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by yhoneycomb 2804 days ago
Actually, it would probably be mainly Asian students if it was completely merit based

Does that suck? If so IMO you're racist

2 comments

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".
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.

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.
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.