Let Harvard Be Harvard, Only Bigger
American society needs its elite institutions, but they also need to be more fair to Asian-Americans.
Open the gates wider.
Photograph: Bloomberg
As Harvard’s defense of its admissions practices continues in a Boston courtroom, the university faces one main obstacle: It’s guilty as charged, as the Vox writer Matt Yglesias recently tweeted. Harvard policy does discriminate against Asian-Americans. So the next step is to arrive at a deeper understanding of how both America and Harvard got to this point.
Like Matt, I attended Harvard (for my doctorate in economics), and most of the people there are as well-meaning as any you might find in Idaho or West Virginia. So why are they imposing burdensome and prejudicial standards on Asian-American applicants?