But that's the exact same thing.
If you have a system where there are 1000 slots and the 1000 applicants with the highest scores get in, and you give Asian applicants +0, white applicants +5, Hispanic applicants +10 and black applicants +20, the outcome is entirely identical to giving Asian applicants -10, white applicants -5, Hispanic applicants +0 and black applicants +10. There is no meaningful difference, the people who consequently get in are exactly the same in both cases.
Harvard is accused of excluding more than half the asian applicants who otherwise would have made the cut. Harvard does not admit anywhere near enough disadvantaged minorities where giving those folks a boost would lead to that many asians not getting a spot.
The personal rating differs widely between the admissions committee and the the alumni volunteers (who give Asians roughly the same ratings as other groups). This happens for no other ethnic group. This is the smoking gun for racial discrimination.
If there are only asian, black and hispanic applicants, it gives exactly the same results. When there are also white applicants, that change is equivalent to adding a -5 modifier for white applicants equal to the original -5 modifier for asian applicants. In neither case is the result a system in which race can only help you -- there are a finite number of slots.
It seems obviously wrong that if you gave +20 to white applicants it would not be a disadvantage to black, hispanic or asian applicants just because they all have the same equally-disadvantaged modifiers.
Especially in the latter case, the effect on asians is indirect and attenuted. For example, say Harvard would have been 60% white, 30% asian, and 10% underrepresented minority. You can double the representation of disadvantaged minorities by reducing the asian representation from 30% to about 27%. So basically the bottom 10% of asians get exluded.
What is instead being alleged here is that Harvard exluded more than half the Asians that otherwise would have been admitted.
The only possible difference is adding white people (or some other separate group) to the "discriminating against" set. And the combination of that precedent and intersectional politics makes even those equivalent as soon as you start adding more non-asian subgroups to the set of disadvantaged minorities.
For example, the white population at Harvard is overly culturally homogeneous. It would legitimately be a significant benefit to their cultural diversity to get some more rednecks in there, using some suitably more specific definition with regard to income, hometown urbanization level, etc.
So if you want to discriminate against a specific group, easy -- just enumerate a bunch of underrepresented groups that don't include them and give them each a bonus. Any given applicant outside of the target victim group is likely to be in one of them.
> So basically the bottom 10% of asians get exluded.
That's just because you're using convenient numbers. If the merit-based numbers would have been 60% asian (e.g. because Asia has a couple billion people who would all like to go to Harvard), you do have to exclude half of them to get them down to 30%.
I know it is hyperbole. But college admissions are zero sum games. Giving points to one person, is the same as taking those away from another.
I thought that there was a period in american history after the civil war where black people's vote counted for 3/5th of a white person.
Turns out it was how electoral votes were decided, in which only slave owner voted before the civil war.
Well, you learning something new every day. I am an idiot.
Harvard's strategy thus, and that's what's reflected in the argument you quote, must be to (1) defeat the allegation that it is affirmatively trying to keep Asians out; (2) explain that any knock-on effects to Asians from affirmative action benefiting other groups is within the bounds of what the Supreme Court has found acceptable in cases like Bakke and Grutter.