Harvard was sued for discriminating against Asian Americans, by looking at factors other than test scores and grades. Harvard, like many universities, attempts to use multiple measures and seeks to have a diverse student body. Its class of 2021 has a mix of Whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. As I wrote earlier,
The U.S. population is about 6% Asian, African Americans are 13%, whites are 61%, Hispanics are 18%.
The Harvard class of 2021 is 22% Asian, 14.6% African American, 11.6% Latino, and 2.5% Native American or Pacific Islander.
The group that is suing is attempting to eliminate affirmative action altogether. It is called Students for Fair Admissions. Its president is Edward Blum of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Eliminating affirmative action would dramatically reduce the proportion of Latinos and African Americans admitted to selective colleges. Blum hopes to eliminate all racial and ethnic preferences.
“COALITION VOICES SUPPORT FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: A coalition of 34 national Asian Pacific American organizations says it rejects the notion that a majority of Asian American Pacific Islanders oppose affirmative action. The group issued a statement Friday in reaction to New York Times coverage of a lawsuit alleging discrimination against Asian Americans in Harvard University’s admissions policies. The National Council of Asian Pacific Americans calls the argument a “false narrative” that exists to drive a wedge between its community and other minority and underserved communities.
— After examining Harvard’s data, the council said it does not believe there was “intentional or implicit bias against Asian American applicants.” “If we did conclude that Harvard’s admissions policies were impacted by implicit bias against our community, we would most certainly voice our concern. We strongly support admission policies that aim to make colleges and universities more diverse and we stand in solidarity with other communities of color,” the statement said. The case is the most recent test for affirmative action at colleges, and is being watched closely across the higher education community.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How do they explain that Asian applicants received the lowest “personality” ratings relative to any other racial or ethnic group? I haven’t followed this closely, but if that’s true, then that on its face that seems hard to square with the idea that there isn’t an implicit bias against Asian applicants. (Or maybe it’s explicit bias?)
Am I really the only one here who finds these “personality” scores (assigned by admissions officers who have never met the applicants) strange and suspect?
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I suspect it has more to do with the cultural milieu than actual personality deficits. Behaviors are socialized differently depending on what community nurtured you. We know that just looking at white students alone.
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These ratings are assigned by people who have never met the applicant.
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Harvard and other institutions that want a diverse student body are using their discretion to create a class with an appropriate distribution of well qualified students who are of different racial and ethnic origins. Do you have a problem with that?
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If a school achieves a desired racial balance by intentionally and systematically assigning members of one racial group artificially low “personality” scores, I might indeed have a problem with that. I certainly don’t feel great about it.
Alternatively, if a school’s admissions officers consistently assign members of one racial group with “personality” scores that are lower than all other racial/ethnic groups for no reason whatsoever, then I might indeed have a problem with that, too, because that seems like a textbook case of what people call “implicit bias.”
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I don’t believe in personality scores. However I commend Harvard for achieving excellent diversity of very well qualified candidates.
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And what does it mean to give someone a low personality score because if their “cultural milieu”?
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How do you give someone a personality score without having met them? Are they giving applicants a survey? If so, I would question whether that survey is class or ethnically sensitive. This is a stupid example but it might help understanding…or not. I waved to a Filipino colleague going by my classroom, and she came in. I found out that our “Hi” or “Bye” wave means come here in the Philippines. Here’s another one for you: My uncle, who was Colombian, used to amuse himself on occasion by backing Americans around a room. Americans apparently need more personal space than Colombians. I am guessing that people of different ethnicities might answer a personality survey differently.
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No, it’s not based on a survey. It’s not exactly clear to me how they come up with the ratings, but the one thing that is clear (from the news reports and the court filings I’ve read) is that they base the personality ratings in the contents of the applicants application file. You apply, fill out the application, write your personal statements, submit your letters of recommendation (I’m laughing now at how bare bones my college applications 30 years ago were), and Harvard rates how kind and courageous and likable and well-respected you are.
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That sounds like an absolutely ridiculous way to determine a person’s personality. I think we are wondering into apocryphal territory here.
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If they just had the courage to have racial quotas, I’d be okay with it. But manipulating their criteria to achieve a diverse student body is wrong and hurtful. Excusing racism for the greater good…? You’ve got some explaining to do.
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I find them strange and suspect, too — has there been any information as to what they are based on?
I bet Jared Kushner had a super duper great “personality!”
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I’m confused. What is a “personality” score and what does that have to do with being admitted to a college?
