What you're saying here is that non-Asian leaders who are individually worse leaders take the spot of Asian leaders who are individually better leaders because the race of non-Asian leaders makes them better leaders.
But we haven't settled whether they're being racially discriminated against. If some legitimate feature to discriminate or filter against correlates with race, then it will look a lot like racial discrimination when it isn't. Harvard wanting to maximize their future prestige by carefully constructing the makeup of their student body is such an instance. Maximizing leadership potential of their student body will look like racial discrimination. It's similar to how the distribution of housing loans can look like racial discrimination if you didn't already know that income correlates with race.
> non-Asian leaders who are individually worse leaders take the spot of Asian leaders who are individually better leaders
No. I'm saying GPA and SAT scores only correlate with leadership potential up to a point. Once you've passed that threshold, other factors start contributing more, e.g. your background, interests, etc. It is not the case that the person with the higher GPA/SAT necessarily has more leadership potential.
And somehow these "lacking in leadership potential" students happen to be Asian more often than the norm? Year after year? Seems like a convenient coincidence.
Then, pray tell, which lack of "being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster" is common to Asian applicants, year after year? I'm sure we would all be fascinated to hear the specific areas in which Asian applicants are failing to match these heuristics where other minority applicants do.
But to put a very fine point on it, Asians with stellar scores, similar backgrounds, similar interests, similar extra curriculars lack diversity in backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars by definition. There's nothing deeper to be noted about this. Whether Asians that apply to Harvard actually have similar backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars is certainly up for debate. But it is plausible.
The issue is that the distribution of leadership potential in the applicant pool is not equivalent to the distribution of top GPA and test scores (past a certain threshold). So when you use your GPA/SAT metric to analyze something that doesn't follow the same distribution, you will conclude there is bias. But it is your metric that is wrong. If your argument is that they necessarily should use your GPA/SAT metric, then you have to argue for this directly. It is not self evident.
There are all sorts of scenarios where there are natural incentives to discriminate on race; perhaps a bank can improve their model on creditworthiness if they considered race. Perhaps a company that provides security personnel can better model risk if they considered race. Perhaps Harvard can better improve their ability to accumulate powerful people if they considered race.
But isn't it agreeable that not all kinds of strife is useful to a nation? Perhaps strife between companies is useful for diversity in a market, but racial strife? Which brews into generations of mistrust?
Sure, but not when done naively. Naive "anti-racism" policies generally serve to cement the current status-quo, which is why they have so much support these days. This is only to argue against the idea that being race blind across the board is a moral imperative.
The issue is what responsibility does Harvard have to admit students in a "meritocratic" (i.e. GPA/SAT are paramount) manner. I don't see that they have any such responsibility. I don't think they should discount Asian applicants because they're Asian. I do think its fair to positively weigh diversity in background and interests. But in a zero-sum scenario, this will look like racial discrimination from the outside, and that's OK.
>perhaps a bank can improve their model on creditworthiness if they considered race
Banks do use income and wealth in their model of creditworthiness. But if you didn't already know that race correlates with income, you might think that they are using race as an independent factor. Presumably you have no issue with this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
There's definitely a bit of gray in there for me.
The issue is that admissions to top universities isn't strictly meritocratic. Or to put it another way, "merit" in this context isn't simply GPA and SAT scores. Harvard as an institution wants to increase its prestige over time, and so they want to admit students who will go on to be CEOs, Senators, Presidents, etc. They want to pick the future leaders of society, but this is only correlated with GPA/SAT up to a point.
This is where race-aware admissions is perfectly warranted by Harvard. They want students who are outliers as those people will go on to do great things. But being an outlier of your cluster is important signal. And race is a very important cluster in society. That they structure their admissions to make sure they're getting the outstanding people from a broad range of races and circumstances is Harvard just working in their best interest. If Asian applications are very similar to each other, then they have a good reason to weigh such applications lower because you're no longer an outlier in the sense that is valuable to Harvard.
This isn't a moral issue like some are trying to make this out to be. If there is a moral issue here, its whether any institution should have such an outsized influence on the outcome of a person's life, not whether Asians are being unfairly barred from the king-maker institution.