To the extent it might seem to be so, it isn’t because they were making arguments form positions that supported their real ideology only at that time. Now those positions no longer serve that ideology—maintenance of the status quo hierarchy—so their arguments have become incoherent.
I think she was heavily involved in the Great Bowling Green Massacre.
Asians are underreprsented when you compare their application scores to other candidates.
In 2019 Asians made up 22.9% of Harvard’s students. However, if their academic scores were all that was used for admission, they would make up 43% of the student body.
Asian Americans as a group have the highest average SAT scores, and yet have the lowest admission rate of any ethnic group:
That’s what I meant by under-representation. It’s not about how many Asians are in the population, it’s about how many were in the group of highly qualified applicants, but who failed to be accepted because of their race. Harvard uses the same kinds of subjective ‘student life’ and other metrics to exclude them - the same rules they’ve used to exclude Jews and Black people in the past.
So…underrepresented relative to how they would, hypothetically, be represented if admissions offices only looked at one particular number? Which nobody who actually works in higher education would ever propose doing?
What if Harvard chose all its applicants based on height? Asians are dramatically over-represented if we arbitrarily choose that metric instead! Who will stand up to oppose this horrible discrimination in favor of Asians??
Rules used to exclude Jews and Black people in the past, rules used to include Jews and Black people in the present . . . it’s really the same thing in the end isn’t it?
Um, previous academic performance is the single biggest indicator of how well someone will do in college. Height, not so much. Although I’m guessing that they definitely consider height if they are looking for a basketball star. Hence not many Asians in basketball, and no one complains because height actually matters. We understand that short people generally aren’t picked.
But if you are choosing people based on who will thrive in a tough academic environment, previous educational attainment and SAT scores are just about the only metric that actually matters.
You don’t think it’s troubling that the demographic with the highest SAT scores over 15 years also had the lowest admissions rate of any ethnic group?
And yes, I think the reason is primarily racism. Harvard just doesn’t want to be a college full of Asians. And their alumni might not like it either, and Harvard relies on them for a lot of funding. Maybe Asian alumni as a group don’t give as much money to Harvard as their upper-class trust fund baby students do. Whatever the reason, Asians are not admitted to Harvard in anywhere near the percentages their academic performance should indicate.
This is completely on-topic and will not lead to a hijack of any kind. There. I’ve said it.
So objective academic testing is as arbitrary as height for acceptance into an academic institution?
Judges have found that racism is not the reason.
Federal judge Allison D. Burroughs ruled Tuesday that Harvard College’s race-conscious admissions process does not intentionally discriminate against Asian American applicants. Her opinion — contained in a 130-page document — outlines the facts and legal conclusions of the case between the University and anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions.
Burroughs decided in Harvard’s favor on all four counts against it and concluded that its admissions process is legally sound.
Burroughs ruled that there are no viable race-neutral alternatives that the College could use to achieve a similarly diverse student population. Throughout the trial, attorneys and expert witnesses argued over a number of potential alternatives — including providing a “tip” to applicants from disadvantaged geographic regions or offering a form of socioeconomic affirmative action.
SFFA repeatedly alleged that Harvard never fully explored race-neutral alternatives in its admissions process. Harvard in turn pointed to two committees formed in 2014 and 2017 with the explicit purpose of considering such alternatives. Those committees found that it is necessary to consider race, and Burroughs wrote that she thought the University had sufficiently considered the alternatives.
Burroughs ruled that none of the alternatives SFFA suggested were viable since they had “come at significant costs” like a decline in the “expected strength” of incoming classes and a one-third reduction in the number of African American students in incoming classes.
In essence, you are falling for the usual, forget that while whites and Asians can be inconvenienced a bit, the other solutions your side proposes does prevent a lot of Hispanics and Blacks to enter. I can then say that what you push is the real racism.
Darn. I was wrong again!
Cite for the claim that SAT scores and educational attainment are the most reliable predictors of college performance?
Explanation for why, if this is true, no actual college or university just admits students based solely on SAT scores?
That is not the way the term “underrepresented” is typically used in college admissions, where it generally refers to proportionality with respect to the general population; but at least what you were actually saying makes more sense than what you seemed to be saying.
