What Statistics Can't Tell Us in the Fight Over Affirmative Action at Harvard
What’s it going to look like if they ruled in favor of Jewish students as a harmed class back in the day and then against Asians this time around? Should Asians all get their skin bleached to not be abused in the elite college admissions process? Should we get Anglo names, avoid Asian extracurriculars and other indications of Asianness, and mark ourselves as White?<p>&gt; Certain private universities, most notably Harvard, introduced policies which effectively placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to the university. According to historian David Oshinsky, on writing about Jonas Salk, &quot;Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in.&quot; He notes that Dean Milton Winternitz&#x27;s instructions were remarkably precise: &quot;Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all.&quot;[15] As a result, Oshinsky added, &quot;Jonas Salk and hundreds like him&quot; enrolled in New York University instead.[16] Physicist and Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman was turned away from Columbia College in the 1930s and went to MIT instead. See also Numerus clausus in the United States.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jewish_quota" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jewish_quota</a><p>Trigger warning: as an Asian, I don’t care about helping Black and Latino people if it means hurting me, and especially when society has already chosen not to exert equivalent unfair treatment on another race (and the optics are especially not great when said race can be lumped in as ‘White’).