1 00:00:01,820 --> 00:00:06,780 Can you imagine, in this day and age, an educational institution discriminating against 2 00:00:06,780 --> 00:00:08,080 a racial minority? 3 00:00:08,080 --> 00:00:10,740 Can you imagine what the outcry would be? 4 00:00:10,740 --> 00:00:14,630 “You mean, you’re preventing these qualified students from attending your college because 5 00:00:14,630 --> 00:00:16,500 of the color of their skin?!” 6 00:00:16,500 --> 00:00:18,340 Well, you don’t have to imagine it. 7 00:00:18,340 --> 00:00:19,580 It’s happening. 8 00:00:19,580 --> 00:00:24,740 And at arguably the most prestigious college in America—my alma mater, Harvard. 9 00:00:24,740 --> 00:00:28,700 The ethnic minority isn’t blacks or Jews, as it was in years past. 10 00:00:28,700 --> 00:00:31,540 The target this time is Asian Americans. 11 00:00:31,540 --> 00:00:33,360 And it’s just as wrong. 12 00:00:33,360 --> 00:00:38,540 After millions of dollars in legal fees, millions of records examined, and hundreds of hours 13 00:00:38,550 --> 00:00:43,469 of depositions and testimony, Harvard’s once purposely opaque admissions policies 14 00:00:43,469 --> 00:00:45,210 have been laid bare. 15 00:00:45,210 --> 00:00:47,460 It’s not a pretty picture. 16 00:00:47,460 --> 00:00:49,360 Here’s what we now know: 17 00:00:49,380 --> 00:00:55,680 Harvard Admissions rates student applicants in three main ways: 1) Academic performance; 18 00:00:55,680 --> 00:00:59,860 2) Extra-curricular achievements; 3) “Personal qualities.” 19 00:00:59,860 --> 00:01:04,040 That’s fine, as far as it goes, if the criteria were applied fairly. 20 00:01:04,040 --> 00:01:05,220 But they’re not. 21 00:01:05,220 --> 00:01:10,520 Asian American applicants consistently score higher in the first two criteria—academics 22 00:01:10,520 --> 00:01:15,570 and extra-curricular activities, which can be objectively assessed—than white students, 23 00:01:15,570 --> 00:01:17,950 Latinos and African Americans. 24 00:01:17,950 --> 00:01:21,620 So how does Harvard justify its Asian American quota? 25 00:01:21,620 --> 00:01:26,479 With the help of category three—“personal qualities,” which include vague and largely 26 00:01:26,480 --> 00:01:32,280 subjective factors like “likability,” “maturity,” “integrity,” and “effervescence.” 27 00:01:32,280 --> 00:01:37,159 According to Harvard’s own internal reports, Asian American applicants are routinely and 28 00:01:37,159 --> 00:01:43,280 systematically marked much lower on this personality scale by Harvard admissions officers who almost 29 00:01:43,280 --> 00:01:45,660 never meet or interview applicants. 30 00:01:45,660 --> 00:01:50,640 But here’s the kicker: the personality ratings given to Asian students by admissions officers 31 00:01:50,649 --> 00:01:56,369 are vastly different than the personality ratings Harvard gets from its own alumni interviewers, 32 00:01:56,369 --> 00:01:58,840 who actually meet the applicants in person. 33 00:01:58,840 --> 00:02:02,760 Alumni interviewers score Asian applicants as high as whites. 34 00:02:02,760 --> 00:02:08,200 In other words, Harvard artificially and fraudulently downgrades Asians on “personality” 35 00:02:08,200 --> 00:02:10,300 to get the results it wants. 36 00:02:10,300 --> 00:02:15,640 And what Harvard wants is to suppress the number of Asian Americans admitted. 37 00:02:15,640 --> 00:02:21,100 Based on the data that Harvard was forced to turn over, economist Peter Arcidiacono 38 00:02:21,110 --> 00:02:25,800 of Duke University concluded that with the same application profile in terms of test 39 00:02:25,800 --> 00:02:31,580 scores, extracurricular activities and personality factors, an Asian American male applicant 40 00:02:31,580 --> 00:02:41,160 would only have a 25% chance of admission—versus 32% if white, 77% if Hispanic, and 95% if black. 