THE MORNING RANT: Racism at Elite Universities - Is it Time to Establish “Historically Asian Colleges”?

The response from leftists and elite universities to the Supreme Court ruling that outlawed affirmative action in university admissions is that racial discrimination has benefited society, and that universities now need to find new and more creative ways to keep discriminating against whites and Asians, but especially against Asians.

Instead of fighting for membership in a club that doesn’t want them, maybe it’s time to establish all new academies for academic overachievers of disfavored races – let’s call them Historically Asian Colleges.

HACs could be color-blind in admissions, but extremely discriminating in admission standards, perhaps requiring a 1450 on the SAT, or maybe disregarding the “Evidence Based Reading and Writing” section of the SAT altogether, and basing admission simply upon the Math section, perhaps requiring a 750 on that section.

HACs could focus exclusively on STEM disciplines and forego the entire distraction of “campus culture” and “college experience.” The culture and experience at Historically Asian Colleges would be access to a superior education, surrounded by equally brilliant peers.

When the Supreme Court finally outlawed racial discrimination in college admissions, it was almost six decades after Jim Crow and other legalized forms of discrimination had been outlawed, but elite universities such as Harvard and the University of North Carolina argued that discrimination is still a good thing so long as the proper ethnicities are being targeted. Specifically, targeting whites for discrimination is a good thing because white people are bad, and discriminating against Asians is a good thing because they do not properly “enrich” the campus experience, not to mention that elite universities would be disproportionately Asian if admission was based on the intelligence of those being admitted.

How are racist universities responding? They’re responding in several predictable ways.

Harvard is obviously distraught about the abolition of affirmative action and how that will affect what had been legal racial discrimination. In response the school is seeking to maintain a separate-but-equal-to-affirmative-action mechanism to perpetuate their “good kind” of racial discrimination, so it now wants certain applicants (e.g. non-white, non-Asian) to include in their admissions application a "discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

Expecting that the Supreme Court would abolish affirmative action, some universities have recently eliminated testing requirements that reveal the scholastic aptitude of incoming students.

Columbia becomes first Ivy League school to permanently drop SAT/ACT testing requirement] NY Post – 3/02/2023]

SUNY (State University of New York) is also eliminating SAT/ACT requirements to keep out undesirable academic overachievers.

Of course, even though elite universities no longer want Asians with 1500 SATs, they still make room for such intellectual luminaries as the Biden progeny.

Joe Biden Says He Wants To Crack Down on 'Privilege' in Education; He Once Called UPenn's President to Get His Granddaughter In [Washington Free Beacon – 7/01/2023]

In 2018, Hunter Biden tapped his father and a number of Biden family connections to help get his daughter into the University of Pennsylvania. Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, show how Joe and Hunter Biden worked behind the scenes to get a subpar family member into one of the most selective schools in the country.

Right now, I already assume that any white student at an Ivy is a privileged mediocrity who is there only because of connections and/or generous financial support to the school from his parents, and I would genuinely be embarrassed to have my name associated with schools such as Harvard or Penn.

What would an Historically Asian College look like? I don’t know, but it doesn’t need the big leafy campus with resort-style dorms, or intercollegiate athletics, or a thriving campus-adjacent bar scene. It needs classrooms and instructors who have excelled at the disciplines being taught.

High-end STEM learning is accelerated by being surrounded with those possessing similar intelligence. There should not be a restriction on the number of elite STEM students, nor should there be any restrictions on who can get into an Historically Asian College. The number of academically-elite HACs and classrooms need only be limited by the number of qualified applicants. Keeping the structure simple would allow the classroom capacity to scale up with qualified applicants.

The race or socio-economic status of HAC applicants wouldn’t matter, only their intellectual capacity to study math and science at an elevated level. HACs would instantly become “elite” simply because of the critical mass of intelligence of those attending and graduating.

That would be much more impressive than the current system, which allows just a trickle of academically brilliant undesirables to share an Ivy League campus with affirmative action admits and the mediocre children of the well-connected.

A lot of us on the right have been cheering for the 20th century university model to collapse, especially since classic liberal education was replaced by political indoctrination and woke pseudo-science. A four-year college degree is not necessary for success in life, but there will always be a need for post-secondary education in certain skills, especially STEM. That is also true for specialized disciplines such as architecture, nursing, accounting, etc. (And let’s be honest, as much as we mock degrees in the humanities, journalism, and the various “grievance studies,” even many business majors such as Management or Marketing provide little more than a degree in the “the college experience” with a sheepskin at the end.)

Historically Asian Colleges might be better thought of as conservatories of science, technology, engineering, and math. Elite musical talent often come out of conservatories rather than colleges. Why not use a similar model to develop elite STEM talent?

Also, and it’s a discussion for another day, but conservatories in lieu of universities for other fields requiring post-secondary education is a discussion that should be had.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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