I’ve never read or heard of a “personality” score, and I read a lot … I mean a lot. How do you get one of those?
I thought personality was divided up into”
introverts
extroverts
psychopaths
sociopaths
narcissists
Trump
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You just have to apply to Harvard, and their admissions officers will give you a personality score, based on how “kind,” “courageous,” and “likeable” you are. Presumably all gleaned from your application packet.
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Based on filling out the application and never meeting the applicants?!?!
My first reaction is that I found this weird, strange and stupid — probably racist in some ways too.
Then on second thought, I wonder if Harvard’s application includes an EQ test too. I’ve read that EQ is considered much more important than IQ. Maybe this “personality” score is really some form of a score for EQ — another way to measure EQ but calling it a Personality Score.
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I would think “personality” equates with “well rounded”. Clubs, athletics, student body elections, service and charity, etc., all should come into play. Students are much more than grades and test scores. And extracurriculars have nothing to do with race, other than to mitigate the influence of grades and test scores. (Quick side note: grades are better than test scores.)
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You might well think wrong. We’ll know more as this heads toward trial.
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(That was quick.) I might at that! Just a’speculating.
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SPELLING!!!!
>
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Capitalization! Punctuation! Complete sentences!
There is always a problem when a group calls itself “students” or “citizens”.
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Fortunately for you, Diane has an open position for an editorial assistant. Starting pay is appreciation, but if things go well you could probably work your way up to gratitude.
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Oh, and ability to blog on an iphone from the back of a taxi a must.
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Shouldn’t the statistics about the US population really be about the US population of 17 – 19 year olds? Because that is the population from which the class is chosen. I think white students may be a smaller than 61% of the population of 17-19 year olds than they are overall. Are there statistics for all 2017 high school graduating seniors that include all types of schools and even home schooled graduating seniors from whom that freshman class would be chosen. Are white students still 61%?
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Asian American
undergraduate enrollments:
Princeton (22%)
Yale (25%)
Columbia (29%)
Cornell (19%)
Brown (14%)
U Penn (20%)
Stanford (22%)
Not sure exactly what their argument is.
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CalTech does not discriminate on the basis of race at all:
Asians: 42.7%
https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/california-institute-of-technology/student-life/diversity/
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When you have more applicants than the seats with the perfect GPA and SAT, you need something else to make a selection. The colleges steering away from SAT use race, ethnicity, personality and other “holistic” options, decreasing not increasing equity.
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Private colleges like Harvard, as you point out, have an overabundance of well qualified applicants. They use a variety of criteria to select the class they want. They do not want a class that has no black or Hispanic students.
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African American and Hispanic enrollments at the Ivies range from 8% to 14% for each group.
These elite universities also have international enrollments between 10% to 15%. It stands to reason that some of these foreign students come from Asian countries as well.
At Princeton, 16.9% of applicants accepted had a GPA of 3.90 to 4.0.
5.6% of applicants accepted had a GPA of 3.50 or lower.
8.2% of Princeton applicants who were accepted had SAT scores of 1500 to 1600. 7.8% of applicant accepted had ACT scores of 32 to 36.
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Picking and choosing your racism is never right.
But just like the “private” bakery selecting not to make a cake for a gay couple based on their criteria — the supreme court might agree with you.
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Princeton was accused of discriminating against Asian applicants back in 2006. After a nine year investigation the Office for Civil Rights (USDOE) cleared the University of any bias in their admission policies. The OCR investigation found that Princeton considered race only in ways consistent with U.S. Supreme Court rulings, and without creating a quota system that limited Asian-American admissions.
The reason Asian-American applicants have such a tough time getting into Princeton, OCR concluded, was that everyone has a tough time getting into Princeton.
Elite universities like Harvard and Princeton are the most selective universities in the world, rejecting 93 to 95 out of every 100 well qualified applicants.
The real story here has to do with the group heading this law suit, Students for Fair Admission and its founder Edward Blum. Through SFFA, Blum trolls for students who feel they have been discriminated against so that he can fight against affirmative action. His goal is to bring it down.
https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/updates/
Here’s an excerpt from
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/24/opinion/yang-harvard-lawsuit/index.html
“Now, let’s go back to Jane Dou. She didn’t end up at the center of the Harvard suit accidentally. She was discovered through a broad-based campaign conducted by SFFA founder Edward Blum — a frustrated Republican congressional candidate who has chosen to make a career out of waging war on laws and policies that give “special privileges” to minorities. Dou was someone Blum wanted — a student willing to serve as a test case in a high-profile attack on affirmative action. It’s important to note that whatever its outcome, the lawsuit won’t help Dou. It’s almost certain that she’s been accepted by other colleges, and by the time the suit is resolved she will likely have graduated from one of them. What this lawsuit is really is just the latest attempt to derail an apparatus that has given hundreds of thousands of blacks, Hispanics and, yes, Asians a means to climb out of circumstances defined by our society’s historical racism.”
