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This is pretty close to how we did things at Princeton. You can only admit so many violin playing science hopefuls.
by brandnewlow 15y ago
This is pretty close to how we did things at Princeton.
You can only admit so many violin playing science hopefuls.
- patio11 15y agoIf I found you a dozen extra violin-playing science hopefuls with high scores and GPAs who were black you and I both know exactly what would happen. The "meh, they don't have a hook" functions as a post-hoc neutral justification of a policy whose stated goal and naked application is to discriminate on the basis of race. It's as transparent a fig-leaf as "We can't admit blacks, they might only speak Ebonics, yo!" would be if you were staring at a transcript which showed multiple awards for competitive forensics, a 4.0 GPA, and a role as Iago that got written up in the NYT. It is also, verbatim, the justification of ethnicity-conscious "holistic" admissions processes which were adopted at Harvard in the 1930s with the explicit, documented aim of keeping "the Jewish problem" to a manageable level.
- brandnewlow 15y agoSure, those black students would be admitted, and the justification is that it's a rarer, more unusual "profile."