Actually, Fuck Harvard

Entire racial groups don’t deserve to be screwed over because Harvard thinks they’re boring.

Let’s get a few things out of the way:

• No, I don’t want to see Harvard’s research gutted.

• No, I don’t want to see international students screwed over (I teach them)

• No, I don’t want an important center for learning diminished.

• No, I don’t think it’s fair for Harvard to have to turn over protest footage or disciplinary records.

• No, I don’t think Trump’s demands are at all consistent with academic independence or freedom of speech.

Of course I don’t want any of those things, or think that this is an appropriate way for the government to interact with an institute of higher learning.

But also…

Harvard has been taking the piss. And it’s more than a little satisfying to watch them finally have to answer for it.

We’re used to our government wrist-slapping lawless institutions by applying meager, ignorable fines, canceling the odd contract, or “speaking out” against them. What we’re seeing now is as ugly as it is unfamiliar: actual pressure. By all accounts, Harvard is feeling the squeeze. And the rest of academia is watching.

Let’s back up a bit.

Harvard is subject to the same laws as all US institutions. Namely, they are not allowed to discriminate in hiring or admission against candidates based on their race.

Harvard decided over the course of the last few decades that actually, those laws don’t really mean what they say. That yeah, they definitely mean it for some groups. But for others…nah.

Never mind all the blood, sweat, tears, horse-trading, and sausage-making that gave us the legacy of the Civil Rights era. Harvard knows better. Harvard knows that the correct, moral, and just way to interpret anti-discrimination law is to sometimes do the actual opposite of what it instructs, depending on who’s knocking at the door.

Harvard’s policy of institutionalized racial discrimination is so egregious, the United States Supreme Court told them they had to end it on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. Rather than comply, they thumbed their nose at the court, and set about openly exploring ways to circumvent its ruling.

Their goal - and this really cannot be emphasized enough - was to find ever more creative ways to reject qualified students on the basis of their skin color.

East and South Asians, whether American citizens or not, are statistical high-performers. If elite university admissions were purely meritocratic, there’d be few of anyone else around. So Harvard, and others, have to manipulate their admission preferences to make sure they don’t end up OvErRuN.

It’s a matter of aesthetics. Harvard wants their campus to look a certain way. If they end up with too many of those people hanging around, it’ll give off the wrong vibe. It’ll send the wrong message, and give the wrong impression to visitors.

Do they admit this? Of course they don’t.

They try, lamely, to claim that race is only one component of their “holistic” admissions process. (That word - “holistic” - is important, because in court, Harvard argued that it squared them with legal precedent.)

They further claimed (somehow, with a straight face) that they weren’t discriminating against racial groups because they weren’t using any applicant's race as a negative, they were just using other applicants’ races as positives. Just, unbeatable logic.

Since most of my own students are high-performing Asians (many also hold American citizenship) I take this all fairly personally.

Imagine a white-owned nightclub that became very popular with African Americans. Should be a great thing, right? Business is business, the market’s the market, it’s a free country, and the only color that matters is green.

But no, actually. Because the club owner doesn’t like those people patronizing his business. He’s worried that those people will drive away other customers. That his club will get a reputation as a place where mostly those people drink.

So he tells his bouncer, “only one of those people for every five other people,” just to keep the right proportions. To maintain the right look. Diversity, sure, but within reason, ya know? And only to a certain end.

If your reaction to the nightclub scenario is, “Wow, that is shockingly racist and certainly illegal”...yes. Yes it is.

And that is what Harvard is doing. Not like what Harvard is doing, not similar to what Harvard is doing, what Harvard is doing. They can dress it up in all the high-minded, pop sociology vocab they want, but it remains the same. They want more from Column A and less from Column B, so they’ve rigged their admissions system to produce their desired outcome.

How they go about it is quite hilarious. In a piece that I enjoyed, but with which I mostly disagreed, Tracing Woodgrains shared the following chart:

What’s shown here is Harvard’s “holistic” candidate scoring system at work. There are two fairly concrete categories measuring Academic and Extracurricular performance, and then there’s a third, comically nebulous category: “Personal.”

