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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35588 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Didn't know that Volokh did that. Props to him.

Here's an argument in favor of explicit, quota-based affirmative action compared to what exists now: it adds transparency instead of driving it underground. Clearly adcoms want to engineer the racial composition of their classes and will do so by whatever means possible. But avoiding explicit quotas just shifts AA mechanisms to illegibility and makes it impossible to discuss. Any debate around the extent, values, and goals of AA gets obscured by a bunch of sand being thrown up in the air. "We are objective and meritocratic, it's just that Asian Americans have ineffably worse personalities" and all that dross.

People can debate the value of AA itself (I'm probably more supportive of it in some circumstances than most here), but it's better to make it explicit so people can reasonably discuss it instead of getting sidetracked about whether and to what extent it's happening. And psychologically it's better for students to know that they're being held to different standards instead of gaslighting them about mysterious personality defects that they all have but group X doesn't.

openly mock Asians is somehow not relevant to the issue

I don't read the quote from the memo as mocking Asians; it's mocking admissions committees and the ridiculous standards they apply to Asians. It's doubtlessly still relevant for trial and there's no reason it should be sealed, but if anything I read some empathy toward Asians and an acknowledgment that they face a much, much higher bar than other minority groups.

Someone needs to get Californians to pass another proposition, one that bans any admission criteria except state residence and SAT results in UC and CSU.

Here's an argument in favor of explicit, quota-based affirmative action compared to what exists now: it adds transparency instead of driving it underground. Clearly adcoms want to engineer the racial composition of their classes and will do so by whatever means possible. But avoiding explicit quotas just shifts AA mechanisms to illegibility and makes it impossible to discuss. Any debate around the extent, values, and goals of AA gets obscured by a bunch of sand being thrown up in the air. "We are objective and meritocratic, it's just that Asian Americans have ineffably worse personalities" and all that dross.

People can debate the value of AA itself (I'm probably more supportive of it in some circumstances than most here), but it's surely better to make it explicit so people can reasonably discuss it instead of getting sidetracked about what's actually happening. And psychologically it's better for students to know that they're being held to different standards instead of gaslighting them about mysterious personality defects that they all have but group X doesn't.

I agree with this, though I admit I haven't thought too deeply on it. Clearly the desire to discriminate against Asians is there, and this desire will be fulfilled one way or another due to the people who have this desire being the same people who control the levers to power in this context. It's best if it's all out in the open, so that potential applicants, their parents, and others can more accurately assess both their chances and the standards of Harvard and other universities.

However, I suspect that the obfuscation is a very important part of the point that is also desired by the people who desire to discriminate against Asians, and as such any implementation of AA will inevitably have to be obscured. AA's value in providing a nice-sounding mechanism for engineering the admissions results they're targeting would be lost if everything were out in the open, and that function might be a critical, irremovable portion of it.

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