Many of you have heard about the lawsuit brought by Asian students against Harvard for its obvious discrimination in the admissions process. Most of you are missing the greater point of Harvard and affirmative action.
The admissions process to Harvard is, for non-members of the top .01%, a glorified spelling bee. It is designed to favor people who display the qualities of social isolation and rote-learning as opposed to free thinking. What does it accomplish for a kid to sit around learning to spell a bunch of words from memory in the age where a dictionary exists? Before MS word, he could have been a spell checker for the NYT, big F-ing deal. You should want you kid to own the next NYT, not be lifetime servant of the powerful.
Harvard, and other elite institutions, are about finding a mindslave for the corporatacracy that the rest of us fancy our superior because they can spout off rote knowledge better than 99.9 percent of us. They take these people and mix them in with C students whose parents are actual .01% and have these kids buy everybody dinner at expensive Boston restaurants so Asian kids whose parents used to scream at them for bringing home a 99% test score in 4th grade understand who the new junior thought controller class (they do this for everyone else too). If you try to upset this hierarchy post graduation, you will find the school to be very . . . unappreciative. (look at Michael Bloomberg's departure from Goldman to understand: a 10 million a year glass ceiling is still a glass ceiling to some people.)
THE PROBLEM IS CENTRALIZATION:
Those of us in crypto have seen this problem with centralization again and again. You put all the power/info in one place, someone starts trying to hack in there. Harvard/Academia's system of mind control excludes certain groups on a cultural basis. A right thinking individual knows that it might be better to get a 89% in Calculus and a basketball letter than to get 100% and have no friends. A right thinking black individual is not going to recognize Harvard as a thought leader and subscribe to their "we're number 1 do what the F we say even when it makes no sense" mind control, if they do not have a single black person at the school.
However, if Harvard comes up with reasonable admission standards and lets the other 20 institutions that are in its intellectual league have their proper recognition (not one of these schools is any better at turning out a productive member of society than the others), now Harvard has lost the #1 slot because they can't be the near exclusive pipeline to a career in investment banking (running the world financial system when you are 22 years old, hey, why not) and other high level control-over-top-down society jobs held by recent graduates.
No black undergrads = Harvard loses top spot.
A more fair system of recognizing "achievement" from 18 year-olds who have NEVER achieved anything real, would cost Harvard this status. Instead of trying to determine who should be president based on what they did in high-school, Harvard and its community would have to sincerely acknowledge these are high-school kids, doing high school things, maybe it is inappropriate for society to put this kind of emphasis on an academic institution. Harvard admitees are not, for the most part, child soldiers who became a general and united a country at 18 years, they did not achieve a physics discovery, most have not even published any original research. They are lucky to have a couple of grown up child actors, muddling through with extensions on every major assignment.
Harvard and one or two other schools, are the only ones where it is actually harder to get into undergrad than it is to get grad school. That shows you it might be over-competitive. Over competition can create a race to the bottom for people "standing on each others shoulders" to get the prize. A race to the bottom occurs when individuals efforts to succeed are, in the aggregate, hurting the overall group: kids popping psychotropics like Aderall to try for a slight edge.
Harvard undergrad has centralized the concept of the top student. How do you convey someone is good, say he want to Harvard. Every smart guy you see in a Hollywood film the script says he's gone to Harvard, or they mention why he didn't. Now some cultures have figured out how to "hack" the system, by actively and directly pursuing statuses that are supposed to be bi-products of success purely because these bi-products make an easier and more scientific discrimination metric.
A person who gets 80 out of 100 right answers on 10th grade level math problems vs. one who gets 99 right on the standardized test: both know 10th grade math. Setting the difference up as the selection criteria for who gets CEO and who gets middle management on difference that is non-essential to any human endeavor is asking for a workforce full of lemmings, from CEO to Janitor. This is what the controllers really want: a hierarchy controlled by them that is viewed as fair within an unfair system, so that no one questions their position in the system but mainly the system itself. The big winners don't want the system changed, because it says they won. If they are smart enough to challenge it, kick them out and there's someone just as capable to replace them.
Being able to focus your attention on certain rote task beyond what others can does not necessarily make one a superior achiever. Hearkening to a likely apocryphal story (based on a Harvard guy John Maynard Keynes quote) about the U.S. Army doing an experiment paying people to spend half a day digging a hole and half a day filling the same hole, then doubling the pay every day, (by day 5 no one shows up) do you really want the person who keeps showing up for the psychological torture until it ends? My guess is, the top 5000 students who did not get into Harvard would have done just as well as the ones who got in, but they receive a designation that they and the school hopes will set them up with a distinct lifetime advantage. This advantage is necessarily based entirely on what these people did in high school.
Conclusion
For Harvard to continue to be what the word "Harvard" has come to mean in the past 70 years, it must maintain the dual objective of simultaneously being the unquestioned first choice social-network (antisocial) for those who rise to the very top in rote-memory-based academic pursuits, while maintaining a student body that allows them to directly influence the many and varied cultures. Otherwise it is just going to have to be "an Ivy League School" and after that, well, the Ivies would be up next. Since more valedictorians apply to Harvard than students are accepted, they simply don't have enough candy to pass out to everyone who deserves a piece, but they can't survive without the false front that Harvard is, by and large, a meritocracy. If the courts step in and give the Asian students what they want, 30 years from now, Harvard and U Penn will be on equal footing, and whatever school and finds a way to build a network more naturally imitating the communities and values of the U.S. will be number 1. Or maybe we'll have a better metric than academia to determine an individual's aptitude. Or better yet, maybe individuals will feel more free to pursue their own passions instead of feeling like they need a particular stamp validating his/her aptitude in order to build the life they want.