一样。计算机系逻辑严谨,不吹自己做不到的牛(物理系的量子计算和应
: 数系的软人工智能不在此列)。
: 美国和中国两社会都讲究做人踏实。做人踏踏实实,不骗不抢不贪,失败不到哪里去。
: 而物理、数学等只能算建筑在沙滩上的神学,连自己都骗不了。
:
: 砖。

n********g
发帖数: 6504
17
这种人越少越好。计算机产业出了这么多问题,就是因为专业的人不够,进来杂七杂八
的把整个行业给搞坏了。

【在 g******t 的大作中提到】
: 计算机这种应用专业没什么意思
: 不像当马工又想从事计算机行业,老老实实从数学系本科读起

1 (共1页)
进入Military版参与讨论
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Harvard sued over 'racial profiling'【转】哈佛申诉组委会行动倡议:个人请愿
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相关话题的讨论汇总
话题: harvard话题: asian话题: he话题: american话题: his