[rdiddly]

I presume they're trying to have it be affirmative-action-like, but your comment did make me think of it in an interesting way: You can't say "race always helps" or "race only helps" because everybody has a race. There are no Person for which Person.Race is null. (Can you tell I'm on a break from writing code tonight?)

[ajross]

> There are no Person for which Person.Race is null.

Are there not? There are surely Person for which multiple rows with distinct Race exist. It's... complicated.

And yes: if you buy that "race" matters, for good or ill, it's not possible to have a completely just policy that is race-blind, it just isn't. If Harvard wants a campus whose diversity of background (and that obviously includes much more than just race) matches the world around it, which seems like a laudable goal to me, then there are going to have to be race-based decisions made.

Are they the right ones? Not to everyone, no. The best ones? Surely not. But let's not get too caught up in our schadenfreude here.

Be honest: the Preferred Admissions Policy of all the folks who are shouting the loudest here would result in a campus filled with middle+ class whites (with a detectable minority of east asians). We've tried that model. It sucked.

[yhoneycomb]

Actually, it would probably be mainly Asian students if it was completely merit based

Does that suck? If so IMO you're racist

[tuesdayrain]

Complaining about any kind of race composition does seem oddly racist to me, even when the poster is trying to reduce racism. I wouldn't go to a university in Africa and say "wow it sucks that there's so many black people here, you need some white people for diversity. Maybe we should tweak the admissions system".

[ajross]

You're missing the point. Let's say you go to your hypothetical "university in Africa", and that your nation had, I dunno, a significant(25%, say) Uzbek minority. Yet the student body was 98% native africans. You seriously wouldn't consider that a problem? You wouldn't ask why the Uzbeks weren't being educated at the same rate as the rest of the population? You'd consider it "oddly racist" to even ask if maybe this was wrong?

That's where we were, in just our parents generation. Harvard used to be 98%+ white as recently as the 1970's. Of of that generation, there were almost no non-white elite graduates entering the top flight law firms and investment banks and academic tenure tracks. I mean, sure, hispanic kids could "go to college". But because of "merit" they couldn't go to Harvard.

So Harvard fixed it. Harvard is now reasonably well-integrated. But the techniques they used to fix it are coarse and hard to apply in a uniformly fair way. So everyone bitches about it, and they tweak it endlessly. But bitching about the algorithm isn't a refutation of the problem.

So tell me again how that's "oddly racist" to think this is a problem.

[yhoneycomb]

Your examples all fall flat. You've completely sidestepped the issue of discrimination against Asians, instead saying that Harvard "fixed" its racism by instituting more racism.

[codyb]

You can call me racist all you want but I do think that'd suck and meeting people from different and similar backgrounds to me has been a tremendous boon to me in my life.

Getting out of your bubble is important, being challenged by others beliefs is important, and learning to have empathy for others situations is important.

And universities should strive to be places where those things happen.

[rdiddly]

You would model that as a many-to-many relationship, with a People table, and a Races table, and a cross-referencing People_Races table that only has PersonID and RaceID columns.

Anywhoo, I'm not sure what the grounds would be for feeling schadenfreude here. "Ha ha, Harvard makes race-based decisions that are not-the-right-ones to everyone, and are surely-not-the-best... THE BLIND FOOLS!" A little esoteric for me.

I'm old OK - I grew up after the leftie ideals that started their ascendancy in the 60s had already kind of arrived in the mainstream. (But before they were set on fire by the likes of Reagan and then sold out by the unholy Clinton-era alliance between erstwhile liberals and 1-percenters.) I was taught, and internalized, values of racial equality, the ennoblement of all peoples, equality for all, one big group called humanity, etc. That picture of Earth taken from the moon by the Apollo astronauts - one world. All of us.

What makes me sad is that what people call fighting "for justice" nowadays seems to mean betraying and abandoning all that. Instead of seeing one big group with no subgroups, and treating everyone equally, some people seem to want to go back to looking out only for their own little subgroup and its interests, against all the others (or against one in particular). Who does that remind you of? Reminds me of the KKK. It was practically their mission statement - "let's look out for our particular subgroup." (white people) So you might say "No no no, we're different because unlike theirs, our cause is just." Are we so sure? The KKK thought they were just. It's in fact the very thing that enabled them to commit horrible acts against human beings. Justness of the cause is ALWAYS how you rationalize injustice.

Seems to me division and hate still lead to exactly where division and hate have always led.

Not that this has much to do with Harvard admissions but I thought I'd get it off my chest.