First Jews, now Asians

One of the uglier chapters in the history of academe is the way many of our top universities, led by Harvard, adopted de facto quotas on Jews after World War I because of concerns their rising numbers of Jewish would “ruin” their schools.

Today a group called Students for Fair Admissions is suing Harvard, arguing that the folks up in Cambridge are at it again. But this time, they say, the target isn’t Jews but Asians, who are losing out from admissions policies based on race.

Students for Fair Admissions is also suing the University of North Carolina — now in the midst of another scandal involving academic fraud for the benefit of athletes — as well as Harvard. But we’ll concentrate on Harvard here.

The applicant it cites is a first-generation Asian-American who ranked No. 1 in a high-school class of 460, attended a high school ranked in the top 5 percent of US high schools, had perfect 800 scores for his SAT II history and math, was an AP Scholar, National Scholar and the like and captained his varsity tennis team — in addition to other volunteer and extracurricular activities that included helping Chinese students learn English. But he was rejected.

FDR of the St.-Louis-Rejecting Fame?

You got it! (But let's call it infamy instead.) And that was far from the only callous action taken by his administration which contributed to costing the lives of European Jews at the hands of the genocidal Nazi regime.

They could just scrap academics as a criteria for admission. Some day soon it may even be reasonable to do so. It may already be reasonable to scrap grades as admission critera for various reasons. You could argue that too big a percentage of ones grades in high school are arbitrary. How a student behaves and interacts is a part of how english, history, and the arts are graded. Maths and sciences are less arbitrary. But in an era when computers are so much a part of our lives does it matter how much you know? Or is it more important to display how well you can learn and apply what you’ve learned?

I am not saying I know the answer. I am just saying if universities wanted to, they could justify throwing grades out the window and just judge applicants based on other criteria including their own internal testing, community ranking, real world experience, recommendations from peers or mentors etc. Good, bad or indifferent, the further they can get from using grades as a criteria the less susceptible they will be to these kinds of accusations.

Again, not saying I think they should, just saying it could be done. And I have no clue how the feds would react to this, considering how much federal money the universities take and need to attract the top researchers. Top as most here know doesn’t necessarily mean best.

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