Justice Dept. Accuses Yale of Discrimination in Application Process | Hacker News Reader

Justice Dept. Accuses Yale of Discrimination in Application Process

nytimes.com

52 pointszffr29 comments

Didn't the supreme court rule in favor of hardvard in a recent discrimination case? How are the facts different in this case?

They aren't - and as much as I'd like to avoid being political, this is just an example of the White House using the department of justice as a vehicle to carry out its agenda. It's purely politically motivated - another example of an attempt of legislation from the bench.

That dastardly agenda of equality before the law

I don't genuinely know if it's equality before the law. The justice department appears to apply law in a non-equal fashion (during a recent congressional questioning, the chief of the justice department explained that he was more lenient on allies of the current administration due to their advanced age and their chances of dying from covid in jail, while there are plenty of other people older for which the justice department is not arguing leniency). A tried and true hat of investigation- interviewing someone with truths you know they will deny and then arresting them for lying- was determined by the justice department to be fundamentally unfair to an ally of the current administration, while the same strategy is currently being used to pursue cases related to parties who are not allies of the administration.

If that were the intended goal that would be great, but it isn't.

> The Trump administration had urged the court to rule against gay and transgender workers, and it has barred most transgender people from serving in the military. The Department of Health and Human Services issued a regulation on Friday that undid protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies.

Luckily the Supreme Court saw the absurdity of that argument and overwhelmingly ruled against it.

Huh, funny, against discrimination here, where it is politically advantageous, but for discrimination there, when it is politically advantageous.

Just call a spade a spade.

Was that before or after the bostock decision?

Anyone who didn't know that Yale discriminates in their application process has never heard of the Bush family dynasty or they are as thick as a brick.

Yes. But for some reason this DOJ isn't concerned with legacy, just a grotesque misapplication of Title VI less than 3 months from a presidential election.

> The Justice Department accused Yale of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which the university is required to comply with as a condition of receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funding.

I wonder how difficult it would be for Yale to just say "no thank you" to all of that gov't funding. Especially if they believed that the justice department finding was politically motivated.

If it only affects 'millions of dollars' then it'd be manageable for Yale.

If it affected federal research or pell grants, that would be much more substantial.

If Yale doesn't choose to fight it, it will fall on colleges with less resources.

I guess if you want to enforce social justice, and only have a few minutes, you need to use proxies like race to speed up the process.

You've got grand scales to balance -- no time to actually learn about the individual.

There’s actually no need to use race as a proxy. For instance, you could just help poor folks regardless of race. If certain races tend to be poorer than others due to historical circumstances, that gets automatically taken into account. If the distribution of poverty across races changes over time, the process responds automatically to take it into account.

This has the advantage that it can easily react to individual people instead of forcibly identifying people with stereotypes about their race. For instance, members of historically privileged groups who are nevertheless very poor can still get help instead of being treated as if they are an aggressor in society. This could cut down on a considerable amount of vitriol and unrest by treating people more fairly.

That's unlikely to happen simply because it might actually work. Many political figures want people to feel oppressed. If people's circumstances were improved enough (or their perception changed enough) that they no longer felt oppressed, then those politicians would have trouble getting votes.

Yeah history is full of race based decisions going well with speeding up the process. Jfc

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352

Ongoing discussions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149606

I think there is an extreme confusion about this portrayal of affirmative action as a sort of 'reverse-racism'. It's not actually a judgement based on race or ethnicity, but on the factors that give people from these groups a harder time to get into the top universities.

I'm sure you could construct a sort of proxy of income/test-scores/hardship or whatever that approximates exactly what affirmative action does while formally avoiding the race issue.

"Affirmative action", in the common understanding of the term, refers to non-race-blind processes in admissions and so forth. If, while controlling for all other variables, a person of race A has a different chance of being admitted than a person of race B because of their race, then yes, we certainly are talking about a form of racism.