Careful readers will note (as could my actual dog…) that the lines for each racial group stay pretty tight in the Academic and Extracurricular categories, then diverge wildly in the Personal category. In the Personal category, African American applicants are breakout rockstars whereas Asians are total lame-os.

There’s also a super weird coincidence here: if you look at the rankings of who gets higher and lower personal scores, the order, from coolest to lamest, goes: African Americans, Hispanics, Whites, then Asians. Which just so happens to be the exact reverse of how those groups perform on standardized tests.

So like, crazy conspiracy here, but let’s say Harvard wanted to artificially engineer a particular racial aesthetic on their campus. I know, I know. That would be illegal. They’ve been warned about it, and would totally never do it. But just play along. Say they wanted to.

What it almost looks like here is that Harvard created an entirely subjective and manipulable category for their “holistic” admissions system that allows them to boost groups who otherwise wouldn’t be as competitive, while simultaneously dampening prospects for boring-ass Asians and white people, of whom there would otherwise be too many.

They apply a similar ethos to their faculty hiring practices as well.

Also, it’s not just Harvard. It’s not even close to being just Harvard. This is simply how academia operates.

What Donald Trump is doing, fairly obviously, is making an example**.

**If I turn out to be wrong about that - if these harsh measures end up applied to other schools, or to schools writ large - consider every word of this piece retracted.

But since I want Harvard to stop discriminating against my students, I want other top schools to stop discriminating against my students, and I want that behavior to cease with minimal pain or disruption inflicted on the overall system of higher education, Trump’s strategy actually strikes me as a pretty good one.

Harvard is feeling the pain, other schools are bearing witness to that pain, and my strong suspicion is that those other schools will not need to be told twice to get their acts together. That’s a good outcome, in my view, even if I hate the precedent it sets.

There are just south of 4,000 degree-awarding institutes of higher learning in the United States. Only one of them is barred from enrolling international students. Only one is having grants canceled. Only one is facing a torrent of lawsuits and investigations. The Academy will survive this, even if Harvard doesn’t (they definitely will though).

Harvard can still fight it out in court, and probably still win some battles. Being home to the top law school on the planet means having access to some pretty crack lawyers. But it’s more complicated than that.

FireOrg’s Robert Shibley explained on Twitter that while Harvard is being denied due process - an overall bad thing in terms of precedent - it’s actually a very good thing for Harvard specifically. If or when they do receive due process, they are full-on fucked.

Reason being, Harvard’s flouting of civil rights law is so open and intentional, the evidence for it is littered across all departments, just waiting in email chains, slacks, text groups, and memos for a subpoena to discover it. Harvard should be thanking their lucky stars that Trump is punishing them without a proper investigation. An ordered process could expose them to far greater peril, and the same is likely true for most universities.

Even if Harvard wins a round or two, it won’t repair the damage. If you’re an international student with three Ivy League offers (always assuming you’re brave enough to come study in America in the first place…) why on earth would you select the one school that can’t reliably offer you a visa? If you’re a top researcher, why would you go to the one place your funding is in constant jeopardy?

The clear answer to both questions is that you wouldn’t. Which is the point.

I highly doubt that Trump’s animus toward Harvard is altruistic, by the way. Some outlets are reporting (unverified) that his son, Barron, was recently rejected. Barack Obama’s daughter, on the other hand, got in. If true, Trump is 100% petty enough for that to be the only reason for his offensive.

Ordinarily, I’d be way too squeamish for any of this. Trump’s onslaught violates any number of principles I hold quite dear. Probably, I should be lobbing a full-throated attack his way. That would be the intellectually consistent thing for me to do, and I know it.

But since Trump manifestly does not care what I, or any other squishy libtard, thinks of his approach, I’m opting instead to shrug and hope for a good outcome. That’s all you can do when you’re functionally a royal subject.

I may not love what Trump is doing, but Harvard more than had it coming. And I hope it works. There may not be much of a Harvard left for my students to attend, but perhaps they’ll have a fair shot at Yale.