Submitted by Roger Barris via Acting-Man.com, [8]
Ivy League: Perfect Scores not Good Enough for the “Wrong Race”
The Economist has run a lengthy article about Asian-Americans [9]. It begins with a description of Michael Wang, who had a perfect score in his college entrance (ACT) exams, who was ranked second academically out of 1,002 students at his high school, who was part of a chorus that performed at Barack Obama’s inauguration, who came in third place in a national piano championship, who was in the top 150 in a national mathematics competition, and who was in several national debating-competition finals. Michael was rejected by six out of the seven Ivy League schools to which he applied. Like many other members of this “model minority,” he is no longer willing to take this quietly.
Michael Wang: too Asian and too perfect for the Ivy League schools. This is a typical example of modern-day socialism’s drive to allegedly “equalize opportunity”, a heading under which the incentive to make an effort to actually accomplish something in life is slowly but surely deadened among those showing the best abilities. Over time, it leads to decay in the population’s morals and intelligence, until you end up with a nation best compared to a ship of fools.
Asian-Americans have suffered systematic discrimination, including as recently as World War II when 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned in camps as potential “fifth columnists” while no similar actions were taken against Americans of German or Italian ancestry.
The article points out that the worst single incident of lynching in American history was actually directed against Chinese immigrants, when 17 were murdered in 1871. Yet, as anyone who has walked the campuses of MIT, Caltech, Harvard or Stanford, or any other top-flight university, can attest, Asian-Americans are massively represented (44% of the recent incoming class at Caltech, which is routinely rated the number one school in the world [10]).
This is despite explicit discrimination which means that, as estimated by two Princeton academics, Asian-Americans need a Scholastic Aptitude Test (“SAT”) score about 140 points higher than a white candidate in order to be admitted to a private university, whereas African-Americans can have a result that is 310 points lower in order gain the same result.
Americans of Japanese ancestry are loaded on a train on their way to a concentr… sorry, internment camp in WW2.
And two University of Michigan researchers have produced a study which shows the difference is down to nothing more than hard work: they followed 6,000 white and Asian children from toddler through school. They found small differences in initial cognitive abilities and the socioeconomic status of parents, but sizable gaps in effort that eventually produce large differences in academic results.
After years of avoiding the issue, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of Abigail Fisher versus the University of Texas in its next session. Ms Fisher, who is white, is suing UT over its affirmative action policies which she claims unfairly denied her a position. Her suit is backed by an amicus curiae brief submitted on behalf of 117 Asian-American organizations. This follows a lawsuit by a group of Asian students against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Here is the gist of Harvard’s defense in this suit:
“…a class that is diverse on multiple dimensions, including on race, transforms the educational experience of students from every background and prepares our graduates for an increasingly pluralistic world…”
I suppose that this argument could be used to support the admission of almost anyone, including a few utter imbeciles since they too are part of our “pluralistic world,” although I think that Harvard restricts this policy to its professorial staff.
But more importantly, what is the message that this sends for both over- and under-achieving students? What does it teach our young about the relative merits of individual hard work versus political machinations? And, from a strictly economic perspective, what are the implications of this for American success when we deliberately hinder investment in our most promising human capital?
I have previously quoted Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts on this subject: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.” Let’s hope that he follows through in the Abigail Fisher case and that Justice Kennedy joins him, since we can reliable expect that the “Gang of Four” (Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayer and Kagan) will march in lock step to whatever nonsense Obama’s Department of Justice puts forth in defense of this indefensible practice.
The four Supreme Court justices most likely to support socialist policies