The thing is, US undergraduate colleges (especially the larger more prestigious ones) are looking for basketball stars as well as people who will thrive in a tough academic environment and people with lots of other characteristics, attainments and skillsets. College admissions is not, and never has been, just about picking the highest-scoring academic achievers. And this is largely because…
Correct, in the sense that Harvard wants to have a more diverse student body (and more diverse faculty and administration as well: the goals of diversity and representation are being strongly advocated in faculty/staff searches as well as in student admissions). This is because that’s the kind of student body that student applicants typically want to be part of.
Even Asian students who want to go to Harvard typically don’t want a Harvard filled with only Asian students. So college admissions officers (at Harvard and everywhere else) have to struggle with the fact that individual applicants (Asians and everybody else) don’t want their own applications disadvantaged for the sake of diversity criteria, but they want their campus community overall to be diverse.
Even if this were true, which is far from proven, as I noted above, no actual college or university would base admissions solely on SAT scores, because college applicants as a whole don’t want college to be only about academic achievements.
College students want sports teams, and theater companies, and music groups, and dance troupes, and a variety of interesting people with different backgrounds and interests to live among and interact with. If college admissions decisions don’t take all those different priorities into account when selecting applicants, their institution gets perceived as less interesting and less desirable, and applications fall off.
In the sense that acceptance isn’t simply about selecting the people with the highest test scores, at least.
This is true for all sorts of competitive selection procedures as well as for academics. Even basketball team tryouts aren’t a matter of just choosing all the tallest people.
(And the extent to which high school grades and standardized test scores are really “objective” measures of academic ability across all demographic groups is a whole other can of worms.)
I don’t think this is correct. Well, not entirely. The powerful are certainly noticing, and they’re certainly concerned, but I don’t think their concern is a result of them facing the same risks everyone else has always faced. Take Tucker Carlson, for instance. I mention him because I can’t think of anyone more agitated about cancel culture than he is. He has one of the most popular shows on TV and a net worth of about $30 million, so he’s basically uncancellable. Yet just this week he’s devoted an absurd amount of screen time to the “cancellation” of Dr. Seuss, a guy who’s been dead for 30 years and who hasn’t even (by any commonly understood definition of the term) been cancelled.
Carlson does this a lot. It’s not just Dr. Seuss. If a putative cancellation trends on Twitter for more than five minutes anywhere in the US, then you can bet even money Carlson will cover it.
What could account for this? If your argument (as I understand it) is correct, it’s because Carlson feels, in some way, personally at risk. Unless I’m missing something, this hypothesis would presume that, somehow, Carlson feels these incidents are the proverbial ‘thin end of the wedge’, and if they can come for Dr. Seuss then one day they’ll come for him.
However, I see no evidence that this is the case. For one thing, Carlson has been the subject of numerous concerted “cancellation” campaigns wherein his opponents have deliberately and methodically targeted his advertisers in a bid to get him off the air. On one particularly ugly occasion, protestors even turned up on his doorstep in the middle of the night chanting “We know where you live”. Say what you like about the ethics of cancel culture, there’s no denying that this was, at the very least, an attempted cancellation. Yet Carlson’s popularity doesn’t seem to have suffered.
If Carlson can survive that, then I think it’s safe to say he can survive more-or-less anything his would-be cancelers could throw at him.
But Carlson’s just one man. What other powerful people are similarly agitated about cancel culture? I can think of several people in Congress who are vocal opponents of cancel culture. Off the top of my head there’s Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Madison Cawthorn, and Marjorie Taylor Green. Can one make a case that those people feel in any way personally at risk from cancel culture? I think the reverse is actually true. If anything, their vocal opposition to cancel culture makes them more popular, not less. This may not be true nationwide, but it’s true among voters in their districts, who are the only people in a position to meaningfully threaten them.
I’m not discounting the possibility that there are some powerful people who feel that they might be ruined by cancel culture, but I can’t think of any whose fears are founded in anything tangible.
So if it’s not the case that the powerful are concerned because they’re now facing the same risks as everybody else, why do they spend so much time talking about something that doesn’t threaten them personally? I can think of three possible explanations:
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They genuinely believe that cancel culture represents a threat to freedom of speech, even if it doesn’t specifically threaten their freedom of speech.
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They don’t oppose cancellation per se, but they think people are being cancelled over silly, trivial things and they’re unhappy about it.
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They couldn’t care less about cancellation, but they know their voters/viewers/readers care about it, and they’re just throwing them some red meat.
