CAMBRIDGE, Mass.— NEARLY a century ago, Harvard
had a big problem: Too many Jews. By 1922, Jews accounted for 21.5
percent of freshmen, up from 7 percent in 1900 and vastly more than at
Yale or Princeton. In the Ivy League, only Columbia and the University
of Pennsylvania had a greater proportion of Jews.
Harvard’s
president, A. Lawrence Lowell, warned that the “Jewish invasion” would
“ruin the college.” He wanted a cap: 15 percent. When faculty members
balked, he stacked the admissions process to achieve the same result.
Bolstered by the nativism of the time, which led to sharp immigration
restrictions, Harvard’s admissions committee began using the euphemistic
criteria of “character and fitness” to limit Jewish enrollment. As the
sociologist Jerome Karabel has documented, these practices worked for the next three decades to suppress the number of Jewish students.
A similar injustice is at work today, against Asian-Americans. To get into the top schools, they need SAT scores that are about 140 points
higher than those of their white peers. In 2008, over half of all
applicants to Harvard with exceptionally high SAT scores were Asian, yet
they made up only 17 percent of the entering class (now 20 percent). Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in America, but their proportion of Harvard undergraduates has been flat for two decades.
A new lawsuit
filed on behalf of Asian-American applicants offers strong evidence
that Harvard engages in racial “balancing.” Admissions numbers for each
racial and ethnic group have remained strikingly similar, year to year.
Damningly, those rare years in which an unusually high number of Asians
were admitted were followed by years in which especially few made the
cut.
The
most common defense of the status quo is that many Asian-American
applicants do well on tests but lack intangible qualities like
originality or leadership. As early as 1988, William R. Fitzsimmons,
Harvard’s dean of admissions, said that they were “slightly less strong on extracurricular criteria.”
Even
leaving aside the disturbing parallel with how Jews were characterized,
there is little evidence that this is true. A new study of over 100,000
applicants to the University of California, Los Angeles, found no
significant correlation between race and extracurricular achievements.
The
truth is not that Asians have fewer distinguishing qualities than
whites; it’s that — because of a longstanding depiction of Asians as
featureless or even interchangeable — they are more likely to be
perceived as lacking in individuality. (As one Harvard admissions
officer noted on the file of an Asian-American applicant, “He’s quiet
and, of course, wants to be a doctor.”)
The
contribution Jews made to American life in the decades after they were
maligned as unoriginal, grasping careerists speaks for itself. There is
no reason to believe that today’s Asian-Americans will leave less of a
mark.
For
all the historical parallels, there’s one big difference. In the days
of Lowell, Harvard was a bastion of white Protestant elites.
Anti-Semitism was rampant. Today, Harvard is a patchwork of ethnicities
and religions; 15 percent of students are the first in their families to attend college. In seven years as a student and teacher at Harvard, I have never heard anyone demean Asian-Americans.
So
why is the new discrimination tolerated? For one thing, many academics
assume that higher rates of admission for Asian-Americans would come at
the price of lower rates of admission for African-Americans. Opponents
of affirmative action — including the Project on Fair Representation, which helped bring the new suit — like to link the two issues, but they are unrelated.
As
recognized by the Supreme Court, schools have an interest in recruiting
a “critical mass” of minority students to obtain “the educational
benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” This justifies, in my
view, admissions standards that look favorably on underrepresented
groups, like African-Americans and Latinos. But it can neither explain
nor justify why a student of Chinese, Korean or Indian descent is so
much less likely to be admitted than a white one.
Conservatives point to Harvard’s emphasis on enrolling African-Americans (currently 12 percent of freshmen) and Hispanics (13 percent) but overlook preferences for children of alumni (about 12 percent of students) and recruited athletes (around 13 percent).
The real problem is that, in a meritocratic system, whites would be a
minority — and Harvard just isn’t comfortable with that.
Admission
to elite colleges is a scarce good. Deciding who gets an offer
inescapably involves trade-offs among competing values. Do we make
excellence the only criterion — and, if so, excellence in what? Should
we allocate places to those students who will profit most from them? Or
to those who are most likely to give back to the community?
There isn’t one right answer. But that does not mean that there aren’t some answers that are unambiguously wrong.
It’s
perfectly fair to consider extracurriculars as an important factor in
admissions. But the current system is so opaque that it is easy to
conceal discrimination behind vague criteria like “intangible qualities”
or the desire for a “well-rounded class.” These criteria were used to
exclude an overachieving minority in the days of Lowell, and they serve
the same purpose today. For reasons both legal and moral, the onus is on
the schools to make their admissions criteria more transparent — not to
use them as fig leaves for excluding some students simply because they
happen to be Asian.
