Nozick and Leftists

From this interview with Robert Nozick:

I had been at Harvard as an Assistant Professor in the mid-​sixties and then came back in 1969 as a Full Professor. That was immediately after the student uprisings, building takeovers, and so on, at Harvard the previous spring. When I arrived in the fall of 1969, there was a philosophy course listed in the catalog entitled “Capitalism.” And the course description was “a moral examination of capitalism.” Of course, for most students, then, it would be taken for granted that a moral examination would be a moral condemnation of capitalism. But that’s not what I intended. We were going to read critics of capitalism. But we were also planning to read defenses of capitalism, and I was going to construct some of my own in the lectures. Some of the graduate students in the philosophy department knew what ideas I held, and they weren’t very happy about a course being taught in the department defending those ideas. Now it was true that there was another course in the department on Marxism by someone who was then a member of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party and students did not object to that. But still some students objected to my giving a lecture course on capitalism. I remember early in the fall (I guess I was scheduled to give the course in the spring term), a graduate student came to me at a departmental reception we had, and said, “We don’t know if you’re going to be allowed to give this course.” I said “What do you mean, not allowed to give this course?” He said, “Well, we know what ideas you hold. We just don’t know whether you will be allowed to give the course.” And I said, “If you come and disrupt my course, I’m going to beat the shit out of you!” And the student was taken aback and said, “But you are taking all this very personally.” And I said, “What do you mean, personally? You are threatening to disrupt my course! you can do other things; you can stand outside the room and hand out leaflets. You can ask students not to register for my course. But if you come into my classroom while I am lecturing and disrupt the class, then I take that very personally.” In fact, at some point later in the term, this student and some others said they were going to make up leaflets and hand them out outside of my classroom. I said, “That’s fine; that would be really exciting.” Then they didn’t get around to doing it, and so I prodded them, “Where are the leaflets? I was counting on something special happening with the leaflets.” But it turned out that it was a lot of trouble to write up a leaflet, to get them run off on a mimeograph machine, and so they never got around to doing it. Thus I never had the privilege of being “leafleted” at Harvard. It seemed to me that sort of antagonism only lasted for a very short period of time and diminished fast. There was no longer any strong personal animosity after that. Maybe it was the general toning down of things in the country in the early 70’s, and I just benefited from the de-radicalization of the university.

More fun photos from this old post Forever Young :-) 

Harvard Veritas: interview with a recent graduate (anonymous) — Manifold Episode #18

 

The guest for this episode is a recent graduate of Harvard College, now pursuing a STEM PhD at another elite university. We have withheld his identity so that he can speak candidly. 

Steve and his guest discuss: 

0:00 Anonymous student’s academic background and admission to Harvard 

21:37 Intellectual curiosity at Harvard 

29:36 Academic rigor at Harvard and the difference between classes in STEM and the humanities 

46:47 Access to tenured professors at Harvard 

50:08 The benefits of the Harvard connection and wider pool of opportunities 

58:46 Competing with off-scale students 

1:00:48 Ideological climate on campus, wokeism, and controversial public speakers 

1:23:11 Dating at Harvard 

1:26:52 Z-scores and other metrics to add to the admissions process 

Transcript 

Harvard Admissions and Meritocracy: 

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/defining-merit.html 

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/09/what-is-best-for-harvard.html 

Harvard Affirmative Action Lawsuit: 

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/01/supreme-court-to-take-up-harvard-unc.html https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/09/former-yale-law-dean-on-harvard-anti.html https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-office-of-institutional_21.html

From first link above, The Chosen by J. Karabel.

Typology used for all applicants, at least as late as 1988: 

1. S First-rate scholar in Harvard departmental terms. 

2. D Candidate's primary strength is his academic strength, but it doesn't look strong enough to quality as an S (above). 

3. A All-Amercan‚ healthy, uncomplicated athletic strengths and style, perhaps some extracurricular participation, but not combined with top academic credentials. 

4. W Mr. School‚ significant extracurricular and perhaps (but not necessarily) athletic participation plus excellent academic record. 

5. X Cross-country style‚ steady man who plugs and plugs and plugs, won't quit when most others would. Gets results largely through stamina and consistent effort. 

6. P PBH [Phillips Brooks House] style: in activities and personal concerns. 

7. C Creative in music, art, writing. 

8. B Boondocker‚ unsophisticated rural background. 

9. T Taconic, culturally depressed background, low income. 

10. K Krunch‚ main strength is athletic, prospective varsity athlete. [ Sometimes also "H Horse" :-) ] 

11. L Lineage‚ candidate probably couldn't be admitted without the extra plus of being a Harvard son, a faculty son, or a local boy with ties to the university community. 

12. O Other‚ use when none of the above are applicable.

Supreme Court To Take Up Harvard, UNC Affirmative Action Case

By coincidence, I was just in contact over the weekend with several of the people involved in the effort to end discrimination against Asian Americans in elite college admissions. 

This has been a long road, but perhaps victory is near. 

Supreme Court To Take Up Harvard, UNC Affirmative Action Case (Harvard Crimson)

... SFFA founder Edward J. Blum, who has spearheaded more than two dozen lawsuits challenging affirmative action and voting rights laws around the U.S., heralded the court’s move. “Harvard and the University of North Carolina have racially gerrymandered their freshman classes in order to achieve prescribed racial quotas,” he wrote in a statement. “Every college applicant should be judged as a unique individual, not as some representative of a racial or ethnic group.”

See previous posts: 

Former Yale Law Dean on Harvard anti-Asian discrimination case: The facts are just so embarrassing to Harvard... Quotas and a climate of dishonesty 

... The facts are just so embarrassing to Harvard that with some modest adjustment in its admissions practices it might be able to absorb a judgment against it and get on with life more or less as usual. The vagueness of the category on which Harvard was relying to make sure that it kept its Asian undergraduates at the level that it wished, the so-called personality score, is such a floppy nothing of an empty basket — that’s not gonna do anymore. 

There is something profoundly disturbing about Harvard using these flaccid categories to achieve something like a quota. The court papers show how the system was invented to keep the number of Jews down in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It’s all pretty bad, and part of the badness is that colleges have been both compelled and allowed to do what they’re doing under the rubric of "diversity," which conceals from view the actual operation of the whole system, and what they are in fact aiming to achieve. It’s substituting one vocabulary for another in a way that creates a climate of dishonesty. What goes on in the admissions office is increasingly mysterious, and what happens once students are admitted — that is something to which little attention is paid by educators themselves. 

Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans on subjective personality evaluation 

Harvard Office of Institutional Research models: explicit racial penalty required to reproduce actual admit rates for Asian-Americans

 

Harvard Discrimination Lawsuit: Judge Burroughs on Racial Balancing and "Unhooked" Applicants 

Harvard Office of Institutional Research on Discrimination Against Asian-American Applicants 

20 years @15 percent: does Harvard discriminate against Asian-Americans?

The Content of their Character: Ed Blum and Jian Li 

Vineer Bhansali: Physics, Tail Risk Hedging, and 900% Coronavirus Returns - Manifold Episode #43

Steve and Corey talk with theoretical physicist turned hedge fund investor Vineer Bhansali. Bhansali describes his transition from physics to finance, his firm LongTail Alpha, and his recent outsize returns from the coronavirus financial crisis. Also discussed: derivatives pricing, random walks, helicopter money, and Modern Monetary Theory.

Transcript

LongTail Alpha

LongTail Alpha’s OneTail Hedgehog Fund II had 929% Return (Bloomberg)

A New Anomaly Matching Condition? (1992)
https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9211299

Added: Background on derivatives history here. AFAIK high energy physicist M.F.M. Osborne was the first to suggest the log-normal random walk model for securities prices, in the 1950s. Bachelier suggested an additive model which does not even make logical sense. See my articles in Physics World: 1 , 2


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

Harvard Discrimination Lawsuit: Judge Burroughs on Racial Balancing and "Unhooked" Applicants

As has been widely reported (WSJ):

U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs found that Harvard’s practices were “not perfect” and could use improvements, including implicit bias training for admissions officers, but said “the Court will not dismantle a very fine admissions program that passes constitutional muster, solely because it could do better.”

I anticipate that this case will end up before the Supreme Court.

While I have not read the entire decision (PDF), I was curious to see how two important arguments made by the plaintiffs (Students For Fair Admissions, SFFA) were addressed. You can evaluate Burroughs' logic and use of evidence for yourself. In the excerpts below I first quote from the SFFA filing, and then from the decision.

Issue #1: Racial Balancing:

SFFA: ... Harvard is engaging in racial balancing. Over an extended period, Harvard’s admission and enrollment figures for each racial category have shown almost no change. Each year, Harvard admits and enrolls essentially the same percentage of African Americans, Hispanics, whites, and Asian Americans even though the application rates and qualifications for each racial group have undergone significant changes over time. This is not the coincidental byproduct of an admissions system that treats each applicant as an individual; indeed, the statistical evidence shows that Harvard modulates its racial admissions preference whenever there is an unanticipated change in the yield rate of a particular racial group in the prior year. Harvard’s remarkably stable admissions and enrollment figures over time are the deliberate result of systemwide intentional racial discrimination designed to achieve a predetermined racial balance of its student body.

This is a relevant figure from the Economist. It shows the increase in Asian representation at Caltech (mostly race-neutral admissions), tracking the overall population of college age Asian Americans, versus the suspicious Ivy league convergence at 15-20% of each class.

From page 80 of the decision:

Although Harvard tracks and considers various indicators of diversity in the admissions process, including race, the racial composition of Harvard’s admitted classes has varied in a manner inconsistent with the imposition of a racial quota or racial balancing. See [Oct. 31 Tr. 119:10–121:10; DX711]. As Figures 1 and 2 show, there has been considerable year-to-year variation in the portion of Harvard’s class that identifies as Asian American since at least 1980.   [ italics mine ]

Figure 1 seems merely to show that admittance by race tends to fluctuate by 5-10% from year to year. No attempt at analysis of correlations across years -- i.e., to detect racial balancing.

Figure 2 seems to show that Asian American applicants are a smaller fraction of the class relative to their share of the applicant pool, whereas, e.g., this ratio is reversed for African Americans. Racial balancing would be found only in detailed comparisons of these ratios across several years, adjusting for strength of application, etc.

Rather than giving a serious analysis of racial balancing (is it actually happening?), Burroughs seems to explicitly support the practice in her comments on racial diversity:

p.30 To summarize the use of race in the admissions process, Harvard does not have a quota for students from any racial group, but it tracks how each class is shaping up relative to previous years with an eye towards achieving a level of racial diversity that will provide its students with the richest possible experience. It monitors the racial distribution of admitted students in part to ensure that it is admitting a racially diverse class that will not be overenrolled based on historic matriculation rates which vary by racial group. [ Isn't this just a definition of racial balancing? ]

Quota Bad, Soft-Quota Good! Is this now the law of the land in the United States of America? SCOTUS here we come...


Issue #2: Is discrimination against Asian Americans especially obvious when one considers "unhooked" applicants separately?

SFFA: ... The task here is to determine whether “similarly situated” applicants have been treated differently on the basis of race; “apples should be compared to apples.” SBT Holdings, LLC v. Town of Westminster, 547 F.3d 28, 34 (1st Cir. 2008). Because certain applicants are in a special category, it is important to analyze the effect of race without them included. Excluding them allows for the effect of race to be tested on the bulk of the applicant pool (more than 95% of applicants and more than two-thirds of admitted students) that do not fall into one of these categories, i.e., the similarly situated applicants. For special-category applicants, race either does not play a meaningful role in their chances of admission or the discrimination is offset by the “significant advantage” they receive. Either way, they are not apples.

Professor Card’s inclusion of these applicants reflects his position that “there is no penalty against Asian-American applicants unless Harvard imposes a penalty on every Asian-American applicant.” But he is not a lawyer and he is wrong. It is illegal to discriminate against any Asian-American applicant or subset of applicants on the basis of race. Professor Card cannot escape that reality by trying to dilute the dataset. The claim here is not that Harvard, for example, “penalizes recruited athletes who are Asian-American because of their race.” The claim “is that the effects of Harvard’s use of race occur outside these special categories.” Professor Arcidiacono thus correctly excluded special-category applicants to isolate and highlight Harvard’s discrimination against Asian Americans. Professor Card, by contrast, includes “special recruiting categories in his models” to “obscure the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for those not fortunate enough to belong to one of these groups.” At bottom, SFFA’s claim is that Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants who are not legacies or recruited athletes. Professor Card has shown that he is unwilling and unable to contest that claim.

The judge seems to have ignored or rejected the claim that discrimination within the pool of unhooked applicants (95% of the total!) is worth considering on its own. This seems to be an entirely legal (as opposed to statistical) question that may be tested in the appeal. (ALDC = Athletes, Legacies, Deans interest list (donors), and Children of Harvard faculty.)

p.52 Although ALDCs represent only a small portion of applicants and are admitted or rejected through the same admissions process that applies to other applicants, they account for approximately 30% of Harvard’s admitted class. [Oct. 30 Tr. 153:6–154:8, DX706; DD10 at 38, 40]. For reasons discussed more fully infra at Section V.F, the Court agrees with Professor Card that including ALDCs in the statistics and econometric models leads to more probative evidence of the alleged discrimination or lack thereof.

