Except there is only one Harvard University. You could spend billions making a new University next door that has just as high standard of teachers and facilities, but it wouldn't be Harvard.

Not that being "Harvard" would make it better, but to a lot of people the prestige of the name is important.

So to that effect, it is a zero sum game.

Does Harvard maintain that lauded reputation if it's known to admit a racial monoculture? Especially in, say, the technology fields, where we've seen the negative impact of such monoculture in the quality of software developed using machine learning algorithms?

All of the biggest software companies have almost no black engineers and relatively few female engineers. They still manage to make money hand over fist, looks like their software is good enough to do the job.

So you're satisfied with "makes money, but has known biases against people's inborn traits."

In general, we is a society (in America at least) have decided that's not good enough. It hasn't been good enough since the time there was one facility for the whites and one facility for the coloreds.

So it's either 1) accept affirmative action and we'll increase spending on education, or 2) reject affirmative action and we would spend this money somewhere else (maybe whatever else gets the votes)?

How do we magically give new colleges Harvard-level endowments?