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Admission officers should look at multiple measures, not just performance on the SAT.
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There’s a piece in the Times today that gets at what I find unsettling about this “personality scoring.”
Harvard Is Wrong That Asians Have Terrible Personalities
By Wesley Yang
There’s a moving passage contained in a deposition taken in the major class-action lawsuit accusing Harvard University of racial bias against Asian-Americans. An attorney for Students for Fair Admissions, the nonprofit group representing a dozen Asian-Americans denied admission by Harvard, confronts the assistant principal of Stuyvesant High School with evidence that white students applying to Harvard in 2014 from her school were more than twice as likely to be admitted to the university as were her Asian-American students.
The assistant principal, Casey Pedrick, starts to cry.
(Witness crying.)
Q. I’m sorry this is upsetting to you. Do you want to take a break?
A. (Witness shakes her head no.)
Q. You want to keep going? Do you want to tell me why this is so upsetting to you?
A. Because these numbers make it seem like there’s discrimination, and I love these kids, and I know how hard they work. So these just look like numbers to all you guys, but I see their faces.
That last sentence is worth lingering on for a moment. When Ms. Pedrick looks in the faces of her Asian students, who comprise more than 70 percent of the population at Stuyvesant, she doesn’t see any one of them as “yet another textureless math grind,” as M.I.T.’s dean of admissions was brazen enough to call a Korean-American student to Daniel Golden, the author of “The Price of Admission.” She doesn’t see her students as an arrogant, privileged “ethnic group” who think they “own admission” to these high-performing schools, as the new chancellor of New York City Schools, Richard Carranza, recently put it.
Ms. Pedrick knows that her Asian students believe they have to earn their admission to Stuyvesant in the only way anyone has for more than four decades: by passing a rigorous entrance exam. Their parents will often invest a major share of the family income into test preparation courses to help them pass — this despite the fact that more Asians live in poverty than any other group in New York City.
At the time that she was deposed, Ms. Pedrick did not know that the Harvard admissions office consistently gave Asian-American applicants low personality ratings — the lowest assigned collectively to any racial group. She did not know that Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research had found that if the university selected its students on academic criteria alone, the Asian share of the Harvard student body would leap from 19 percent to 43 percent. She did not know that though Asians were consistently the highest academically performing group among Harvard applicants, they earned admission at a rate lower than any other racial group between 2000 and 2019.
All she knew was what she had witnessed as an assistant principal and the single fact that she was shown by her deposers. But perhaps she intuited the rest.
Earlier this month, we learned that a review of more than 160,000 individual student files contained in six years of Harvard’s admissions data found that Asians outperformed all other racial groups on every measure of academic achievement: grades, SAT scores and the most AP exams passed. They had more extracurricular activities than their white counterparts. They were rated by interviewers who had met them as virtually on par with their white counterparts in their personal qualities. Yet Harvard admissions officers, many of whom had never met these applicants, scored them collectively as the worst of all groups in the one area — personality — that was subjective enough to be readily manipulable to serve Harvard’s institutional interests.
The report by the plaintiff’s expert witness, the Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono, revealed that Harvard evaluated applicants on the extent to which they possessed the following traits: likability, helpfulness, courage, kindness, positive personality, people like to be around them, the person is widely respected. Asian-Americans, who had the highest scores in both the academic and extracurricular ratings, lagged far behind all other racial groups in the degree to which they received high ratings on the personality score.
“Asian-American applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time only in the top academic index decile. By contrast, white applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time in the top six deciles,” wrote Mr. Arcidiacono. “Hispanics receive such personal scores more than 20% of the time in the top seven deciles, and African Americans receive such scores more than 20% of the time in the top eight deciles.”
Even if the very worst stereotypes about Asians were true on average, it beggars belief that one could arrive at divergences as dramatic as the ones Mr. Arcidiacono documents by means of unbiased evaluation.