See also Former Yale Law Dean on Harvard anti-Asian discrimination case: The facts are just so embarrassing to Harvard... Quotas and a climate of dishonesty and comments therein.

Manifold Episode 10: Ron Unz on the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, The Unz Review, and the Harvard Admissions Scandal

Ron Unz is the publisher of the Unz Review, a controversial but widely read alternative media site hosting opinion outside of the mainstream, including from both the far right and the far left. Unz studied theoretical physics at Harvard, Cambridge and Stanford. He founded the software company Wall Street Analytics, acquired by Moody’s in 2006, and was behind the 1998 ballot initiative that ended bilingual education in California.

Podcast transcript

The Unz Review

The Myth of American Meritocracy - How corrupt are Ivy League admissions?

The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

Dialogs

In a high corner office, overlooking Cambridge and the Harvard campus.

How big a role is deep learning playing right now in building genomic predictors?

So far, not a big one. Other ML methods perform roughly on par with DL. The additive component of variance is largest, and we have compressed sensing theorems showing near-optimal performance for capturing it. There are nonlinear effects, and eventually DL will likely be useful for learning multi-loci features. But at the moment everything is limited by statistical power, and nonlinear features are even harder to detect than additive ones. ...

The bottom line is that with enough statistical power predictors will capture the expected heritability for most traits. Are people in your field ready for this?

Some are, but for others it will be very difficult.

Conference on AI and Genomics / Precision Medicine (Boston).

I enjoyed your talk. I work for [leading AgBio company], but my PhD is in Applied Math. We've been computing Net Merit for bulls using SNPs for a long time. The human genetics people have been lagging...

Caught up now, though. And first derivative (sample size growth rate) is much larger...

Yes. It's funny because sperm is priced by Net Merit and when we or USDA revise models some farmers or breeders get very angry because the value of their bull can change a lot!

A Harvard Square restaurant.

I last saw Roman at the Fellows spring dinner, many years ago. I was back from Yale to see friends. He was drinking, with serious intent. He told me about working with Wilson at Cornell. He also told me an old story about Jeffrey and the Higgs mechanism. Jeffrey almost had it, soon after his work on the Goldstone boson. But Sidney talked him out of it -- something to the effect of "if you can only make sense of it in unitary gauge, it must be an artifact" ... Afterwards, at MIT they would say When push comes to shove, Sidney is wrong. ...

Genomics is in the details now. Lots of work to be done, but conceptually it's clear what to do. I wouldn't say that about AGI. There are still important conceptual breakthroughs that need to be made.

The Dunster House courtyard, overlooking the Charles.

We used to live here, can you let us in to look around?

I remember it all -- the long meals, the tutors, the students, the concerts in the library. Yo Yo Ma and Owen playing together.

A special time, at least for us. But long vanished except in memory.

Wheeler used to say that the past only exists as memory records.

Not very covariant! Why not a single four-manifold that exists all at once?

The Ritz-Carlton.

Flying private is like crack. Once you do it, you can't go back...

It's not like that. They never give you a number. They just tell you that the field house is undergoing a renovation and there's a naming opportunity. Then your kid is on the right list. They've been doing this for a hundred years...

Card had to do the analysis that way. Harvard was paying him...

I went to the session on VC for newbies. Now I realize "valuation" is just BS... Now you see how it really works...

Then Bobby says "What's an LP? I wanna be an LP because you gotta keep them happy."

Let me guess, you want a dataset with a million genomes and FICO scores?

I've helped US companies come to China for 20+ years. At first it was rough. Now if I'm back in the states for a while and return, Shenzhen seems like the Future. The dynamism is here.

To most of Eurasia it just looks like two competing hegemons. Both systems have their pluses and minuses, but it's not an existential problem...

Sure, Huawei is a big threat because they won't put in backdoors for the NSA. Who was tapping Merkel's cellphone? It was us...

Humans are just smart enough to create an AGI, but perhaps not smart enough to create a safe one.

Maybe we should make humans smarter first, so there is a better chance that our successors will look fondly on us. Genetically engineered super-geniuses might have a better chance at implementing Asimov's Laws of Robotics.  

On with the Show

Our YouTube / podcast show is live!

Show Page

YouTube Channel

Podcast version available on iTunes and Spotify.

Our plan is to record a new one every 1-2 weeks. We're in the process of scheduling now, so if you have contacted me to be on the show, or have suggested a guest, please bear with us as we get going.

Manifold man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve and Corey have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

Music and Mathematics: Noam Elkies

Dinner with two old Harvard friends -- mathematician Noam Elkies and MSU physicist Dean Lee. Noam is in town this week to give a lecture, a colloquium, and perform a piano recital.

At 26 Noam became the youngest full professor in Harvard history, and the youngest to ever receive tenure. He has an amazing Wikipedia entry :-)

In 1981, at age 14, he was awarded a gold medal at the 22nd International Mathematical Olympiad, receiving a perfect score of 42 and becoming one of just 26 participants to attain this score,[3] and one of the youngest ever to do so. Elkies graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1982[4][5] and went on to Columbia University, where he won the Putnam competition at the age of sixteen years and four months, making him one of the youngest Putnam Fellows in history.[6] He was a Putnam Fellow two more times during his undergraduate years. After graduating as valedictorian at age 18 with a summa cum laude in Mathematics and Music, he earned his Ph.D. at the age 20 under the supervision of Benedict Gross and Barry Mazur at Harvard University.[7]

From 1987 to 1990 he was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.[8]

In 1987, he proved that an elliptic curve over the rational numbers is supersingular at infinitely many primes. In 1988, he found a counterexample to Euler's sum of powers conjecture for fourth powers.[9] His work on these and other problems won him recognition and a position as an associate professor at Harvard in 1990.[4] In 1993, he was made a full, tenured professor at the age of 26. This made him the youngest full professor in the history of Harvard.[10] Along with A. O. L. Atkin he extended Schoof's algorithm to create the Schoof–Elkies–Atkin algorithm.

Noam, Dean, and I are all veterans of the Malkin Athletic Center weight room, when it was old-school and gritty :-)

Here's an earlier version of the talk Noam gave tonight. Video should start with him constructing a canon from thin air!

Glenn Loury and Laurence Kotlikoff on the Harvard Trial (video)

Glenn Loury is Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Economics, Brown University. Laurence J. Kotlikoff is a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and Professor of Economics at Boston University.

Video should start at @49:06 Glenn: Affirmative Action undermines black students’ dignity.

