Judge Burroughs’s opinion also addressed the striking fact that, when sending recruitment letters to potential applicants in “Sparse Country” (underrepresented states in the Harvard applicant pool), Harvard used an SAT score cutoff of 1310 for white students, 1350 for Asian American females, and 1380 for Asian American males.
Constitutional lawyers-- how is this not discrimination?
Edit: to be clear-- when I wrote "constitutional lawyers," I meant people who have domain experience in constitutional law. And when I wrote "discrimination," I mean discrimination that would be unconstitutional according to both the U.S. Constitution and relevant U.S. legal precedent.
Hopefully this will cause relevant comment to bubble up above the one that begins with "IANAL..."
It is, or at least likely to be recognized as such within the next month or so by SCOTUS.
Chief Justice Roberts, for one, seemed pretty steamed by Harvard's treatment of Asian-ancestry applicants, and he's got 5 justices to his right on this.
Honestly, I would not be shocked if Justice Kagan hopped on with the majority: Quantitative practices like this—and the "social scoring" that would be taken as clear evidence of racism in almost any other context—are hard to defend under the "value of diversity" rationale.
It will be interesting to see if Gorsuch breaks with the conservative side here. He seems like a "good old boy" from the Harvard social club (he is one of 4 SCOTUS judges who went to Harvard law). Roberts is also a Harvard graduate, but he doesn't seem to be the kind of person to break with his principles on this.
I would agree with you on Kagan, but her alma mater is... Harvard Law. The last Harvard SCOTUS judge is Jackson, who has a 0% chance to rule against them here.
I think there is 0 chance any of the six conservative justices let stand practices that, again, are either facially discriminatory or have demonstrated disproportionate impact with no plausible explanation other than discriminatory intent.
The interesting question to me is whether there's a consensus position on acceptable means to "diversity" ends that pulls in Kagan or the other liberals.
IANAL, but I would say it's because these are recruitment letters, not acceptance policies. As in: it alters where you look, not what you're looking for. And that can alter the balance in the representation that you end up with, even if your selection criteria are exactly the same across all groups.
It's the same as hiring policies. Imagine you have an objective test that you can give candidates, and you are willing to accept anyone who gets a 5 on a 5-point scale. The test is completely independent of race. You have two schools to draw candidates from. One is 90% white, the other 90% Black. You have resources to recruit at only one school. You want to increase the representation of Black employees, without lowering your standards.
Which school do you recruit at? The 90% Black one. You end up with employees who are exactly as qualified as if you had recruited at the other school, but a higher percentage of them are Black. If you're white and go to the second school, your chances of getting an offer are no different. If you're white (or Black) and go to the first school, you get no recruiter and unless you find out about the position on your own, you're screwed. If the schools are the same size, then you could say that being white lowered your chances of getting hired, as a direct result of the choice that the recruiter made.
Does the recruiter have a responsibility to make your odds of being admitted independent of your race? What would that mean? If there are 100 schools to choose from, it would mean that the recruiter would have to go to every one of them, and spend an amount of time at each inversely proportional to the school percentage of some race, which doesn't take into account the overall size of each school... it doesn't even work mathematically.
Back to the original example, imagine if Sparse Country states had twice as many good Asian male candidates as Asian female, and twice as many of those as good white candidates. (The percentages of not good candidates could be completely different, even reversed, and it wouldn't change anything.) Nothing stops any of those candidates from applying. But you can adjust your recruiting policies to get roughly the same number of good applications from each group.
This reduces the odds that a given Asian male (sampled evenly from the population) will end up admitted. But it does not affect the odds for an Asian male who chooses to apply.
> Hopefully this will cause relevant comment to bubble up above the one that begins with "IANAL..."
They gave you a perfectly good answer. Asking people to apply is very different from how you treat the applications.
How about you be more specific on what in particular you think is violated? Do you have any response to the counter-questions about how a recruiter even could go after neutral demographics when the colleges they visit don't have neutral demographics?
Put in a little bit of explanation before you start demanding a lawyer spend time on you.
Constitutional lawyers-- how is this not discrimination?
Edit: to be clear-- when I wrote "constitutional lawyers," I meant people who have domain experience in constitutional law. And when I wrote "discrimination," I mean discrimination that would be unconstitutional according to both the U.S. Constitution and relevant U.S. legal precedent.
Hopefully this will cause relevant comment to bubble up above the one that begins with "IANAL..."