
Justice Dept. Accuses Yale of Discrimination in Application Process - zffr
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/yale-discrimination.html
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gruez
Didn't the supreme court rule in favor of hardvard in a recent discrimination
case? How are the facts different in this case?

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ntsplnkv2
They aren't - and as much as I'd like to avoid being political, this is just
an example of the White House using the department of justice as a vehicle to
carry out its agenda. It's purely politically motivated - another example of
an attempt of legislation from the bench.

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gotoeleven
That dastardly agenda of equality before the law

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TeaDrunk
I don't genuinely know if it's equality before the law. The justice department
appears to apply law in a non-equal fashion (during a recent congressional
questioning, the chief of the justice department explained that he was more
lenient on allies of the current administration due to their advanced age and
their chances of dying from covid in jail, while there are plenty of other
people older for which the justice department is not arguing leniency). A
tried and true hat of investigation- interviewing someone with truths you know
they will deny and then arresting them for lying- was determined by the
justice department to be fundamentally unfair to an ally of the current
administration, while the same strategy is currently being used to pursue
cases related to parties who are not allies of the administration.

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morninglight
Anyone who didn't know that Yale discriminates in their application process
has never heard of the Bush family dynasty or they are as thick as a brick.

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throwaway5752
Yes. But for some reason this DOJ isn't concerned with legacy, just a
grotesque misapplication of Title VI less than 3 months from a presidential
election.

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pyrophane
> The Justice Department accused Yale of violating Title VI of the Civil
> Rights Act of 1964, which the university is required to comply with as a
> condition of receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funding.

I wonder how difficult it would be for Yale to just say "no thank you" to all
of that gov't funding. Especially if they believed that the justice department
finding was politically motivated.

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mushufasa
If it only affects 'millions of dollars' then it'd be manageable for Yale.

If it affected federal research or pell grants, that would be much more
substantial.

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chmod600
I guess if you want to enforce social justice, and only have a few minutes,
you need to use proxies like race to speed up the process.

You've got grand scales to balance -- no time to actually learn about the
individual.

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nilkn
There’s actually no need to use race as a proxy. For instance, you could just
help poor folks regardless of race. If certain races tend to be poorer than
others due to historical circumstances, that gets automatically taken into
account. If the distribution of poverty across races changes over time, the
process responds automatically to take it into account.

This has the advantage that it can easily react to individual people instead
of forcibly identifying people with stereotypes about their race. For
instance, members of historically privileged groups who are nevertheless very
poor can still get help instead of being treated as if they are an aggressor
in society. This could cut down on a considerable amount of vitriol and unrest
by treating people more fairly.

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john-shaffer
That's unlikely to happen simply because it might actually work. Many
political figures want people to feel oppressed. If people's circumstances
were improved enough (or their perception changed enough) that they no longer
felt oppressed, then those politicians would have trouble getting votes.

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detaro
previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352)

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threatofrain
Ongoing discussions.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149606)

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Barrin92
I think there is an extreme confusion about this portrayal of affirmative
action as a sort of 'reverse-racism'. It's not actually a judgement based on
race or ethnicity, but on the factors that give people from these groups a
harder time to get into the top universities.

I'm sure you could construct a sort of proxy of income/test-scores/hardship or
whatever that approximates exactly what affirmative action does while formally
avoiding the race issue.

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Niten
"Affirmative action", in the common understanding of the term, refers to non-
race-blind processes in admissions and so forth. If, while controlling for all
other variables, a person of race A has a different chance of being admitted
than a person of race B because of their race, then yes, we certainly are
talking about a form of racism.

On the other hand, as you point out, one could design a race-blind system that
gives a leg up to people who grew up in poverty, people whose parents were
incarcerated on account of the war on drugs, etc. This system would
disproportionately give a leg up to black students, so when looked at from an
angle of averaged-out racial group dynamics it may "approximate exactly what
affirmative action does."

However, crucially, on an _individual_ level such a system would not
discriminate between otherwise similar applicants on the arbitrary basis of
race. Unlike affirmative action, such an alternative system as you describe
would not be racist, and that is no small distinction.

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scarface74
Are they also going to sue Yale for legacy admissions and preferring children
of parents who make large donations?

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chmod600
This is about a particular statute that prohibits discrimination based on
certain factors.

You could make an indirect argument that legacy admissions are a form of
racial preference.

As for having a lot of money... well, that's what private colleges are about.

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maallooc
You can't drink from that fountain because you're Black. You can't go to that
university because you're Asian.

Both looks like plain old racism to me.

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iaw
I think you're being downvoted because you draw a false equivalency.

Fountain rules in the Jim Crow era were uniformly applied to all African
Americans. The university question is whether or not race should be included
in admission consideration given that some races have been historically
disadvantaged relative to others.

When a purely rank-ordered 'merit' based approach would yield a heavily
homogeneous outcome does it make sense to try use an approach that gets closer
to a representative sample of the country?

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flowerlad
> _heavily homogeneous outcome_

You can classify people along lots of dimensions including race, ethnicity,
gender, religion, wealth, urban vs. rural upbringing, sexual orientation,
introvert vs. extrovert, political leaning, and so on.

Your claim of _homogenous outcome_ is based on how many of these dimensions?
Just one?

Because of the immigration policies of the United States, people of certain
ethnicities tend to be crème de la crème, for example, if you are from Asian
countries you have to be in the top 0.1% of your country in order to immigrate
to the US. As a result, if you take the top 10% of performers in High School
they tend to have more Asians. To limit their advancement based on their race
does not just punish them it punishes the nation by depriving the nation of
its best brains.

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iandanforth
The principle of race blindness has consequences. If you ignore those
consequences this isn't a tough call, making decisions based on race is bad.
If you are willing to take into account things like history, socioeconomic
reality, and the motives of people supporting one side or another then this
gets much more complicated. Personally I'd be in favor of stating that
intentional discrimination against historically privileged or over represented
classes is a good thing. Of course, I don't assert that to be an unarguable
truth.

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clusterfish
Bad history wasn't caused by race blindness but quite the opposite, by racial
discrimination.

There are many ways to justify racial discrimination, they are all wrong. Not
the first time "the privileged" were said to be in the wrong either.

If you want to help people who are poor, live in poor neighbourhoods and whose
parents have no degrees (example of effects of bad history), go ahead and no
one will judge you use those factors and end up helping mostly people of a
certain race, as long as you're not actually taking their race into account
when making decisions.

But that's not what's happening, or at least what DOJ is alleging is that Yale
does in fact use race as primary decision factor. They should not be looking
at race as a factor at all, even if supreme court allows for that.