@95:27

Kotlikoff: I think it's pretty obvious that at least based on the facts so far that Harvard probably did downgrade the personalities of the Asians in order to achieve ...

Glenn: [Interrupting] Well that's the ball game -- they discriminated. Civil Rights Act of 1960.

Yesterday David Card (Harvard's statistical expert in the Asian American discrimination trial) began his testimony. At least as reported in the Chronicle, he has yet to dispute Arcidiacono's (plaintiff expert) finding that among "unhooked" applicants (95% of applicants: not in the subset of legacies, recruited athletes, and major donor kids), Asian Americans are discriminated against relative to all others, including whites. I discuss this in detail here and here.

Card has questioned the legal relevance of Arcidiacono's finding (he does not want to consider unhooked applicants separately), but that is for the judge and lawyers to wrangle over (see excerpt below). As a statistical fact I have yet to see any claim from Harvard or Card that the result is incorrect.

Perhaps today's cross examination of Card will focus on this important question, which the media is largely ignoring.


From the SFFA brief:

"The task here is to determine whether “similarly situated” applicants have been treated differently on the basis of race; “apples should be compared to apples.” SBT Holdings, LLC v. Town of Westminster, 547 F.3d 28, 34 (1st Cir. 2008). Because certain applicants are in a special category, it is important to analyze the effect of race without them included. Excluding them allows for the effect of race to be tested on the bulk of the applicant pool (more than 95% of applicants and more than two-thirds of admitted students) that do not fall into one of these categories, i.e., the similarly situated applicants. For special-category applicants, race either does not play a meaningful role in their chances of admission or the discrimination is offset by the “significant advantage” they receive. Either way, they are not apples.

Professor Card’s inclusion of these applicants reflects his position that “there is no penalty against Asian-American applicants unless Harvard imposes a penalty on every Asian-American applicant.” But he is not a lawyer and he is wrong. It is illegal to discriminate against any Asian-American applicant or subset of applicants on the basis of race. Professor Card cannot escape that reality by trying to dilute the dataset. The claim here is not that Harvard, for example, “penalizes recruited athletes who are Asian-American because of their race.” The claim “is that the effects of Harvard’s use of race occur outside these special categories.” Professor Arcidiacono thus correctly excluded special-category applicants to isolate and highlight Harvard’s discrimination against Asian Americans. Professor Card, by contrast, includes “special recruiting categories in his models” to “obscure the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for those not fortunate enough to belong to one of these groups.” At bottom, SFFA’s claim is that Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants who are not legacies or recruited athletes. Professor Card has shown that he is unwilling and unable to contest that claim.

[ Card and Arcidiacono have exchanged criticisms of the other's analysis already, so Card's lack of response on this specific point is worthy of attention. ]

UPDATE: The reporting below confirms what I wrote above. Card and Harvard maintain that looking specifically at unhooked applicants is irrelevant to the case, and do not dispute the statistical facts uncovered by SFFA regarding that group (95% of all applicants!). SFFA maintain (see case law cited above) that anti-Asian American discrimination in this category is itself a violation of law. Will any journalists report this part of the case, prominently discussed in the SFFA brief?

Chronicle: Card’s main objection to Arcidiacono’s model is that it omits recruited athletes, the children of alumni, the children of Harvard faculty and staff members, and students on a special list that includes children of donors. Excluding all those applicants, who are accepted at a relatively high rate, Card suggested, had skewed his counterpart’s results.

[ THIS EXCLUSION DID NOT "SKEW" THE RESULTS -- THE POINT IS THAT THIS ANALYSIS IS OF INTEREST IN AND OF ITSELF. SURELY THIS POINT WILL NOT BE LOST ON THE JUDGE. ]

Harvard Admissions on Trial: Enter the Statisticians

Let's see if any other media outlets cover this very essential part of the trial -- the cross examination of each side's statistical experts. As far as I understand, the plaintiff's claim that "unhooked" Asian American applicants are discriminated against by Harvard relative to applicants of other ethnicities (including white applicants) is NOT DISPUTED by Harvard, nor by their statistical expert David Card (economist at Berkeley).

Chronicle: ...A main difference between the two economists’ analyses is which types of applicants they included. Arcidiacono excluded recruited athletes, the children of alumni, the children of Harvard faculty and staff members, and students on a “Dean’s List” made up partly of children of donors. Those applicants — about 7,000 out of the roughly 150,000 students in the six-year data set — are admitted at a much higher rate than the rest of the pool, which Arcidiacono said made them difficult to compare with the other applicants.

The judge, Allison D. Burroughs of the Federal District Court, had some questions about the decision to omit that group. She wondered how many Asian-American applicants in those excluded categories are admitted. As it turned out, they are admitted at higher rates than the white applicants.

“It looks to me like what you’re arguing is you have an admissions office that’s discriminating against Asians, but they only do it in certain places,” she said. Arcidiacono agreed.

Unhooked applicants make up 95% of all applicants, but only 2/3 of admits. Recruited athletes, legacies, rich donor kids, etc. are all admitted at much higher rates than ordinary kids -- while only 5% of the applicant pool they are 1/3 of the entering class!

There has never been any claim that Asian Americans who are, e.g., nationally ranked athletes or children of billionaires are discriminated against. Eoin Hu, a Chinese American, was the star running back at Harvard when I was there! Jeremy Lin may have been denied D1 scholarships by Stanford and Berkeley despite being first-team All-State and Northern California Division II Player of the Year, but Harvard Basketball was very happy to have him.

Special status is a much stronger effect than Asian ethnicity, so including hooked applicants only dilutes the statistical effect found by Arcidiacono. Card insisted on lumping together hooked and unhooked applicants in his analysis and has not (to my knowledge) rebutted Arcidiacono's analysis. Reportedly, 86 percent of recruited athletes were admitted, 33.6 percent of legacy students were admitted, 42.2 percent of applicants on the Dean or Director’s List (major donor kids) were admitted, and 46.7 percent of children of faculty or staff were admitted. Compare this to an admit rate of ~5 percent for unhooked applicants. It is clear that these are different categories of applicants that should not be conflated.

If your kid is an unhooked applicant, you can infer much more about his or her prospects from Arcidiacono's analysis than from Card's. The former covers 95% of the pool and is not subject to large idiosyncratic and distortionary effects from the special 5% that are advantaged for reasons having nothing to do with academic merit or even personality and leadership factors.

From the SFFA brief (still uncontested?):

Professor Arcidiacono thus correctly excluded special-category applicants to isolate and highlight Harvard’s discrimination against Asian Americans. Professor Card, by contrast, includes “special recruiting categories in his models” to “obscure the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for those not fortunate enough to belong to one of these groups.” At bottom, SFFA’s claim is that Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants who are not legacies or recruited athletes. Professor Card has shown that he is unwilling and unable to contest that claim.