The Asian-American population has more than doubled over the last 20 years, yet the Asian-American share in the student populations at Harvard has remained frozen. Harvard has maintained since the 1980s, when claims of anti-Asian discrimination in Ivy League admissions first surfaced, that there is no racial bias against Asian-Americans once you control the preferences offered to athletes and alumni.
The discovery process in this case has demonstrated that this claim is no longer supportable.
Mr. Arcidiacono found that an otherwise identical applicant bearing an Asian-American male identity with a 25 percent chance of admission would have a 32 percent chance of admission if he were white, a 77 percent chance of admission if he were Hispanic, and a 95 percent chance of admission if he were black. A report from Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research found that even after alumni and athletic preferences were factored in, Asians would be accepted at a rate of 26 percent, versus the 19 percent at which they were actually accepted. That report, commissioned back in 2013, was summarily filed away, with no further investigation or action taken.
No innocuous explanation can account for the extent of these disparities. Yet Harvard is insisting that those who call it what it plainly is — racial discrimination — are advancing a “divisive agenda.”
On June 12, Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, sent an email to all alumni of the college warning of a forthcoming attempt to use “misleading, selectively presented data taken out of context” in order to “question the integrity of the undergraduate admissions process.” The statement promised to “react swiftly and thoughtfully to defend diversity as the source of our strength and our excellence — and to affirm the integrity of our admissions process.”
As the Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen pointed out in The New Yorker, the tortuous and evasive quality of the discussion of the treatment of Asian-Americans in elite colleges stems from the way our legal doctrine on affirmative action has evolved. The Supreme Court ruled that it was legal to use race as a criterion in admissions in order to pursue the educational benefits of “diversity” in the landmark 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, but it forbade the imposition of racial quotas and, by extension, the maintenance of a policy that consciously aims at “racial balancing.”
This imposes a legal condition on Harvard. Rather than make the honest claim that it actively pursues racial balance and that there are good reasons to do so, the school must engage in a charade that nearly everyone working in the proximity of a highly competitive college knows to be false.
Harvard has been here before. “To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way, which is at the same time straightforward and effective,” wrote A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the 1920s, “and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admission authorities, based upon the probable value to the candidate, to the College and to the community of his admissions.” The opacity of its admissions procedure could veil what Lowell’s written correspondence would later disclose to be a fully intended policy of discrimination.
The same zealously defended discretion to rank applicants on intangible personality traits would, of course, later come to the aid of blacks, Hispanics and Asians when Harvard pivoted toward an embrace of affirmative action in the 1970s. Affirmative action and the privileges of legacy and wealthy students, most of whom are white, both found shelter in the concept of “diversity” — a term that refers at once to racial diversity and the mix of people that make Harvard’s student body so varied and so disproportionately rich. Alumni preference, so crucial to the sustenance of Harvard’s $38 billion endowment, could provide cover before the courts for racial bias. Harvard’s commitment to racial diversity could whitewash its devotion to the preservation of privilege before liberal public opinion.
There is, in this fragile system, a place for textureless math grinds. But only a few.
The conclusion is unavoidable: In order to sustain this system, Harvard admissions systematically denigrated the highest achieving group of students in America. Asian-Americans have been collateral damage in the university’s quest to sustain its paradoxical mission to grow its $37 billion endowment and remain the world’s most exclusive institution — all while incessantly preaching egalitarian doctrines.
Until very recently, Asian-Americans have been politically quiescent and largely deferential to a status quo that works against them. But now, a portion of the Asian-American community is acting in what it deems to be its own interest.
In the face of this challenge, Harvard has resorted to the desperate expedient of promulgating racial stereotypes. In denying that it has engaged in racial balancing at the expense of Asian-Americans, Harvard has put itself in the morally untenable position of affirming a brazen falsehood.
Harvard’s lawyers will soon tell the highest court in the land that Casey Pedrick’s Asian students are less respected because they are less likable, less courageous, and less kind than all other applicants. The university has decided that this is necessary for the greater good. The reality is that it is a carefully considered act of slander.
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“An otherwise identical applicant bearing an Asian-American male identity with a 25 percent chance of admission would have a 32 percent chance of admission if he were white, a 77 percent chance of admission if he were Hispanic, and a 95 percent chance of admission if he were black.” – If you manage not to get shot, not get into prison, if you eat at least once a day, and you magically graduated with a decent GPA, and got a decent SAT score despite attending a crappy school, then yay! you get 95% chance. Ain’t it lovely.
