Website owner: James Miller
Quotas against Asians
The following is from Thomas Sowell. Is Reality Optional? pp. 121- 122.
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Quotas against Asians
A PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH at one of the better eastern colleges was appalled at the low quality of the essays her students turned in. In order to get them to understand what an essay should be like, she xeroxed one of the few good ones and gave a copy to each student.
It was an essay written by a Vietnamese student who learned to speak English only 5 years ago.
Asian students have had so many remarkable academic success stories that we are no longer surprised. What should be surprising—in fact appalling—is that some people seem to think they are too successful. Evidence is growing of quotas being used to limit the number of Asians admitted to some top colleges and universities.
Congressman Dana Rohrbacher of California has been trying to dig out the facts about quotas being used to limit the number of Asian American students admitted to colleges and universities. He has also been trying to light a fire under the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, to get them to take legal action against such discriminatory practices.
In keeping with its general policy of not rocking the boat in academia, the Department of Education is proceeding with all deliberate slowness.
According to the Department of Education itself, the Law School at Berkeley maintained racially separate waiting lists of applicants throughout most of the 1980s. In 1989, after Congressman Rohrbacher and others made a public issue of quotas against Asians at Berkeley, the Berkeley Law School discontinued racially separate waiting lists. According to the Department of Education, there is now "a unitary waiting list"—even though this "unitary" waiting list shows "the race or ethnicity of students who were to receive special consideration."
What a revolutionary change!
You know and I know that if any such practices had been used to keep out women or a number of other minorities, other than Asians, all hell would have broken loose. Instead, the Department of Education says it will "conduct it compliance review" and that this review "will be scheduled as soon as possible." They don't say it will begin as soon as possible. But they will pencil it in on the schedule.
None of this necessarily indicates an animosity toward Asians, either at Berkeley or at the Department of Education. The animosity is much broader than that, and extends far beyond college campuses. The hostility is against rewarding outstanding performance and productivity.
Wherever the criterion is performance rather than body count, Asian Americans are usually "over-represented." That means you cannot have the statistical representation of all groups in proportion to their percentage of the population if you use performance as a criterion. Any high-performance group upsets the plans of those who think it is their prerogative to mix and match different groups to present a pretty public relations picture.
In an earlier era, the problem was how to keep out Jews—another, high-performance group that upset the preconceived notions. Today, that problem has disappeared because Jews are just lumped in as part of "whites." Asians have, in effect, inherited the anti-Semitic quotas of the past.
This whole issue is broader and deeper than anti-Asian quotas. It is part of a fundamental conflict between those who believe in rewarding productivity and those who believe in handing out rewards as "entitlements'' just for being around. By and large, believers in entitlements have been winning that conflict—especially in academia. Individuals, groups, or nations whose performances have earned high rewards are treated as if they were guilty something.
Many people are poor because they were not born into circumstances that encouraged them to develop productive skills or attitudes. Whether this was due to family history or group history, such children have a bleak future unless they can be encouraged or required to develop basic skills as they grow up. Instead, they are often told bogeyman stories about how their problems are all due to being "exploited" or "excluded" by their more fortunate contemporaries. These bogeyman stories are often the work of intellectuals as well as politicians.
When high-performance Asian Americans show up, they ruin this whole political morality play. Asians have experienced a history of discrimination but their high performance today shows that that is not the only factor that counts. Their history threatens the whole ideological house of cards, on which many people's federal grants, careers, and egos are based.
No wonder that quotas against Asians arouse so little concern. But, we should all be concerned, not only about Asian Americans, but about what happens to performance in a country that downgrades performance.
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12 May 2024
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