
Harvard Is Wrong That Asians Have Terrible Personalities - genemat
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-american-racism.html
======
guymcgwire
The very idea that anyone could understand a person's personality or character
from an essay and 45 minute interview is laughable. On top of this, even
trained professionals demonstrate subconscious racial biases in everyday life.
This has been confirmed in several psychology studies. It's perfectly valid to
question the value of a subjective personality assessment. It opens the door
to stereotype-fitting and confirmation bias. I'd also challenge the admissions
committee to really observe the way Asian-americans, particularly Asian-
american males, are treated on campus at Harvard. It's bizarre and surprising.
They're treated with the casual dismissiveness formerly reserved for 1950s
housewives. I can't imagine that this attitude doesn't track all the way back
through the admissions process.

~~~
stcredzero
_> I'd also challenge the admissions committee to really observe the way
Asian-americans, particularly Asian-american males, are treated on campus at
Harvard. It's bizarre and surprising. They're treated with the casual
dismissiveness formerly reserved for 1950s housewives._

This.

Microaggressions do exist. I think they are a part of how we naturally arrange
ourselves in dominance hierarchies. They are so subtle and natural, it's
insane to make such actions a crime, or to create bureaucratic enforcement
against them. Those are policies of insanity. That said, I've seen a lot of
racially tinged microaggressions as an Asian male.

------
resource0x
Harvard has good company (quote from the article about Gregory Perelman)

"Leningrad University’s maths department had a quota of two Jews per year
among 350 students. Its Moscow equivalent was more zealous and actively
investigated all candidates for traces of a Jewish background. Students with
Jewish sounding names were refused entry, just in case."

Source: [https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2012/02/08/ussrs-
bans-j...](https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2012/02/08/ussrs-bans-jews)

~~~
394549
> "Leningrad University’s maths department had a quota of two Jews per year
> among 350 students. Its Moscow equivalent was more zealous and actively
> investigated all candidates for traces of a Jewish background. Students with
> Jewish sounding names were refused entry, just in case."

They also had their own tricky, deniable way to accomplish the their
discrimination:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556](https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556)

> This is a special collection of problems that were given to select
> applicants during oral entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State
> University. These problems were designed to prevent Jews and other
> undesirables from getting a passing grade. Among problems that were used by
> the department to blackball unwanted candidate students, these problems are
> distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find. Using
> problems with a simple solution protected the administration from extra
> complaints and appeals. This collection therefore has mathematical as well
> as historical value.

------
JumpCrisscross
> _She doesn’t see her students as an arrogant, privileged “ethnic group” who
> think they “own admission” to these high-performing schools, as the new
> chancellor of New York City Schools, Richard Carranza, recently put it._

This statement was made in response to complaints about "a plan to change the
way students are admitted to New York’s elite public high schools" that would
correct a perceived overrepresentation of Asian students at the schools [1].

"'I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission
to these schools,' [Carranza] said on Fox 5 New York."

Shockingly, he's still in his post [2].

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/nyregion/carranza-
special...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/nyregion/carranza-specialized-
schools-admission-asians.html)

[2]
[http://schools.nyc.gov/AboutUs/leadership/Richard+A.+Carranz...](http://schools.nyc.gov/AboutUs/leadership/Richard+A.+Carranza)

~~~
ggg9990
Why “shockingly,” when being anti-affirmative action is called racist by many?

------
TAForObvReasons
Can we just call a spade a spade? "Terrible personality" is a euphemism
designed to give plausible deniability for admission decisions. The metric
itself is fungible and subjective enough that they could ascribe any number
they please to any individual.

There was a systemic effort decades ago to reduce the Jewish admission rate,
and now there's a systemic effort to reduce the Asian admission rate. History
may not repeat but it certainly does rhyme

~~~
busterarm
The Asian admission rate reduction at Harvard has been going on for almost 20
years now. At least since I was in high school. I had an asian friend who
didn't get into Harvard because they had admitted his older brother two years
before _and they told him this in his rejection letter_...

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up 25% of their admissions. They
don't collect statistics on white, those who choose not to identify or other.
Kind of hard to argue a bias. It seems like if anything the school is actively
trying to be less homogenous, not more.

[https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-
statistics](https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics)

~~~
ggg9990
Rejection letters are generic. Your story is quite dubious, can you post a
scan of the letter?

~~~
busterarm
I'm going to post a scan of someone else's letter from 20 years ago? That's a
realistic ask?

~~~
ggg9990
More realistic than the notion that Harvard wrote the reason for a rejection
in any of the tens of thousands of rejection letters they send every year.
Sounds very much like a “friend of a friend” story.

------
noobermin
Why must they evaluate people's personalities in the first place? Why not just
judge based on academics only?

~~~
bradlys
From reading HN the last time this controversy came up, I've come with a
possibility.

