By John Fund
Sunday, April 05, 2015
A group of Asian-American students has filed suit against
Harvard’s admissions policy, charging that it seeks to limit the number of
Asian students much like quotas held down the number of Jewish students until
the 1920s. For example, one of the students Harvard rejected, an unnamed child
of Chinese immigrants, had perfect scores on three college-admission tests,
graduated first in his (or her) class, led the tennis team, and raised money
for National Public Radio.
Harvard officials respond that one in six of its students
have an Asian background, its admissions policy was singled out for praise in a
1978 Supreme Court decision, and it rejects thousands of impressive
overachievers every year.
But the group bringing the lawsuit, Students for Fair
Admissions, won a powerful PR ally this week: Vijay Chokal-Ingam, an Indian American
who happens to be the brother of Fox comedy star Mindy Kaling, revealed that he
won acceptance to medical school by claiming to be black. Frustrated at being
rejected by medical schools in part because of mediocre test scores and a 3.1
grade point average, Chokal-Ingam shaved off his slick black hair in 2001,
began using his middle name, “Jojo,” and checked the “black” box on his
applications. He soon won interviews at Harvard and Columbia and a spot on
waiting lists at the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University, and Mt.
Sinai. He eventually went to Saint Louis University Medical School but dropped
out after two years. He then applied as an Asian American to UCLA’s business
school and graduated with an MBA. He now works in Los Angeles as a résumé
coach.
“I got into medical school because I said I was black,”
Chokal-Ingam writes at his blog Almost Black. “The funny thing is I’m not. . .
. My plan actually worked. Lucky for you, I never became a doctor.”
Chokal-Ingam admits it was wrong for him to lie but says
he did so in part because he was angry at the system of quotas that
discriminated against Asian-American students. “Affirmative-action racism is as
ingrained in our society as imperialism was in the time of Gandhi and
segregation was in the time of (Martin Luther) King,” he wrote on his blog.
“People who challenge affirmative action racism such as Abigail Fisher, Justice
Thomas, and Ward Connerly are the true heirs” to the ideal of a color-blind
society.
He isn’t opposed to giving people from disadvantaged
backgrounds a leg up when it comes to college admissions, but he argues that it
was wrong for someone of his financially privileged background to get into
medical school with mediocre grades.
“I disclosed that I grew up in one of the wealthiest
towns in Massachusetts, that my mother was a doctor, and that my father was an
architect,” he told the New York Post. “I was the campus rich kid, let’s just
put it on the table. And yet they considered me an affirmative-action
applicant.” He says affirmative action actually works against the interests of
its beneficiaries, because it “promotes negative stereotypes about the
competency of minority Americans by making it seem like they need special
treatment.”
Liberals active in the 1960s civil-rights movement such
as Martin Luther King called for a color-blind society, but today’s
left-wingers want to entrench quotas forever. Last year, the Democratic state
senate in California rammed through a ballot measure that would have ended the
state’s ban on racial preferences at public universities, a ban put in place by
voters in 1996. But Asian Americans mobilized against any return to racial
preferences and forced the Democratic state assembly to shelve the idea. That
effort was part of what inspired Chokal-Ingam to write a book on his
experience. It will be called Almost Black.
Richard Kahlenberg, an education-policy analyst at the
Century Foundation, says there is indeed evidence that Harvard is substituting
race for poverty as a major determinant in its admissions policy. “Harvard has
as many students in the freshman class from families in the top 1 percent by
income nationally as from the bottom 50 percent,” he told Fox News last year.
“It could produce considerable racial and ethnic diversity without resorting to
racial preferences.”
Edward Blum, a civil-rights activist who has midwifed the
complaint against Harvard, says he believes the recent 2013 Supreme Court
decision in Fisher v. University of Texas provides valuable legal ammunition
for his point of view. “The Fisher opinion unambiguously requires schools to
implement race-neutral means to achieve student-body diversity before turning
to racial classifications and preferences,” he told me in an interview last
year. But at the three most selective Ivy League schools, there is a clear
anomaly: Asian Americans were over 27 percent of applicants to those schools
between 2008 and 2012 but represented only 17–20 percent of those admitted.
Blum believes that the discrepancy represents a “bamboo ceiling” against
Asian-American applicants.
The Harvard lawsuit will be fascinating to watch if it
strips away the veil behind which college-admission decisions are made. Even if
the case does not ultimately reach the Supreme Court, it will probably be a
powerful teaching tool for Americans of good will who want to promote education
opportunity for minorities but not at the expense of other minorities. As Chief
Justice Roberts declared a few years ago: “The way to stop discrimination based
on race is to stop discriminating based on race.”
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