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Why focus on the tortured manner by which admissions ‘justifies’ its racial selections to obtain a wide mix of cultures & personality types on campus? Apparently the law requires such nonsense to dance around the quota-word. Whether you call if affirmative action or diversity or social engineering, discrimination is the tool. If the courts don’t like Harvard’s doublespeak, they’ll substitute other jargon to get the desired results.
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How about if we stop trying to “measure” or rate “personality” at all? That may be the one thing worse than trying to “measure” or rate “learning”. Or maybe they’re just both equally bad, wrong and invalid.
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So Harvard is supposed to admit students based solely on their academic and extracurricular activities… Just what is that going to do to the proportion of black and Hispanic students admitted? (I am not skipping white students, just focusing on those with a lower proportion of students accepted.) I am going to be terribly politically incorrect now and entirely unfair to many Asian American families. Does that mean we admit students based on whether their families followed a “tiger mom” strategy? Whether fair or not “Asians” have a reputation of a laser-like focus on academic excellence. There is a push to be the best at anything they do. “Down time” does not seem to be a concept embraced by the Asian American community. Have I hit all the stereotypes yet?
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Bingo…you hit the nail on the head! I live in an area with a very large asian population. The asian parents do not let the kids associate with american children out side of school (yes, my children have been told this by some of their asian classmates!). Once they are done with the public school day, their parents whisk them away for private tutoring every day (math, english, reading, debate etc). The kids who are musically gifted are carted off to private lessons and the choice of instruments are piano, cello, violin and some are allowed to play flute (classical instruments are what the parents allow). They attend Chinese or Korean school on the weekends. Many do not have a televison in the home because that is a distraction. Once these kids are in HS, they are expected to take 3-4 AP classes every year. Many take SAT and ACT 8-10 times and the parents start this as early as 8th grade. Of course these kids are awkward….they have never been allowed to participate in society as a whole. I have some asian friends and they speak of how hard it was for them socially once they got to college and were away from the influence of their parents….they didn’t know how to interact with others. It’s the way their community is structured. It’s not racist….it’s reality. Their culture is structured around competition/work ethic. They haven’t yet figured out that test prep is NOT the same as education.
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While your personal experience is mostly correct, it does not apply to all Asian students. For instance, Anchee Min’s daughter made many friends of all races and ethnic groups when she went through K-12. She did not go to tutoring and cram classes after school.
Do you know who Anchee Min is — if not, Google that name?
I was married to Anchee for sixteen years. Her daughter was six when we got married.
When Anchee’s Chinese friends urged her to live near Stanford because that would help my stepdaughter to get into Stanford, I disagreed and we lived more than fifty miles from there. When they urged Anchee to send Lauryann to cram classes after regular school, I disagreed and said she’d be better off if she was involved in sports, academic decathlon, and making friends.
Anchee listened to me and not her sister or local Chinese friends. Lauryann has no problems socializing with just about anyone, and she made it into Stanford to graduate from that university in 2016.
When Lauryann made it to Stanford, all of Anchee’s Chinese friends with younger children wanted to know how she did it. They learned that success in school doesn’t have to be the Asian way with a focus on tests. They learned what it takes to be an all-around scholar-athlete where tests are of secondary importance.
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Lloyd,
I have always been impressed by your life experiences and your wisdom. Now that I googled Anchee Min, I am even more impressed. Wow!
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Thank you. I wish Anchee would write more books but she grew up in China and didn’t start to learn English until after she arrived in the United States in her late 20s. She still thinks in Mandarin Chinese and probably in the Shanghai dialect, and she must translate everything she hears or reads in English into Mandarin in an attempt to understand what she is hearing. Half the time she isn’t sure what someone speaking in English is saying because they are talking too fast — even to this day.
To write in English, she has to do the reverse and think of every sentence in Mandarin and then translate it into English.
The process is not easy for her and it comes with a lot of stress. To this day, reading a book printed in English puts her to sleep because of the process, but she can read a book a day that is printed in Mandarin and never lose interest.
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Lloyd Lofthouse….you are correct. Living in a district with a large asian population has certainly opened my eyes. It seems that 3rd – 4th generation asian americans fare far better since their parents want the children to have a more american way of life. Unfortunately, the asian community in our area chooses to reside in a certain area, which keeps the kids and the culture contained. One of our high schools is actually referred to as “the asian school”. I think the more modern asian parents are starting to push their children to assimilate more and to shy away from the constant push for” academic excellence”, but it’s hard when the older generation living within the same household still hold onto the old ways.
