Two choices of message

From A question about the racial experience at Harvard by Niall Kilmartin. He is playing with emotional dynamite but it is an interesting question in its own right.

2) Having implied the importance of academic talent in overt and subtle ways, Harvard creates an artificial racial reality: it selects its asian-american students to average 140 Scholastic Aptitude Test points more that its white-american students. It selects its white-american students to average 130 SAT points more than its hispanic-american students. And it selects its african-american students to average 180 SAT points less than its hispanics, 310 SAT points less than its whites and 450 SAT points less than its asians.*

Thus Harvard gives members of each of these easily-distinguishable racial groups the routine experience of encountering a consistent, marked discrepancy between their group and other groups in precisely the area that the whole essence of being at Harvard implies is important, not just for gaining some academic degree but for being worthy to decide on politics, social mores, life in general. Day by day, the experience of being at Harvard teaches its students that, in the quality that matters, asians are typically superior, whites are typically normal, hispanics are typically inferior and blacks even more so. Harvard is a university – a pillar of academia, a place that implies academic is everything – and they chose the racial mix of their students to incarnate academic racial inequality.

3) Harvard also teaches that it is the most appalling sin, unspeakably evil and harshly-punished even when the evidence is slight or non-existent, for any student ever to refer in the slightest, most micro, most indirect way to this routinely-experienced reality that Harvard admissions has created. Students must not in any way betray that they have noticed any aspect or even distant side-effect of the artificial reality Harvard has created for them – and this of course compounds the artificiality of the Harvard reality.

So my question is: what does this experience in fact teach Harvard students?

The Harvard SAT discounts reflect very roughly the differences in average score for the population at large, i.e they reflect an underlying reality. Why that reality exists is a third-rail issue but not the point of his observation.

Given that the differences exist, Harvard basically has a choice to create either of two different impressions.

The first is that you have objective criteria and hold everyone to the same criteria and let the chips fall as they may. Under this scenario, all students will deal with students of other races who are just as bright as they. They may notice that there are fewer of them than simple demographics might suggest but there would be no question that the African-American with an IQ of 145 (3 SD) was fully the equal of the Asian or White or Hispanic with an IQ of 145. All are equally bright, though some individuals in any of the groups will be more or less effective depending on cultural norms and personal behaviors.

The second impression is quite different. If you are using affirmative action strategies to try and obtain a rough simple demographic representational equivalency in your student population, then you are going to have the SAT point variances as identified in the first quoted paragraph. Under this scenario, well-intended as it might be, each racial group is going to encounter distinct cognitive differences among other racial groups because that is what Harvard has selected for in order to achieve demographic representation.

The choice is to signal that all bright people have similar cognitive potential despite their race OR you signal that there are capability differences based on race. Affirmative Action does the latter. It is a choice.

Is it the best choice? There is a legitimate argument about that. I think the former is probably the better approach, i.e. reinforce that smart people can and do come from every race. But it is an uncomfortable choice and there are merits on both sides. The problem is that we are not discussing the relative merits of the choice. We are simply insisting that there is no choice.