Luke Ford

Jesse Merriam writes:

* racial diversity makes us so divided that we need the government to be involved in managing our most intimate affairs and teaching us how “to live together and unite in common purpose.” No one asked why something that requires constant governmental meddling and intervention is somehow still a strength and not a weakness.

* Harvard had to institute a roughly 200-point preference on the SAT for black applicants, as Jerome Karabel details in his book, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005).

* An example can be found in the diversity report cards used by ESPN. For the racial diversity of its players, the National Basketball Association gets a higher diversity grade than Major League Baseball, despite the fact that the NBA is one of the most racially homogeneous sports leagues, whereas MLB’s racial breakdown closely matches the nation’s percentages. The only way to make sense of this ranking is that the NBA is considered more diverse than MLB because it is less white (the NBA is around 18% white, whereas MLB is around 62% white). To be more diverse is to be less white.

* …if Harvard admitted students according to a purely academic index (as we would expect an academic institution to do without racial diversity pressures), Harvard would be only 0.76% black (assuming that a selective institution like Harvard would not need to go beyond the top 10% of applicants). But with Harvard’s racial preferences, more than 15% of the admitted class was black.

* Despite the fact that whites constitute around 60% of the nation’s population, the undergraduate programs at Yale, Princeton, and Stanford are, respectively, 38%, 41%, and 26% white.

* Between 1963 and 1966, Princeton had a roughly 200-point SAT difference for black students and the overall student population (for this period, Princeton’s black students averaged 550 verbal and 590 math on the SATs; the class overall averaged 650 verbal and 695 math). Not to be outdone, Harvard admitted 90 black freshmen in 1969, almost 8% of the student body. Princeton pushed ahead in 1970, using racial preferences to increase blacks to 10.4% of the student body, the highest percentage of any of the Big Three. Princeton thus went from being a school that did not admit a single black student for three consecutive years in the 1950s to being more than 10% black in 1970.

* a [1967] Harvard study on race and SAT performance concluded that “only 1.2 percent of the nation’s male black high school graduates could be expected to score as high as 500 on the verbal section of the SAT and a mere three-tenths of one percent as high as 550.” To put that in perspective, that same year the median SAT scores for Harvard-admitted students were 697 verbal and 708 math. Only about 1% of the nation’s black male students were able to score on the SAT roughly 400 points below Harvard’s average at the time.