哈佛大学是否歧视亚裔学生？

哈佛大学是否歧视亚裔学生?

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — NEARLY a century ago, Harvard had a big problem: Too many Jews. By 1922, Jews accounted for 21.5 percent of freshmen, up from 7 percent in 1900 and vastly more than at Yale or Princeton. In the Ivy League, only Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania had a greater proportion of Jews.

马萨诸塞州坎布里奇——在将近一个世纪以前，哈佛大学(Harvard)有个非常严重的问题：犹太人太多。到1922年，犹太人在新生中所占比例为 21.5%，而1900年时仅为7%，远远超过了耶鲁大学(Yale)或普林斯顿大学(Princeton)中犹太人的人数。在常春藤盟校(Ivy League)当中，只有哥伦比亚大学(Columbia)和宾夕法尼亚大学(University of Pennsylvania)中的犹太人较多。

Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, warned that the “Jewish invasion” would “ruin the college.” He wanted a cap: 15 percent. When faculty members balked, he stacked the admissions process to achieve the same result. Bolstered by the nativism of the time, which led to sharp immigration restrictions, Harvard’s admissions committee began using the euphemistic criteria of “character and fitness” to limit Jewish enrollment. As the sociologist Jerome Karabel has documented, these practices worked for the next three decades to suppress the number of Jewish students.

哈佛校长A·劳伦斯·洛厄尔(A. Lawrence Lowell)曾发出警告，“犹太人的入侵”将“毁灭哈佛”。他想设定一个上限：15%。当教职工反对这一提议时，他通过操纵录取过程，达到了同样的效果。当时，本土主义的勃发促使有关方面对移民进行了严格限制，哈佛大学的招生委员会开始利用“个性与适合与否”的含糊标准来限制犹太人入校。正如社会学家杰罗姆·卡拉贝尔(Jerome Karabel)所述，这些做法在接下来30年里成功限制了犹太学生的人数。

A similar injustice is at work today, against Asian-Americans. To get into the top schools, they need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers. In 2008, over half of all applicants to Harvard with exceptionally high SAT scores were Asian, yet they made up only 17 percent of the entering class (now 20 percent). Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in America, but their proportion of Harvard undergraduates has been flat for two decades.

如今，出现了一种相似的不公正现象，但针对的是亚裔美国人。为了进入顶尖学校，他们学术能力评估测试(Scholastic Assessment Test，简称SAT)的成绩必须比白人学生高出大约140分。2008年，在哈佛大学所有SAT成绩非常高的申请者当中，超过一半的人都是亚裔。然而，他们在新生中所占的比例仅为17%(现在为20%)。亚裔是美国增长最迅速的种族，但20年来，他们在哈佛大学本科生中所占的比例却一直变化不大。

A new lawsuit filed on behalf of Asian-American applicants offers strong evidence that Harvard engages in racial “balancing.” Admissions numbers for each racial and ethnic group have remained strikingly similar, year to year. Damningly, those rare years in which an unusually high number of Asians were admitted were followed by years in which especially few made the cut.

一个代表亚裔申请者的新诉讼案提供了强有力的证据，表明哈佛大学在使用种族“平衡”策略。每一年，每个种族和民族的录取人数都保持着惊人的相似性。足以对哈佛大学“定罪”的是，学校在极少数年份录取的亚裔学生人数会超过以往，但在接下来几年，达到标准的人就会特别少。

The most common defense of the status quo is that many Asian-American applicants do well on tests but lack intangible qualities like originality or leadership. As early as 1988, William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions, said that they were “slightly less strong on extracurricular criteria.”

对于这种现状，一个最常见的理由就是，许多亚裔美国申请者能够在考试中取得高分，但是缺乏创造力或领导力等抽象的品质。早在1988年，哈佛大学招生主任威廉·R·菲茨西蒙斯(William R. Fitzsimmons)就表示，他们在“课余标准上的表现稍差”。

Even leaving aside the disturbing parallel with how Jews were characterized, there is little evidence that this is true. A new study of over 100,000 applicants to the University of California, Los Angeles, found no significant correlation between race and extracurricular achievements.

即便不提犹太人当初是如何被定性的，以及当下的情况与那时是如何相似，也也还有一个问题，那就是几乎没有证据能证明上述说法的真实性。针对加州大学洛杉矶分校(University of California, Los Angeles)逾10万名申请者的一项新研究发现，种族和课外成就之间并无显著的相关性。

The truth is not that Asians have fewer distinguishing qualities than whites; it’s that — because of a longstanding depiction of Asians as featureless or even interchangeable — they are more likely to be perceived as lacking in individuality. (As one Harvard admissions officer noted on the file of an Asian-American applicant, “He’s quiet and, of course, wants to be a doctor.”)

