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发帖数: 5125 | 1 ZT: Asians get the Ivy League's Jewish treatment:
来源: 加共 于 2014-11-24 18:25:15 [档案] [旧帖] [给我悄悄话] 本文已被阅读：
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Quotas to keep minorities out of schools were once considered racist and
unfair, but colleges think it is just fine as long as they discriminate
against the right minorities.
Decades ago, the Ivy League colleges thought they had a problem: too many
Jews. These recent immigrants, from a culture that prized education and
academic achievement, had an unfortunate characteristic: They worked harder,
studied longer and cared more about school. In short, they had all the
attributes required for success in the Ivy League.
Problem was, the Ivy League didn't really want them. Being first-generation
students, these applicants didn't have rich alumni parents who would be
likely to donate big bucks. Being from an ethnicity not associated with
America's governing class, they didn't help the Ivy League with its biggest
selling point — that going to college there provides an opportunity to rub
shoulders with America's governing class. And they were seen as boring
grinds who studied too hard and weren't much fun.
The result was a change in admissions criteria to reward "leadership," and "
well-rounded" candidates — a thin disguise for "WASPs" — and, following
closely on, actual quotas for Jewish students, so that no matter how many
applied, their numbers on campus would stay just about the same. After
several decades, this came to be seen as racist and unfair, and the quotas
were dropped. (Though by then, conveniently enough, the Ivy League was able
to find Jewish applicants with plenty of money, polish and governing-class
connections without too much trouble).
But while the quotas for Jews are gone, the Ivy League now, by all accounts,
has quotas for Asian students. They are seen as people who study too hard,
boring grinds who aren't much fun — and, of course, their parents aren't as
rich and connected. And though the numbers of highly qualified Asian
applicants have grown dramatically, the number of Asians admitted stays
pretty much the same every year.
Now the Asian students are suing. In a lawsuit against Harvard, they are
claiming that Harvard demands higher qualifications from Asian students than
from others, and that it uses "racial classifications to engage in the same
brand of invidious discrimination against Asian Americans that it formerly
used to limit the number of Jewish students in its student body."
These claims are almost certainly correct. Discrimination against Asian
students — and not just by Harvard, but throughout higher education — has
been an open secret for years. Asian students, we're told, face a "bamboo
ceiling" as a result.
Where today's discrimination is different from the Ivy League's old quotas
against Jews is that those old quotas were removed as part of efforts to
fight racism. The Ivy League's new quotas, meanwhile, are often defended on
the same grounds — or, at least, as a means of attaining "diversity."
But that's harder to do in a nation that is made of minorities. In the old
days, affirmative action was about overcoming white resistance to opening up
institutions to blacks. If a black student with lower SAT scores got a spot
in college at the expense of a white student, well, that white student
probably had benefited to some degree from growing up, or having had parents
who grew up, in a racially-segregated society. And, given many white
institutions' history of lying and foot-dragging when it came to
desegregation, affirmative action was a way of ensuring that we got results,
not excuses.
But it has been more than 60 years since Brown v. Board of Education, and,
what's more, racial issues in America are no longer black-and-white. The
Vietnamese child of boat people or the Indian "untouchable" immigrant who
applies to Harvard didn't benefit from racial segregation, and probably
overcame more obstacles pre-college than an African-American born in New
York. Why should these Asian applicants be disadvantaged so that
universities can ensure that there aren't too many of the wrong kind of
people on campus?
Thirty years ago, my old law professor Burke Marshall wrote an article in
the Yale Law Journal on non-discrimination in a "nation of minorities." He
opined that affirmative action was still about breaking down white power
structures. Maybe that was still true in 1984. But now universities — all
of which, including "private" schools like Harvard, are heavily fed by
taxpayer funds — are engaging in racial discrimination in order to produce
what they regard as a pleasing bouquet of race and ethnicity. Is that a good
enough reason to deny individuals a fair chance? I don't think so. And I
suspect that courts will feel the same way.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the
author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American
Education from Itself.
In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from
outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns
like this, go to the opinion front page or follow us on twitter @USATopinion
or Facebook. | W*****d
发帖数: 4196 | 2 同意里面的观点，除非华人或亚裔群体努力提高政治影响力，光是赚点钱，补习SAT，
练钢琴，是不可能改变被美国大学歧视的命运的。 |
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