Over at the New Yorker, there’s a long and generally excellent piece by Hua Hsu on that on-going feast n’ farce o’ schadenfreude, the Harvard Asian-American discrimination lawsuit. But there are two sentences near the end of the article that boggle the mind severely, to wit:
One of the most ephemeral qualities that admissions officers say they look for in young college applicants is something called “grit.” Unlike other soft qualities, like leadership, it’s clear when you see it.
Well, Mr. Hsu gets paid to write, unlike me, and his editors get paid to edit, but one can only guess that poor Harold Ross, wherever he’s buried, is one revolving corpse.1 Poor Mr. Hsu has chosen the wrong word to say what he wants to say, and what he wants to say is, alas, self-contradictory.
Mr. Hsu seems to think that “ephemeral” means “subjective”. It doesn’t. It means “short lived” (literally, “one day”). “Ephemeral grit”? What is that?
But there are more problems. If Mr. Hsu had used “subjective”, his two sentences would be even more obviously contradictory than they already are. If “grit” is “ephemeral/subjective”, how come “it’s clear when you see it”? Sounds like what Mr. Hsu meant to say, or should have meant to say, was
Perhaps the least subjective of the qualitative factors that admissions officers say they look for in young college applicants is something called “grit.” Unlike other such factors, like leadership, it’s clear when you see it.
But, of course, that’s exactly what he didn’t say.
But wait, there’s still more. I’m not an admissions officer, but I would say that any kid who can put together a resume that would get a glance at Harvard—has gotten an A+ in every advanced credit course offered in the country, has at least two or three letters in various strenuously fashionable and fashionably strenuous sports, has volunteered endlessly on behalf of the underprivileged and the environment, and has written, directed, and edited several feature length films—has shown tons of “grit.” How else can you get in the door?
If you search for “Harvard” at the New Yorker, you’re going to find lots of articles, but beyond Hsu’s, which offers excellent and extensive background on the suit, the best I’ve seen so far is at Slate by Aaron Mak, discussing three internal reports that Harvard produced on its admissions process, which, Mak says, “strongly suggest that Harvard has exhibited a pattern of willful disregard for evidence that its admissions process suppresses the number of Asian-American applicants it accepts.” Still, it’s both unsurprising and amusing that none of the current articles I’ve read refer back to the “explosive” charges by Harvard Jew Ron Unz in his 2012 article for the American Conservative, “The Myth of American Meritocracy”, accusing the Ivies of discriminating against Asians not to make room for blacks and Hispanics but to make room for Jews. I briefly restated Unz’s arguments here, which I found convincing, though a little overstated:
Briefly, it boils down to this: Asians constitute about 6 percent of the U.S. population and fill about 20 percent (very roughly) of the undergraduate slots in America’s elite colleges. Jews constitute less than 2 percent of the U.S. population and fill about 30-40 percent (very roughly) of the undergraduate slots in America’s elite colleges. So both groups are doing “well.” But if you look at outstanding high school students, measured by numbers of National Merit Scholarship semifinalists (the top one-half of one percent), the Asians are easy winners.
By Unz’s 2012 numbers, the college percentages should be reversed: 30-40 percent Asians, 20 percent Jewish.
Afterwords
I did not go to Harvard, and if Oberlin had required active participation in any sport other than uncompetitive walking, I wouldn’t have gone there either.
- I explored some of Harold Ross’s many linguistic tics and peccadillos in my little book James Thurber A Reader’s Guide. ↩︎