事实是，不是亚洲人的优点比白人少;而是他们更容易被认定为缺乏个性，个中原因则是亚洲人经常被描述为缺乏特色，甚至彼此之间没有区别。(哈佛大学的一名招生工作者曾在一名亚裔申请者的文件中写道，“他很安静，当然，他想成为一名医生。”)

The contribution Jews made to American life in the decades after they were maligned as unoriginal, grasping careerists speaks for itself. There is no reason to believe that today’s Asian-Americans will leave less of a mark.

在被污蔑为缺乏创造力、贪婪、一心追求名利地位之后数十年，犹太人为美国人的生活做出的贡献可谓有目共睹。我们没有理由相信，如今的亚裔美国人会做不出同样的成绩。

For all the historical parallels, there’s one big difference. In the days of Lowell, Harvard was a bastion of white Protestant elites. Anti-Semitism was rampant. Today, Harvard is a patchwork of ethnicities and religions; 15 percent of students are the first in their families to attend college. In seven years as a student and teacher at Harvard, I have never heard anyone demean Asian-Americans.

尽管与过去有众多相似之处，这里仍然存在一个巨大差异。在洛厄尔时代，哈佛是白人新教徒精英的大本营。当时，反犹主义盛行。如今，哈佛由来自不同民族和持不同宗教信仰的人组成;15%的学生都是家族中的第一个大学生。作为学生和教师在哈佛大学度过七年之后，我从未听到任何人对亚裔美国人加以贬损。

So why is the new discrimination tolerated? For one thing, many academics assume that higher rates of admission for Asian-Americans would come at the price of lower rates of admission for African-Americans. Opponents of affirmative action — including the Project on Fair Representation, which helped bring the new suit — like to link the two issues, but they are unrelated.

那么，人们为何要容忍这种新的歧视?首先，许多学者都认为，如果招收高比例的亚裔学生，就会造成非洲裔美国人的录取比例降低。平权行动的反对者—— 其中包括参与提起新诉讼的“公平代表计划”(Project on Fair Representation)——喜欢把这两件事联系起来，但它们并不相关。

As recognized by the Supreme Court, schools have an interest in recruiting a “critical mass” of minority students to obtain “the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” This justifies, in my view, admissions standards that look favorably on underrepresented groups, like African-Americans and Latinos. But it can neither explain nor justify why a student of Chinese, Korean or Indian descent is so much less likely to be admitted than a white one.

最高法院也承认，招收“足够多”的少数族裔学生对学校有益，能让它获得“学生群体多元化给教育带来的好处”。在我看来，这种说法肯定了对非洲裔和拉丁裔美国人等人数偏少的团体有利的录取标准。但是，它并不能解释，也没有肯定中国、韩国或印度裔学生被录取的可能性比白人学生低得多的现象。

Conservatives point to Harvard’s emphasis on enrolling African-Americans (currently 12 percent of freshmen) and Hispanics (13 percent) but overlook preferences for children of alumni (about 12 percent of students) and recruited athletes (around 13 percent). The real problem is that, in a meritocratic system, whites would be a minority — and Harvard just isn’t comfortable with that.

保守派指出，哈佛注重招收非洲裔(目前在新生中占12%)和西语裔美国人(13%)，但却对围绕着校友子女(约占学生人数的12%)和特招运动员(约13%)的偏好视而不见。真正的问题在于，在一个靠能力说话的体系中，白人将会成为少数群体，而哈佛只是很难接受这一点罢了。

Admission to elite colleges is a scarce good. Deciding who gets an offer inescapably involves trade-offs among competing values. Do we make excellence the only criterion — and, if so, excellence in what? Should we allocate places to those students who will profit most from them? Or to those who are most likely to give back to the community?

名校的录取名额是一种稀缺商品。在决定谁应该被录取的过程中，必然会牵涉到不同价值观的权衡。我们应该把优秀作为唯一标准吗——如果是这样，那么这种优秀体现在什么方面?我们该不该把名额分配给那些将从这些名额中获益最多的学生?抑或是录取那些最有可能回馈社会的人?

There isn’t one right answer. But that does not mean that there aren’t some answers that are unambiguously wrong.

正确答案并非只有一个。但这并不意味着，有些答案不存在明显错误。