Discussion on Harvard Admissions Controversy

There's lines from this that got you in trouble in 2024.

So the big famous line is, you wrote,

under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications,

blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students.

And am I right in understanding that

that line was what was the line used

against you in 2024 as evidence of,

or quote unquote, evidence of you being racist?

Oh, that was one of the main ones, yeah.

So that's literally a statistic from Harvard.

Harvard conducted an internal study in 2013,

which concluded that if admissions were based only on grades and test scores,

without like the funny personality business and all that,

that the undergraduate population would be actually 0.67%.

So slightly less than 0.7% black.

And that was, was that used as sort of

a reason for DEI policy by Harvard?

They were forced to reveal that in

the students for fair admissions versus Harvard lawsuit.

As I'm sure you and the listeners know,

a very famous case where an organization representing

Asians sued Harvard for discriminating against them.

So Harvard,

they have a formula for determining who to admit and

they would systematically

give Asian applicants low scores on the measure that they called personality.

And they would give black applicants very high scores on this.

So reduce the number of Asians who are admitted and

increase the number of black applicants who are admitted.

So that was clear.

And the Supreme Court of the United States recognized

what this was, which was racial discrimination against Asians.

And it was Harvard's was forced to admit that

if they didn't do any of this stuff,

if they just accepted based on academic qualifications,

then the black population would be less than 0.7% black

compared to the current,

at the time it was like 12 and a half, 13% black.

So most of the black students who

were admitted would not have been admitted under a colorblind system.

Right. Okay.

But you don't like the colorblind system yourself,

but for different reasons.

Well, that's the thing.

So people just quote this and they say,

well, look,

because people don't understand the difference between saying something is the case

and being happy that it's the case.

They think that I'm gloating about this and

saying that it's good to have fewer black

college students, which is in context, not what I was saying.

In fact, I was saying I was responding

to those people who think that the issue

will go away if we become colorblind.

And I'm saying that if we adopt the policy of colorblindness,

we're going to have disparities that are far larger than people recognize.