Business Times
Does discriminating against Asian-Americans advance equality? The US Supreme Court decides
Wed, Nov 02, 2022
DURING the 1920s and 1930s, the Ivy League universities, most notably Harvard, discriminated against Jewish applicants and placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to their institutions.
Hence the medical schools at Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania and Yale had rigid quotas in place. Yale University medical school, for example, accepted in 1935 applicants from a pool of some 500. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in.
According to historian David Oshinsky, the dean of the Yale medical school Milton Winternitz’s instructions were clear: “Never admit more than five Jews, and take no blacks at all.”
As a result, many American-Jewish applicants who became famous judges, physicists and Nobel laureates, including Jonas Salk, who developed the vaccine against polio, were turned away from these schools and obtained their degrees at state universities or abroad.
Institutional discrimination against Jewish applicants to Harvard also took place under the administration of former university president Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who according to a biographer was “increasingly alarmed” over the rising number of Jewish students earning admission to the university based on their high test scores. In fact, Jewish applicants scored a significant number of spots due to their top marks on the entry exams.
Professor Lowell, who was Harvard president from 1909 to 1933, referred to “the Hebrew question” as a “knotty one” and a “source of much anxiety”, and concluded that Harvard could do “the most good” by limiting the number of men admitted from that religious group, even warning fellow administrators and the governing bodies that unless the university took action, the “danger would be imminent”.
“If (the) number (of Jews) should become 40 per cent of the student body, the race feeling would become intense. If every college in the country would take a limited proportion of Jews, I suspect we should go a long way toward eliminating race feeling among students,” Professor Lowell wrote.
In response, Harvard administrators introduced a system of what was called “holistic” admissions at the college in the 1920s that took into account non-academic factors. So instead of instituting quotas limiting Jewish admission rates to Harvard, the university embraced a new admissions process that still restricted the number of Jewish enrolments without the use of “hard” quotas.
The idea was that Harvard and other Ivy League universities would not judge applications solely based on test scores and high school transcripts. Admissions officers would strive to give “consideration of each applicant as a whole person”, assessing the “character, fitness and promise” of the applicant.
The history of this institutional anti-Semitism perpetrated nearly a century ago by Harvard was filed by the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that accuses the university of present-day discrimination against Asian Americans in the admissions process, and that is being considered by the US Supreme Court this week.
The Justices are considering challenges to the admission practices of Harvard as well as the University of North Carolina (UNC), in particular that they discriminate illegally against Asian-Americans in favour of other races.
As Edward Blum, the president of the Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) that is suing Harvard, the nation’s oldest private university, and UNC, America’s oldest public university, put it, the two schools are raising the bar for admission for certain racial and ethnic groups and lowering it for others.
In the case of Harvard, SFFA contends that the university is discriminating against Asian-Americans in the early 21st century in the same way it had discriminated against Jews in the early 20th century.
According to the lawsuit, Harvard is penalising Asian-American applicants in favour of African-Americans, Hispanics and whites by “engaging in racial balancing, overemphasising race and rejecting workable race-neutral alternatives” to achieving diversity.
SFFA presented to the court a hypothetical case of an Asian-American male with a 25 per cent chance of admission, and explained that changing the applicant’s race to Hispanic boosted his chances to 77 per cent; and if he were African-American, his admission prospects would surge to 95 per cent.
According to studies, Asian-American applicants to Harvard ranked above all other racial and ethnic groups on objective measures such as tests and test scores. So in order to limit the number of Asian-Americans admitted, Harvard employs, not unlike the case of Jews a century ago, a “holistic” approach that uses subjective measures of personality including leadership traits, and whether the applicants exuded confidence, or were likable or kind.
That in turn is likely to thwart the chances of admission for many Asian-Americans who may be introverted, and ironically leads Asian-American parents to hire tutors who are supposed to teach their kids how to become likable and kind.
Harvard and UNC, and those that back their discriminatory policies of racial preferences, aka “affirmative action”, argue that race is a proxy for views and experiences, and would ensure “diversity” in the university, as though the colour of one’s skin tells us something about who the applicant is. That argument runs very much contrary to basic principles of the civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr., and its struggle for racial equality.
In a way, the current US Supreme Court is now revisiting a similar case the court considered in 2003 when it concluded that race could be used as one factor in achieving diversity, and as a way of correcting the system of racial injustice that African-Americans had experienced.
But interestingly enough, one of the conservative Justices ruling in the 2003 case, Sandra Day O’Connor, wrote then that she expected that the use of race to achieve diversity wouldn’t be needed in 25 years.
That in fact is the view of the majority of Americans. According to a 2022 Pew Research survey, 74 per cent of all Americans, including 59 per cent of African-Americans, 64 per cent of Asian-Americans and 68 per cent of Hispanics, don’t believe that race should be a factor in college admission.
Critics have pointed out that the system of racial preferences, or “affirmative action”, is a form of “reverse racism”, and argued that tags like “Hispanic” or “Asian-American” don’t make a lot of sense when you consider that immigrants from Cuba and Nicaragua and Spain or, for that matter, from India, Japan or Nepal, don’t have a lot in common, while rising numbers of intermarriages between members of these groups and whites are challenging the entire notion of racial identity itself.
And, anyway, why should the son of wealthy immigrants from Brazil or Nigeria be favoured over the daughter of poor immigrants from Cambodia or, for that matter, West Virginia when it comes to being admitted to a college or getting a job?
On another level, an affirmative action “industry” has been growing in recent years with politicians and lobbyists operating in the name of their preferred ethnic group to try to squeeze special benefits from the government and from businesses as opposed to trying to promote racial justice.
In recent years, voters in several states, including California, adopted bans on affirmative action, in admissions at public universities as well as in other areas of public life.
That explains why the proportion of Asian Americans in some of the top universities in California is much higher than their percentage in the population: More than 43 per cent of undergraduates at Berkeley in 2020; close to 25 per cent at Stanford in 2021; and 44 per cent at CalTech in 2022.
And according to experts, they would make up 43 per cent of the admitted class at Harvard in accordance with their academic performance, in the same way that the percentage of Jews at Harvard is today more than 20 per cent despite the fact that Jews make up only 2.4 per cent of the American adult population.
The majority on the Supreme Court appears to be ready to rule in favour of SFFA that the race-based admissions programmes at Harvard and UNC are, indeed, discriminatory against Asian-Americas and are therefore unlawful and must be repealed.
In that context, the exchange on Monday (Oct 31) between Chief Justice John Roberts and Seth Waxman, a lawyer representing Harvard, was revealing.
Waxman argued that race is only one “tip” that the school uses in the admission process. Chief Justice Roberts then asked whether that means that race is determinative in some cases”. Waxman conceded that race was a determining factor “just as being, you know, an oboe player in a year” when the school’s orchestra needs an oboe player.
“We did not fight a civil war about oboe players, ‘ the Chief Justice responded. “We did fight a civil war to eliminate racial discrimination.”