The question of how unhooked applicants are treated has been discussed in college admissions circles for some time. From 2006:

Inside Higher Ed covers a panel called “Too Asian?” at the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Particularly telling are the comments of a former Stanford admissions officer about an internal study which found evidence of higher admission rates for white applicants over Asians of similar academic and leadership qualifications (all applicants in the study were "unhooked" - meaning not in any favored categories such as legacies or athletes). 

Harvard Admissions on Trial

Now that the Harvard Asian American discrimination trial has started, let me share some previous correspondence with NYTimes reporters who are covering the proceedings.

... it's far too easy for the press to just report it as "Harvard's statistician disagrees with plaintiff's statistician" when in fact there are specific and important claims (e.g., regarding unhooked applicants) that are unanswered by Harvard.

Claim: when unhooked applicants are considered, Asians are discriminated against relative to all other groups.

Unhooked applicants are 95% of the total pool, but only ~2/3 of those admitted (see below). [ Unhooked = ordinary applicant = non-legacy, non-recruited athlete, etc. ]

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-office-of-institutional.html

From the SFFA brief:

"The task here is to determine whether “similarly situated” applicants have been treated differently on the basis of race; “apples should be compared to apples.” SBT Holdings, LLC v. Town of Westminster, 547 F.3d 28, 34 (1st Cir. 2008). Because certain applicants are in a special category, it is important to analyze the effect of race without them included. Excluding them allows for the effect of race to be tested on the bulk of the applicant pool (more than 95% of applicants and more than two-thirds of admitted students) that do not fall into one of these categories, i.e., the similarly situated applicants. For special-category applicants, race either does not play a meaningful role in their chances of admission or the discrimination is offset by the “significant advantage” they receive. Either way, they are not apples.

Professor Card’s inclusion of these applicants reflects his position that “there is no penalty against Asian-American applicants unless Harvard imposes a penalty on every Asian-American applicant.” But he is not a lawyer and he is wrong. It is illegal to discriminate against any Asian-American applicant or subset of applicants on the basis of race. Professor Card cannot escape that reality by trying to dilute the dataset. The claim here is not that Harvard, for example, “penalizes recruited athletes who are Asian-American because of their race.” The claim “is that the effects of Harvard’s use of race occur outside these special categories.” Professor Arcidiacono thus correctly excluded special-category applicants to isolate and highlight Harvard’s discrimination against Asian Americans. Professor Card, by contrast, includes “special recruiting categories in his models” to “obscure the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for those not fortunate enough to belong to one of these groups.” At bottom, SFFA’s claim is that Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants who are not legacies or recruited athletes. Professor Card has shown that he is unwilling and unable to contest that claim.

[ Card and Arcidiacono have exchanged criticisms of the other's analysis already, so Card's lack of response on this specific point is worthy of attention. ]

Will Harvard contest the claim that within the set of unhooked applicants, Asian Americans are discriminated against? As far as I know they have not.

The question about how unhooked applicants are treated has been discussed in college admissions circles for some time. See this from 2006:

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2006/11/ugly-truth.html

Inside Higher Ed covers a panel called “Too Asian?” at the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Particularly telling are the comments of a former Stanford admissions officer about an internal study which found evidence of higher admission rates for white applicants over Asians of similar academic and leadership qualifications (all applicants in the study were "unhooked" - meaning not in any favored categories such as legacies or athletes). 

[ So it is strange for Card / Harvard to claim that this specific question is not worth investigating! ]

Thanks to the lawsuit the results of a Harvard internal study in 2013 have been revealed, which concluded, like the Stanford study, that there was indeed discrimination against Asian American applicants. This will undoubtedly be discussed at trial.




The Content of their Character: Ed Blum and Jian Li.

Jian Li: "I have a message to every single Asian-American student in the country who is applying to college: your civil rights are being violated and you must speak up in defense of them. If you've suffered discrimination you have the option to file a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights. Let your voice be heard .. not only through formal means but also by simply letting it be known in your schools and your communities, in the press and on social media, that university discrimination is pervasive and that this does not sit well with you. Together we will fight to ensure that universities can no longer treat us as second-class citizens."

Jordan Peterson: Identity Politics, IQ, Harvard and Asian admissions

First ~9min: Trump, the US Left and Right, Identity Politics

@10min: IQ

@24min: Harvard and Asian admissions. "The Asians are the wildcard..."

@37min: Nazism, Communism; UK Leftist: "I don't love Obama. I'm literally a communist, you idiot."

Coincidentally (or perhaps not) I know the room they are sitting in very well. I'll be there later today ;-)

Harvard Office of Institutional Research models: explicit racial penalty required to reproduce actual admit rates for Asian-Americans

This is my third post discussing the Students For Fair Admissions lawsuit against Harvard over discrimination against Asian-American applicants. Earlier posts here and here discussed, among other things, the tendency of the Admissions Office to assign low personal ratings to A-A applicants. A-As received, on average, the lowest such ratings among all ethnic groups from the Admissions Office. In contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually met the candidates) gave A-A applicants scores comparable to white applicants, and higher than other ethnic groups.

Harvard's Office of Institutional Research (OIR) produced a series of internal reports on discrimination against Asian-American applicants, beginning in 2013. They attempted to model the admissions process, and concluded there was outright penalization of A-A applicants:

Mark Hansen, the (now former) OIR employee, remembers far more. He remembers working with others in OIR on the project. He remembers gathering data, conducting the regression analysis, collaborating with colleagues, coordinating with the Admissions Office, and discussing the results of OIR’s investigation with Fitzsimmons and others on multiple occasions.  Hansen expressed no concerns with the quality and thoroughness of OIR’s statistical work. Moreover, he has a clear understanding of the implications of OIR’s findings. Hansen testified that the reports show that Asian Americans “are disadvantaged in the admissions process at Harvard.” And when asked: “Do you have any explanation other than intentional discrimination for your conclusions regarding the negative association between Asians and the Harvard admissions process?” Hansen responded: “I don’t.”

The figures below show several OIR models which try to fit the observed admit rates for various groups. The only model that comes close (Model 4) is one which assigns outright penalties to A-A applicants (using "demographic" -- i.e., explicitly racial -- factors). IIUC, this is *after* the low Personal Rating scores from the Admissions Office have already been accounted for!