On the other hand, as you point out, one could design a race-blind system that gives a leg up to people who grew up in poverty, people whose parents were incarcerated on account of the war on drugs, etc. This system would disproportionately give a leg up to black students, so when looked at from an angle of averaged-out racial group dynamics it may "approximate exactly what affirmative action does."

However, crucially, on an _individual_ level such a system would not discriminate between otherwise similar applicants on the arbitrary basis of race. Unlike affirmative action, such an alternative system as you describe would not be racist, and that is no small distinction.

Such a proxy would be a completely different beast than affirmative action. Affirmative action means that uber-rich minorities are helped more than dirt poor Asians/whites. I don't think that any race-neutral proxy could ever approximate a race-based policy.

Are they also going to sue Yale for legacy admissions and preferring children of parents who make large donations?

This is about a particular statute that prohibits discrimination based on certain factors.

You could make an indirect argument that legacy admissions are a form of racial preference.

As for having a lot of money... well, that's what private colleges are about.

You can't drink from that fountain because you're Black. You can't go to that university because you're Asian.

Both looks like plain old racism to me.

I think you're being downvoted because you draw a false equivalency.

Fountain rules in the Jim Crow era were uniformly applied to all African Americans. The university question is whether or not race should be included in admission consideration given that some races have been historically disadvantaged relative to others.

When a purely rank-ordered 'merit' based approach would yield a heavily homogeneous outcome does it make sense to try use an approach that gets closer to a representative sample of the country?

> heavily homogeneous outcome

You can classify people along lots of dimensions including race, ethnicity, gender, religion, wealth, urban vs. rural upbringing, sexual orientation, introvert vs. extrovert, political leaning, and so on.

Your claim of homogenous outcome is based on how many of these dimensions? Just one?

Because of the immigration policies of the United States, people of certain ethnicities tend to be crème de la crème, for example, if you are from Asian countries you have to be in the top 0.1% of your country in order to immigrate to the US. As a result, if you take the top 10% of performers in High School they tend to have more Asians. To limit their advancement based on their race does not just punish them it punishes the nation by depriving the nation of its best brains.

Your own argument is a false equivalency just as much. There are many non-merit based factors you could be looking at that aren't race, that would lift up all poor people, or all people with parents who who have no degrees, etc., And such approaches would help disadvantaged races/people disproportionately more than privileged races/people without ever looking at the applicant's race. That would be fair, and automatically balanced as races become more or less disadvantaged over time. Explicitly using race in decisions is just plain racism.

"I don't like Black people drinking from this fountain because they tend to be dirty." was the White's excuse. "I don't like Asians enrolling because they tend to be smart." is their excuse now.

Oh yeah, let's give benefits to Blacks because color. Just like we gave benefits to Whites because color. Because equality, diversity, history, and else. Oh yeah, Asians were in fact the victims by White slave traders but we don’t care because it’s more cool and hip to promote black victimhood.

What is it with the West and their racism? “Let’s defeat racism and social injustice by racial discrimination”? Now that’s worth a chill down your spine!

The principle of race blindness has consequences. If you ignore those consequences this isn't a tough call, making decisions based on race is bad. If you are willing to take into account things like history, socioeconomic reality, and the motives of people supporting one side or another then this gets much more complicated. Personally I'd be in favor of stating that intentional discrimination against historically privileged or over represented classes is a good thing. Of course, I don't assert that to be an unarguable truth.

Bad history wasn't caused by race blindness but quite the opposite, by racial discrimination.

There are many ways to justify racial discrimination, they are all wrong. Not the first time "the privileged" were said to be in the wrong either.

If you want to help people who are poor, live in poor neighbourhoods and whose parents have no degrees (example of effects of bad history), go ahead and no one will judge you use those factors and end up helping mostly people of a certain race, as long as you're not actually taking their race into account when making decisions.

But that's not what's happening, or at least what DOJ is alleging is that Yale does in fact use race as primary decision factor. They should not be looking at race as a factor at all, even if supreme court allows for that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com