Depending on the person, it could be one or all of these things. Let’s look at option 3, which is the least charitable. If the opposition to cancel culture by powerful people is entirely based on self-interested pandering, then the question becomes “Do the people to whom they’re pandering (i.e. their audiences) feel threatened by cancel culture, and do they have good reason to be?”
My opinion is that the answer to both these questions is a resounding yes. There are lots of instances of regular people, people who are in no sense powerful, being bullied by online mobs intent on ruining their lives. Sometimes, the mob has a point. I recall a case where a man was caught on camera racially abusing an Asian woman who confronted him about not wearing a mask. The incident went viral, the guy was doxxed, and a bunch of people contacted his employer to say they wouldn’t do business with them unless they fired him; so they did. No great loss.
However, there are lots of other instances of people being targeted for the silliest things imaginable, and suffering severe consequences as a result. Perhaps the dumbest I can recall offhand was a campaign led by an Asian woman against a white-owned Thai restaurant who had put slightly risque labels on their sauce bottles. Apparently, this was cultural appropriation and, to cut a long story short the restaurant’s leaseholder refused to renew their lease and the restaurant had to move premises. No small burden for a family owned restaurant to endure during a pandemic. Last time I checked the restaurant was still in business, but the point is that this woman really tried her level best to run them out on a rail and if circumstances had been even slightly different then she might’ve succeeded. This isn’t the worst example of cancel culture hurting powerless people over next to nothing, just the silliest. I can cite many more examples of powerless people being far more grievously injured if you wish to see them.
To tie this back to my overarching point, while cancellation may be useful in dealing with genuine bigots, and while you’re absolutely correct that it’s not a new phenomenon, I don’t agree that the recent attention paid to it is due to powerful people getting spooked. It’s due to powerful people catering to regular people who are getting spooked. These regular people have a point, and whether the powerful are pandering to them for money, or speaking up for them out of a sense of genuine moral outrage is immaterial. The world is changing fast, and minor infractions which, only a few years ago would’ve flown under the radar of even the most assiduous progressive are now costing people their livelihoods. This is a trend that only seems to be speeding up, and the vast majority of its victims aren’t fortunate enough to be turned into a cause célèbre by the likes of Tucker Carlson, so they suffer in silence.
It’s for this reason that I oppose cancel culture. I think that cancellation, as a tool, is being used far too often, on far too many people, very few of whom have any genuine power, for very flimsy reasons.
That said, you’re correct when you say that cancellation can be a valid tool for fighting bigotry on occasion. I just don’t think those occasions are representative of the phenomenon as it exists today.
I read a bunch of cites. Some say that high school GPA is far more important than standardized tests, while others say that inconsistencies between schools and grade inflation practices make standardized tests better. Doesn’t really matter which is more important, as A) Asian Americans do better on both, and B) Harvard seems to use SAT scores as the initial filter, keaning you won’t even get a preliminary recruitment letter unless your SAT’s reach a certain level.
Somit doesn’t really matter if more intqngible aspects of your life circumstances are important, because you don’t even get an interview if you get filtered out by the race-based screening done before they even send out recruitment letters.
We are fundamentally going to disagree if you don’t think that it’s racist to discriminate against individuals based on race to achieve larger social goals such as righting past wrongs or coming up with the ‘proper’ mix of races based on ideology.
Can you provide a cite for the specific incident you’re talking about? I don’t disbelieve your description, but I can’t find any more detailed reporting (or any reporting at all) about it.
Called it!!!
According to that criterion, any form of affirmative action, preferential recruitment, diversity criteria, etc., would be labeled “racist”. So yeah, I think we’re going to fundamentally disagree about that.
I doubt, too, that we’re going to get any clearer than this when it comes to, “My side was all for it when it benefited us, but now that it tends to create a certain basic sense of fairness in righting profound and historical wrongs … well … it simply must end.”
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression 
? I think you’re going to have to provide a cite for that claim, because it runs counter to everything I’ve ever seen in college admissions. Are you somehow under the impression that students can’t apply to Harvard, or can’t gain acceptance to Harvard, unless they first get sent a recruitment letter?
No, no, no, that’s not how college recruitment works. Recruitment, as the name suggests, is a process of encouraging potential applicants to submit an application. It does not in any way limit who may apply, nor does it determine which applicants get offered interviews or acceptances.