In the decades leading up to the data discovery forced by the SFFA lawsuit, we heard many claims that legacy / recruited athlete status, or leadership characteristics, or extracurriculars, were the reasons for A-As having such a low acceptance rate (despite their strong academic records). The OIR analysis shows that these effects, while perhaps real, are only part of the story. In Model 4, pure racial bias reduces the A-A percentage of the entering class from 26% (after accounting for all the factors listed above) to the actual 18-19%!

Harvard Office of Institutional Research on Discrimination Against Asian-American Applicants

Harvard's Office of Institutional Research (OIR) produced a series of internal reports on discrimination against Asian-American applicants, beginning in 2013. I believe this was in response to Ron Unz's late 2012 article The Myth of American Meritocracy. These reports were shared with, among others, William Fitzsimmons (Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid) and Rakesh Khurana (Dean of Harvard College). Faced with an internal investigation showing systemic discrimination against Asian-American applicants, Harvard killed the study and quietly buried the reports. The Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA) supporting memo for Summary Judgment contains excerpts from depositions of these and other Harvard leaders concerning the internal reports. (Starting p.15 -- SAD!)

The second report included the figure below. Differences are in SDs, Asian = Asian-American (International applicants are distinct category), and Legacy and Recruited Athlete candidates have been excluded for this calculation.

As discussed in the previous post: When it comes to the score assigned by the Admissions Office, Asian-American applicants are given the lowest scores of any racial group. ... By contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually meet the applicants) rate Asian-Americans, on average, at the top with respect to personal ratings—comparable to white applicants ...

From the SFFA (Students For Fair Admissions) supporting memo for summary judgement:

OIR found that Asian-American admit rates were lower than white admit rates every year over a ten-year period even though, as the first of these two charts shows, white applicants materially outperformed Asian-American applicants only in the personal rating. Indeed, OIR found that the white applicants were admitted at a higher rate than their Asian-American counterparts at every level of academic-index level. But it is even worse than that. As the second chart shows, being Asian American actually decreases the chances of admissions. Like Professor Arcidiacono, OIR found that preferences for African American and Hispanic applicants could not explain the disproportionately negative effect Harvard’s admission system has on Asian Americans.

On David Card's obfuscatory analysis: the claim is that within the pool of "unhooked" applicants (excluding recruited athletes, legacies, children of major donors, etc.), Asian-Americans are discriminated against. Card's analysis obscures this point.

The task here is to determine whether “similarly situated” applicants have been treated differently on the basis of race; “apples should be compared to apples.” SBT Holdings, LLC v. Town of Westminster, 547 F.3d 28, 34 (1st Cir. 2008). Because certain applicants are in a special category, it is important to analyze the effect of race without them included. Excluding them allows for the effect of race to be tested on the bulk of the applicant pool (more than 95% of applicants and more than two-thirds of admitted students) that do not fall into one of these categories, i.e., the similarly situated applicants. For special-category applicants, race either does not play a meaningful role in their chances of admission or the discrimination is offset by the “significant advantage” they receive. Either way, they are not apples.

Professor Card’s inclusion of these applicants reflects his position that “there is no penalty against Asian-American applicants unless Harvard imposes a penalty on every Asian-American applicant.” But he is not a lawyer and he is wrong. It is illegal to discriminate against any Asian-American applicant or subset of applicants on the basis of race. Professor Card cannot escape that reality by trying to dilute the dataset. The claim here is not that Harvard, for example, “penalizes recruited athletes who are Asian-American because of their race.” The claim “is that the effects of Harvard’s use of race occur outside these special categories.” Professor Arcidiacono thus correctly excluded special-category applicants to isolate and highlight Harvard’s discrimination against Asian Americans. Professor Card, by contrast, includes “special recruiting categories in his models” to “obscure the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for those not fortunate enough to belong to one of these groups.” At bottom, SFFA’s claim is that Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants who are not legacies or recruited athletes. Professor Card has shown that he is unwilling and unable to contest that claim.

This is an email from an alumni interviewer:

[M]y feelings towards Harvard have been slowly changing over the years. I’ve been interviewing for the college for almost 10 years now, and in those ten years, none of the Asian American students I’ve interviewed has been accepted (or even wait-listed). I’m 0 for about 20. This is the case despite the fact that their resumes are unbelievable and often superior to those of the non-Asian students I’ve interviewed who are admitted. I’ve also attended interviewer meetings where Asian candidates are summarily dismissed as “typical” or “not doing anything anyone else isn’t doing” while white or other minority candidates with similar resumes are lauded.

From p.18 of the SFFA memo:

Mark Hansen, the (now former) OIR employee, remembers far more. He remembers working with others in OIR on the project. He remembers gathering data, conducting the regression analysis, collaborating with colleagues, coordinating with the Admissions Office, and discussing the results of OIR’s investigation with Fitzsimmons and others on multiple occasions.  Hansen expressed no concerns with the quality and thoroughness of OIR’s statistical work. Moreover, he has a clear understanding of the implications of OIR’s findings. Hansen testified that the reports show that Asian Americans “are disadvantaged in the admissions process at Harvard.” And when asked: “Do you have any explanation other than intentional discrimination for your conclusions regarding the negative association between Asians and the Harvard admissions process?” Hansen responded: “I don’t.”

A very sad tweet:

Here's an exchange in the Harvard lawsuit in which a a teacher at Stuyvesant started to cry when she was shown data that showed her Asian students were *half* as likely to be admitted to Harvard as her white students in 2014 pic.twitter.com/EfjBeBFgfy

— Molly Hensley-Clancy (@mollyhc) June 15, 2018

Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans on subjective personality evaluation

Harvard and Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA), which is suing Harvard over discrimination against Asian-American applicants, have released a large set of documents related to the case, including statistical analysis of records of more than 160,000 applicants who applied for admission over six cycles from 2000 to 2015.

Documents here and here. NYTimes coverage.

The following point does not require any sophisticated modeling (with inherent assumptions) or statistical expertise to understand.

Harvard admissions evaluators -- staffers who are likely under pressure to deliver a target mix of ethnicities each year -- rate Asian-American applicants far lower on subjective personality traits than do alumni interviewers who actually meet the applicants. The easiest way to limit the number of A-A admits each year would be to penalize them on the most subjective aspects of the evaluation...

As stated further below: When it comes to the score assigned by the Admissions Office, Asian-American applicants are assigned the lowest scores of any racial group. ... By contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually meet the applicants) rate Asian-Americans, on average, at the top with respect to personal ratings—comparable to white applicants...