I think a portion of it is that if you judge based solely on academics then
you will only get a certain type of person who is focused on scores in
academics. You could easily fill your class with the top X% of scorers but
that won't necessarily make an interesting group of graduates in the real
world. It especially won't make an interesting group of people to interact
with. I don't think I'd go to that school even if I had been admitted.

I think part of it is that they're hoping to find people who will end up being
important people in the world. Not necessarily just those who perform well
academically.

~~~
zawazzi
Absolutely this.

Academic performance is mostly a disqualifier to figure out if someone would
be successful enough. Harvard, doesn't really care about the GPA of its
existing students which is why they also don't care about grade inflation.
They're looking for signals that you'll succeed outside of academia. If you
want to go to Harvard, stop looking at the application as a checklist. The
best applicants are differentiated beyond the classroom.

~~~
gnicholas
> _Academic performance is mostly a disqualifier to figure out if someone
> would be successful enough_

Really?

~~~
zawazzi
Harvard has around 1000 admissions spots in any year. I think there are
roughly 30,000 people who score a SAT 2200+ in a given year. Say half of those
a have A level GPA. At that point there's more significant non-academic
differences, than academic differences.

~~~
gnicholas
I think we would agree that non-academic considerations are important. I
wouldn't say that academic performance is a disqualifier, which makes it
sounds like there's an inverse correlation between academic performance and
success.

------
cozzyd
Sounds like the Harvard equivalent of "culture fit."

~~~
gurkendoktor
Is culture fit typically being used to conceal discrimination? I always
assumed that "culture fit" _was_ actually about culture and personality. I
don't even think it's necessarily an euphemism, I'd probably use these words
to describe why I don't belong in a Java shop.

Although, 90% of the time it probably means "must be friends with the CEO or
willing to work overtime".

------
maym86
Reminds me of the issues with women being rejected from orchestras because of
gender bias. It was improved by introducing blind auditions where all that
could be judged was the quality of the performance.

[http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-
impact...](http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-
impact-“blind”-auditions-female-musicians)

Ironically the link is from Harvard.

------
shripadk
I don't get why you need to evaluate based on personality to get admission
into an educational institution. Just doesn't make sense.

"Harvard’s lawyers will soon tell the highest court in the land that Casey
Pedrick’s Asian students are less respected because they are less likable,
less courageous, and less kind than all other applicants."

And that's how you lose out on the best.

------
fareesh
This seems to be against the purported goal of diversity. It also doesn't
address the elephant in the room - Asian students are outperforming other
students. Do we know why? My guess is that it's cultural. Correct me if I'm
wrong.

The Promise: "Come to our country, where everyone is treated equally and we
will make a great multicultural society where we can all live together and
learn and experience each other's culture"

The Outcome: Asian parents, generally, raise their kids to value hard work and
academic excellence. Asian students end up taking this advice and generally
outperform their peers from other communities.

Harvard's Solution: "Your culture is giving you an unfair advantage because
other kids are not raised this way. Your culture should be more like everyone
else's culture"

Is this diversity? Or are you eventually going to homogenize everything via
this method? Is the end goal of diversity to become the Borg?

------
sctb
Some of the previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334733)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320360)

------
lordnacho
How do they know what ethnic group you are? Do they really have that on the
forms? Or do they guess by name?

I would have been terribly misidentified on name, my name is very rare in my
birth country.

~~~
saagarjha
You put an ethnic group down when you apply.

~~~
GenerocUsername
Welp... looks like we solved the crisis. Just stop asking for ethnic status.
If the "character" aspect of the application is truly about character they
wouldn't need the ethnicity questions

~~~
lozenge
The interviewer would still know the race, we just wouldn't be able to analyse
the results for bias (unless working off name alone).

------
frgtpsswrdlame
You know we could probably leave the personality aspect of the admissions
process in _and_ allow more Asians in if they just did away with legacy
admissions. Ending legacy admissions makes more room for everyone else but
still allows Harvard to maintain subjectivity in admissions.

~~~
pochamago
The new study everyone's talking about shows that even after solving for
legacies and sports, Asians face a huge uphill battle in admissions.

------
RenegadeEagle
Off topic, but is there a way I can view % acceptance rate of universities
over the last 40 or so years?

Thanks.

------
reader5000
It is an odd situation where Asians are academically superior to Westerners,
yet Western academic universities are globally considered more "prestigious"
than any Asian university.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Asian Americans are technically westerners. The USA is a racially
heterogeneous country.

------
DannyB2
Maybe the "terrible personalities" is an observation of a symptom, which is
triggered by being at Harvard, or from the process of getting into Harvard?
NOT some universal truth about all Asians. Maybe not even all Asians at
Harvard. Maybe its not even a truth at all.

~~~
dunpeal
Have you read the article?

The issue discussed is that Harvard consistently rates Asian _candidates_ as
having "poor personality". They never got into the school, because of that
assessment.

That low rating is relative to other ethnic groups.

Are you suggesting that submitting an application to Harvard somehow makes
Asians (but not other ethnicities!) have bad personality?

