When does affirmative action cross the line into discrimination? Is creating diversity all that it's cut out to be? Shivani Khanna shines light onto the uncomfortable reality facing American higher education today.

Shivani Khanna
Gargoyle assistant editor
Posted Friday, Jan. 26, 2007

Opinions

IN OCTOBER, YALE freshman Jian Li filed a civil rights complaint against Princeton University for rejecting his application for admission. He claimed that he was discriminated against because his application was rejected on the basis of his nationality — Asian American.

“Theoretically, affirmative action is supposed to take spots away from white applicants and redistribute them to underrepresented minorities,” Li told the Daily Princetonian. “What's happening is one segment of the minority population is losing places to another segment of minorities, namely Asians to underrepresented minorities.”

Li points to a study conducted by two Princeton professors which concluded that if colleges were to remove the consideration of race from the admissions process, white applicants would feel little effect. Asian students, on the other hand, would fill nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class that are currently taken by African American or Hispanic students.

Dare I say there exists a quota that limits the number of Asian students who are being accepted into elite colleges? This situation bears a striking resemblance to the quota used in the 20th century by institutions such as Harvard and Yale to keep Jews out of the Ivy League, an effort recently documented by Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel in his award-winning 2005 book, “The Chosen.” In today's supposedly more progressive and politically correct society we recognize that this was a discriminatory act.

A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard's president during that earlier time, boldly stated that Jews were a detriment to the school. “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate,” he said, “because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”

The Ivy League gatekeepers didn't claim Jews were unqualified. They said they weren't admitting Jews because having them would change the “feel” of the school. The same thing is happening today with Asian Americans, and we're using affirmative action as a tool to accomplish it. We've also given that “feeling” a new name: diversity.

But it's becoming more and more apparent that the supposed benefits of affirmative action and diversity in education are often ephemeral and practically nonexistent.

Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, has argued that black students are often admitted into universities above their skill level and end up doing poorly and unable to compete with their classmates.

This mismatch caused by affirmative action has been noticed by UCLA law professor Richard Sander, who found that nearly half of black law students reside in the bottom 10 percent of their law school classes.

Kirsanow asks: “Would college administrators continue to mouth platitudes about affirmative action if their students knew that preferential admissions cause black law students to flunk out at two-and-a-half times the rate of whites? Or that black law students are six times less likely to pass the bar? Or that half of black law students never become lawyers?”

The call for the removal of affirmative action in its entirety may be a little too rash, because I have seen many who have benefited from the system. It is essential, however, to have the gumption to call attention to the problem and realize that the diversity that college campuses are trying to create comes at the expense of an Asian population which is being discriminated against severely.

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