SFFA Memorandum: Professor Arcidiacono found that Harvard’s admissions system discriminates against Asian-American applicants in at least three respects. First, he found discrimination in the personal rating. Asian-American applicants are significantly stronger than all other racial groups in academic performance. They also perform very well in non-academic categories and have higher extracurricular scores than any other racial group. Asian-American applicants (unsurprisingly, therefore) receive higher overall scores from alumni interviewers than all other racial groups. And they receive strong scores from teachers and guidance counselors—scores that are nearly identical to white applicants (and higher than African-American and Hispanic applicants). In sum, Professor Arcidiacono found that “Asian-American applicants as a whole are stronger on many objective measures than any other racial/ethnic group including test scores, academic achievement, and extracurricular activities.”

Yet Harvard’s admissions officials assign Asian Americans the lowest score of any racial group on the personal rating—a “subjective” assessment of such traits as whether the student has a “positive personality” and “others like to be around him or her,” has “character traits” such as “likability ... helpfulness, courage, [and] kindness,” is an “attractive person to be with,” is “widely respected,” is a “good person,” and has good “human qualities.” Importantly, Harvard tracks two different personal ratings: one assigned by the Admissions Office and another by alumni interviewers. When it comes to the score assigned by the Admissions Office, Asian-American applicants are assigned the lowest scores of any racial group. ... By contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually meet the applicants) rate Asian Americans, on average, at the top with respect to personal ratings—comparable to white applicants and higher than African-American and Hispanic applicants.

From the Crimson:

The report found that Asian American applicants performed significantly better in rankings of test scores, academics, and overall scores from alumni interviews. Of 10 characteristics, white students performed significantly better in only one—rankings of personal qualities, which are assigned by the Admissions Office. [italics added]

See also Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions. (Source of figure at top; the peak in A-A representation at Harvard, in the early 1990s, coincides with external pressure from an earlier DOJ investigation of the university for discrimination.)

A very sad tweet:

Here's an exchange in the Harvard lawsuit in which a a teacher at Stuyvesant started to cry when she was shown data that showed her Asian students were *half* as likely to be admitted to Harvard as her white students in 2014 pic.twitter.com/EfjBeBFgfy

— Molly Hensley-Clancy (@mollyhc) June 15, 2018

For the statistically sophisticated, see Duke Professor Arcidiacono's rebuttal to David Card's analysis for Harvard. If these entirely factual and easily verified characterizations of Card's modeling (see below) are correct, the work is laughable.

Professor Card’s models are distorted by his inclusion of applicants for whom there is no reason to believe race plays any role.

As my opening report noted, there are several categories of applicants to whom Harvard extends preferences for reasons other than race: recruited athletes, children of faculty and staff, those who are on the Dean’s List or Director’s List [i.e., Big Donors], legacies, and those who apply for early admission.1 Because of the significant advantage that each of these categories confers on applicants, my report analyzed the effect of race on an applicant pool without these special categories of applicants (the baseline dataset), which allowed me to test for the effect of race on the bulk of the applicant pool that did not fall into one of these categories.2

Professor Card, however, includes all of these applicants in his model, taking the remarkable position that there is no penalty against Asian-American applicants unless Harvard imposes a penalty on every Asian-American applicant. But this is an untenable position. I do not assert that Harvard uses race to penalize Asian-American applicants who are recruited athletes, children of donors (or others identified on the Dean’s List), legacies, or other preferred categories. By including these special recruiting categories in his models, Professor Card obscures the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for all other applicants.

Professor Card further exacerbates this problem by including in his calculations the large majority of applicants whose characteristics guarantee rejection regardless of their race. Harvard admits a tiny fraction of applicants – only five or six percent in recent years. This means that a huge proportion of applicants have no realistic chance of admission. If an applicant has no chance of admission, regardless of his race, then Harvard obviously does not “discriminate” based on race in rejecting that applicant. Professor Card uses this obvious fact to assert that Harvard does not consider race at all in most of its admissions decisions. Further, he constructs his models in ways that give great weight to these applicants, again watering down the effect of race in Harvard’s decisions where it clearly does matter. (To put it in simple terms, it is akin to reducing the value of a fraction by substantially increasing the size of its denominator.)


Professor Card removes interaction terms, which has the effect of understating the penalty Harvard imposes on Asian-American applicants.

As Professor Card notes, his model differs from mine in that he removes the interaction terms. An interaction term allows the effects of a particular factor to vary with another distinct factor. In the context of racial discrimination, interaction terms are especially helpful (and often necessary) in revealing where certain factors operate differently for subgroups within a particular racial or ethnic group. For example, if a law firm singled out African-American women for discriminatory treatment but treated African-American males and other women fairly, a regression model would probably not pick up the discrimination unless it included an interaction between African-American and female.

Professor Card rightly recognizes that interaction terms should be included in a model when there is evidence that racial preferences operate differently for particular groups of applicants; yet he nonetheless removes interaction terms for variables that satisfy this condition. The most egregious instance of this is Professor Card’s decision not to interact race with disadvantaged status—even though the data clearly indicate that Harvard treats disadvantaged students differently by race.

...

Professor Card’s report changes none of my conclusions; to the contrary, given how easy it is to alter the results of his models and that my own models report the same results even incorporating a number of his controls, my opinions in this case have only been strengthened: Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants; Harvard imposes heavy racial preferences in favor of Hispanic and African-American applicants; and Harvard has been manipulating its admission of single-race African-American applicants to ensure their admission rate approximates or exceeds the overall admission rate. Professor Card has demonstrated that it is possible to mask the true effects of race in Harvard’s admission process by changing the scope of the analysis in incorrect ways and choosing inappropriate combinations of control variables. But Professor Card cannot reach these results by applying accepted statistical methods and treating the data fairly.

The Content of their Character: Ed Blum and Jian Li

See 20 years @15 percent: does Harvard discriminate against Asian-Americans? The excerpt below is from the Harvard lawsuit brief, recalling the parallel between what had been done to limit Jewish enrollment in the early 20th century, and the current situation with Asian-Americans.

... Harvard is engaging in racial balancing. Over an extended period, Harvard’s admission and enrollment figures for each racial category have shown almost no change. Each year, Harvard admits and enrolls essentially the same percentage of African Americans, Hispanics, whites, and Asian Americans even though the application rates and qualifications for each racial group have undergone significant changes over time. This is not the coincidental byproduct of an admissions system that treats each applicant as an individual; indeed, the statistical evidence shows that Harvard modulates its racial admissions preference whenever there is an unanticipated change in the yield rate of a particular racial group in the prior year. Harvard’s remarkably stable admissions and enrollment figures over time are the deliberate result of systemwide intentional racial discrimination designed to achieve a predetermined racial balance of its student body.