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The “big” mistake those Asian parents make is moving into an area dominated by other Asians where the schools have high rates of Asian students. The competition between these students that are being driven by their Mostly Tiger Parents is intense.
But because we lived in an area that had a very small Asian population, our daughter was one of the few Asians in her intermediate and high school and she didn’t feel any competition with other students being driven to be the best to qualify for the top universities.
It helped that I was a teacher for thirty years, I knew that top universities like Stanford tend to accept students from around the world and do not focus on the local community.
It worked for our daughter. She was the only one from her graduating class to get into Stanford that year. I’m sure that hundreds of Asian students at Gunn High apply to Stanford and most of them don’t get in.
44.1 percent of the high school students at Gunn are Asian and it is one of two high schools in Palo Alto near Stanford.
Click to access 2017-2018%20Gunn%20School%20Profile.pdf
Lauryann’s high school, when she attended, had less than a 9 percent Asian student population.
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Harvard graduation rates within 6 years by race/ethnicity (undergraduate)
White
97.4 %
Black African-American
94.2 %
Hispanic
95.9 %
Asian
98.1 %
American Indian or Alaskan Native
83.3 %
Race-ethnicity Unknown
97.3 %
Non-resident alien
98.7 %
The implication that admissions via affirmative action gives undeserving minorities a free ride into Harvard is not reflected in the graduation data. Once matriculated, students at the elite universities work in a highly competitive, pressure cooker environment. Graduation at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and others is well earned by ALL.
True cultural diversity at these elite institutions is almost completely overshadowed by the uniformity of the academic culture.
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6 years, is that the standard now? Good for the student loan industry, I guess.
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Harvard has so many applicants that it can assemble a class of very well qualified students from any background. All are well qualified
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I’m envisioning what it must be like to be a Ivy League admissions counselor. You have a stack of applications piled up taller than you are, every single one of them has perfect or near-perfect test scores, perfect or near-perfect GPS (all honors/AP/IB/etc. classes, of course). Every one is the president of the student government, captain of the debate team, a member of National Honor Society and editor of the newspaper, literary magazine and/or the yearbook. Every one has played at least one sport, sings and/or plays an instrument and volunteers every week. Every one has stellar recommendations from three teachers, the principal, two elected officials and the Pope. How the hell do you tell them all apart?
I’d be tempted to pick the application from the straight-C student who applied as a lark and doodled his essay in purple crayon just because at least he stands out.
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Ugh – GPA, of course, not GPS.
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There is another type of diversity that has received little attention and probably plays into what seems to be an Asian-American discrimination issue. All colleges and universities need academic diversity; they need students to fill up the variety of programs they offer.
Historical data probably shows that Asian students disproportionally fill only certain areas of concentration. The Harvard rebuttal suggest that the plaintiffs have cherry picked a very incomplete and misleading data set.
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That sounds like an absolutely ridiculous way to determine a person’s personality. I think we are wondering into apocryphal territory here.
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I don’t know how my comment ended up here. It was in response to speculation on how Harvard “rates” personality/ sociability of applicants.
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There’s been a lot of writing about this, based on the documents and data produced in the case. This isn’t apocryphal.
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Good point, RATT. A well rounded student population would also involve picking students with a wide range of interests.
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CSPAN “Q&A”‘s interview of Amy Wax (law prof, Penn) is informative on the extent to which elite U’s go to hide the process and squelch informed discourse. Granted she has a big mouth and apparently zero social intelligence. You can’t really understand her opinions unless you listen to her at length, as she thinks/ talks like a legal brief — phrases lifted out of context sound terrible. That said – I was surprised to learn that exam grades are no longer posted at the classroom door but cloaked in secrecy, as is class rank & basis of selection for Law Review — all presumably to sidestep discussion &/or protect sensitive feelings.
Wax finds: to even talk about the facts involved in affirmative action – incoming grades vs outgoing & later achievement in field – in order to discuss pro’s, con’s, why we need it, whether it puts some in a needlessly brutal uphill climb but perhaps helps them in long run – is verboten. Discussing grades of ‘underperforming minorities’ at all is considered denigration, attack, emotionally injurious (the “psychologizing of pedagogy”), morally suspect. Dissent [to “hard-line progressive” ideas] is cast as morally suspect; “we now have a new rhetorical universe where moralization and the language of harm has become the language of discourse in ideas.”
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