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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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

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

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

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

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