... In a letter to the chairman of the committee, President Lowell wrote that “questions of race,” though “delicate and disagreeable,” were not solved by ignoring them. The solution was a new admissions system giving the school wide discretion to limit the admission of Jewish applicants: “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, and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admissions authorities ... The only way to make a selection is to limit the numbers, accepting those who appear to be the best.”

... The reduction in Jewish enrollment at Harvard was immediate. The Jewish portion of Harvard’s entering class dropped from over 27 percent in 1925 to 15 percent the following year. For the next 20 years, this percentage (15 percent) remained virtually unchanged.

... The new policy permitted the rejection of scholastically brilliant students considered “undesirable,” and it granted the director of admissions broad latitude to admit those of good background with weaker academic records. The key code word used was “character” — a quality thought to be frequently lacking among Jewish applicants, but present congenitally among affluent Protestants.

DOJ invokes Title VI against Harvard admissions:

WSJ: ... The Justice Department, whose Civil Rights Division is conducting the investigation into similar allegations, said in a letter to Harvard’s lawyers, dated Nov. 17 and reviewed by the Journal, that the school was being investigated under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin for organizations that receive federal funding. The letter also said the school had failed to comply with a Nov. 2 deadline to provide documents related to the university’s admissions policies and practices. ...

I believe I first mentioned Jian Li on this blog back in 2006! It's nice to see that he is still courageous and principled today.



From his closing remarks:

I have a message to every single Asian-American student in the country who is applying to college: your civil rights are being violated and you must speak up in defense of them. If you've suffered discrimination you have the option to file a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights. Let your voice be heard .. not only through formal means but also by simply letting it be known in your schools and your communities, in the press and on social media, that university discrimination is pervasive and that this does not sit well with you. Together we will fight to ensure that universities can no longer treat us as second-class citizens.

DOJ invokes Title VI against Harvard admissions

“Elections have consequences..." -- Barack Obama

See 20 years @15 percent: does Harvard discriminate against Asian-Americans?

CNN: The Justice Department is actively investigating Harvard University's use of race in its admissions policies and has concluded the school is "out of compliance" with federal law, according to documents obtained by CNN. ...

[Click through for DOJ letter to Harvard. Harvard refused to supply admissions data to DOJ as requested for Title VI investigation of bias against Asian-Americans.]

Wall Street Journal

WSJ: ... The Justice Department, whose Civil Rights Division is conducting the investigation into similar allegations, said in a letter to Harvard’s lawyers, dated Nov. 17 and reviewed by the Journal, that the school was being investigated under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin for organizations that receive federal funding. The letter also said the school had failed to comply with a Nov. 2 deadline to provide documents related to the university’s admissions policies and practices.

The department told Harvard it “may file a lawsuit” to enforce compliance if Harvard doesn’t hand over the documents by Dec. 1, according to a separate letter dated Nov. 17 from John M. Gore, the acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division.

... if a federal judge finds Harvard has violated Title VI, the court has broad authority to issue a remedy, such as ordering the university to change its admissions policies, the experts say.

Schools in violation of Title VI can also lose access to federal funds.

From DOJ web site:

TITLE VI OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964
42 U.S.C. § 2000D ET SEQ.
OVERVIEW OF TITLE VI OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964

Title VI, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq., was enacted as part of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. As President John F. Kennedy said in 1963:

Simple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers of all races [colors, and national origins] contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes or results in racial [color or national origin] discrimination.

Harvard to Release Six Years of Admissions Data for Lawsuit

This amounts to "comprehensive data" on almost 200k applicants! I imagine the legal team could use some good data scientists...

Crimson: Harvard to Release Six Years of Admissions Data for Lawsuit

Harvard must produce “comprehensive data” from six full admissions cycles for use in the pending admissions lawsuit between the University and anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions following a court order filed Tuesday.

Students for Fair Admissions launched the lawsuit in 2014, alleging that the University’s admissions process discriminates against Asian American applicants by setting quotas. ...

See also 20 years @15 percent: does Harvard discriminate against Asian-Americans? and much more.

Does this graph look like "soft-quotas" to you?

Free Harvard, Fair Harvard: Overseer election results

None of the Free Harvard, Fair Harvard candidates were among the winners of the Harvard Overseer election, which ended last Friday. I didn't expect to win, but I thought Ralph Nader had a good chance. Nevertheless, it was worthwhile to bring more attention to important issues such as admissions transparency and use of the endowment. My thanks to the thousands of Harvard alumni who supported our efforts and voted for the FHFH ticket.

NYTimes: Group Urging Free Tuition at Harvard Fails to Win Seats on Board

A rebellious slate of candidates who this year upset the normally placid balloting for the Board of Overseers at Harvard has failed to secure positions on the board, which helps set strategy for the university.

Calling itself Free Harvard, Fair Harvard, the group ran on a proposal that Harvard should be free to all undergraduates because the university earns so much money from its $37.6 billion endowment. It tied the notion to another, equally provocative question: Does Harvard shortchange Asian-Americans in admissions?

The outsider slate, which was formed in January, proposed five candidates against a slate of eight candidates officially nominated by the Harvard Alumni Association. After 35,870 alumni votes were counted, five winners were announced from the alumni group on Monday. ...

Perhaps our efforts emboldened other groups to push for important changes:

WSJ: Asian-American Groups Seek Investigation Into Ivy League Admissions

A coalition of Asian-American organizations asked the Department of Education on Monday to investigate Brown University, Dartmouth College and Yale University, alleging they discriminate against Asian-American students during the admissions process.

While the population of college age Asian-Americans has doubled in 20 years and the number of highly qualified Asian-American students “has increased dramatically,” the percentage accepted at most Ivy League colleges has flatlined, according to the complaint. It alleges this is because of “racial quotas and caps, maintained by racially differentiated standards for admissions that severely burden Asian-American applicants.” ...

See also

NYTimes: Professors Are Prejudiced, Too

... To find out, we conducted an experiment. A few years ago, we sent emails to more than 6,500 randomly selected professors from 259 American universities. Each email was from a (fictional) prospective out-of-town student whom the professor did not know, expressing interest in the professor’s Ph.D. program and seeking guidance. These emails were identical and written in impeccable English, varying only in the name of the student sender. The messages came from students with names like Meredith Roberts, Lamar Washington, Juanita Martinez, Raj Singh and Chang Huang, names that earlier research participants consistently perceived as belonging to either a white, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese student.

... Professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities. We found the most severe bias in disciplines paying higher faculty salaries and at private universities. ... our own discipline of business showed the most bias, with 87 percent of white males receiving a response compared with just 62 percent of all females and minorities combined.

... Were Asians favored, given the model minority stereotype they supposedly benefit from in academic contexts? No. In fact, Chinese students were the most discriminated-against group in our sample. ...