41 00:02:41,200 --> 00:02:43,640 What’s the real-life result of all this? 42 00:02:43,640 --> 00:02:49,380 In 2013, Asian Americans made up 19% of the incoming freshmen class. 43 00:02:49,380 --> 00:02:54,900 According to Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research, if the personality factors had not 44 00:02:54,910 --> 00:02:59,100 been rigged, that percentage would have been 43%. 45 00:02:59,100 --> 00:03:05,989 Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 guarantees that “No person in the United States shall, 46 00:03:05,989 --> 00:03:12,040 on the ground of race, color or national origin, be excluded from participation in, or be denied 47 00:03:12,040 --> 00:03:18,080 benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal 48 00:03:18,080 --> 00:03:19,900 financial assistance.” 49 00:03:19,900 --> 00:03:24,540 Each year, Harvard takes hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government. 50 00:03:24,540 --> 00:03:29,300 In Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s 51 00:03:29,319 --> 00:03:34,310 affirmative action policies, deciding that race could be used as a “plus factor” 52 00:03:34,310 --> 00:03:37,360 to achieve diversity, but never as a quota. 53 00:03:37,360 --> 00:03:42,640 Yet, by placing strict limits on the percentage of Asian American applicants it will admit, 54 00:03:42,640 --> 00:03:46,060 racial quotas are exactly what Harvard is using. 55 00:03:46,060 --> 00:03:50,280 One strongly suspects this quota system isn’t limited to Harvard. 56 00:03:50,280 --> 00:03:57,020 In the last ten years, Asian American students have been limited to an 18-22% presence across 57 00:03:57,020 --> 00:03:58,560 the Ivy League. 58 00:03:58,560 --> 00:04:01,220 Or maybe that’s just a coincidence. 59 00:04:01,220 --> 00:04:07,360 Writing for the majority in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote 60 00:04:07,360 --> 00:04:12,780 that the Court “expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no 61 00:04:12,780 --> 00:04:17,120 longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” 62 00:04:17,120 --> 00:04:22,360 With less than a decade to go, the Ivy League shows no indication that it’s giving up 63 00:04:22,360 --> 00:04:24,340 on those racial preferences. 64 00:04:24,340 --> 00:04:27,680 Instead, these colleges have doubled down. 65 00:04:27,680 --> 00:04:33,520 Objective standards regarding admissions continue to be increasingly disfavored as the illegal 66 00:04:33,520 --> 00:04:36,900 goal of racial balancing is advanced. 67 00:04:36,900 --> 00:04:42,140 This racial balancing is justified by the left’s desire to achieve “racial diversity” 68 00:04:42,140 --> 00:04:48,280 —its insistence on seeing every person only through the prism of race, as if the most important 69 00:04:48,280 --> 00:04:52,200 thing any of us has to offer is the color of our skin. 70 00:04:52,200 --> 00:04:55,020 Not long ago, that was called “racism.” 71 00:04:55,020 --> 00:04:57,200 It’s still called racism. 72 00:04:57,200 --> 00:05:02,610 It needs to end, once and for all—for the sake of deserving Asian American students, 73 00:05:02,610 --> 00:05:07,450 for the sake of Harvard’s own integrity, and for the sake of the American principle 74 00:05:07,450 --> 00:05:10,950 that the rules must be the same for everyone. 75 00:05:10,950 --> 00:05:16,750 Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts said it best: “The way to stop discrimination 76 00:05:16,750 --> 00:05:21,500 on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” 77 00:05:21,500 --> 00:05:23,880 It’s time we did just that. 78 00:05:23,880 --> 00:05:29,760 I’m Lee Cheng, of the Asian American Legal Foundation, for Prager University.