By Jeff Yang, CNN
Recently, an organization called Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging that its admissions practices violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act for “intentionally discriminating against applicants on the basis of race” — specifically, against Asian Americans. (A second, similar lawsuit was filed against the University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill.)
Graduating Harvard University Law School students. (Photo by Robert Spencer/Getty Images)
The lawsuit alleges that Harvard has, through the use of “holistic” consideration of applicants, “systematically” excluded qualified Asian Americans in favor of less qualified black and Latino applicants in an attempt to illegally achieve “racial balancing.”
Here’s the thing. This lawsuit — and the organization that filed it — is not the affirmative action crusade it may seem, and I will get to that in a minute.
As an Asian American graduate of Harvard, I read this news with dismay, both because I share a lot in common with the plaintiff at the core of the suit — let’s call her Jane Dou — and because my personal experience has been so fundamentally different.
You see, both she and I are second-generation Asian Americans, the children of immigrants who saw preparing us for higher education as their fundamental responsibility.
It’s a common running joke among second-generation Asian Americans that our parents start us on college prep before we begin potty training. The joke didn’t seem so funny to me when I was a kid, however. I remember earning minutes of TV by defining vocabulary words correctly — while I was still in 4th grade. I remember being rewarded for finishing homework early by getting extra “Mommy Homework,” which always involved problem sets and practice exams from a dog-eared stack of Princeton Review test prep tomes.
I didn’t remember being dressed in a crimson-colored onesie while still an infant, but my mother showed me the one she’d bought for me, proudly pulling it from storage on the day I headed out to college.
That’s because to my parents, it wasn’t enough for me to just go to college. There was only one school they saw as a fitting goal, and it was the reason they came to America, my mother said, hoping that one day they would have kids who would grow up to attend it. That was Harvard University, the only school whose brand name shone brightly enough to reach across the waters to Taiwan. Other schools might offer a more dynamic curriculum, better access to senior faculty, a greater amount of financial aid. None of that mattered. To them, it was Hafu Daxue or bust.
As it turns out, I did get into Harvard. And two years later, so did my sister. And her part-time undergraduate job at the Harvard admissions office ended up leading us to a few awkward revelations.
You see, in the course of her job, she was able to gain access to college admissions files, and couldn’t resist pulling her own to see what it said. The file told her bluntly that she had been a “marginal” admit based on her application, but that she was ultimately accepted because she had a brother who was already a student in good standing — that is to say, me.
Incensed, she then pulled my file to see whether I had gotten in on my own merits. And what she shared with me was the discovery that I essentially would have been denied admission, based on scores and grades that were somewhat lower than hers, and an all-too-typical extracurricular career (piano, math team, blah blah blah).
Read the full article HERE.
