好英语网不要再让亚裔成为校园多元化的牺牲品了
The Supreme Court is poised to begin adjudicating lawsuits that claim the admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are discriminatory against students of Asian descent and, in the case of U.N.C., against white students. The rightward tilt of the current court makes it possible, even likely, that it will not only address the specific issues in question in these cases but also ban outright the use of race in university admissions.
美国最高法院准备对哈佛大学和北卡罗来纳大学招生政策歧视亚裔学生的诉讼进行裁决，针对北卡大学的诉讼还包括歧视白人学生。最高法法院当前的右倾也许——甚至有很大可能——导致其不仅会处理这些案件涉及的具体问题，还将彻底禁止大学将种族当作招生的考量因素。
To those dismayed by the court’s recent rulings on issues such as abortion and gun control, it might seem natural to see a looming ban on affirmative action in admissions as water from the same well. I do not. The way racial preferences have been defended in recent years has involved a good deal of shaky argumentation.
对于最近因最高法院在堕胎、枪支管制等议题上的判决而沮丧的人来说，认为即将到来的招生平权措施禁令与这些判决同根同源似乎顺理成章。但我并不这么想。近年来，对种族偏好做法的辩护充斥着大量站不住脚的论点。
Take, for instance, the idea that a diverse student body is a key component of a good education: As I’ve argued previously in this newsletter, diversity is a thin justification for treating applicants differently. But beyond that, it’s worth noting that a different, earlier and disturbing version of the diversity argument emerged not in reference to students of color but to Jewish students. In the early 20th century, “character”-based goals emerged among some Ivy League schools. One such goal was “geographic” diversity. This was held up as a boon to student bodies but motivated largely by an assumption that admitting students from schools far from northeastern cities would serve to hold down the number of Jewish applicants accepted.
就拿学生群体多元化是良好教育的关键这一观点举例：正如我之前在本专栏所论证的那样，以多元化为由来区别对待申请者是站不住脚的。但除此之外，值得注意的是，关于多元化的争论在以前还有一个不一样的、令人不安的版本，不是针对有色人种学生，而是针对犹太学生。20世纪初，一些常春藤盟校提出了一些基于“品格”的目标。“地域”多元化就是其中之一。这被认为是对学生群体的一种恩惠，但主要是出于一种假设，即从远离东北部城市的学校录取学生，将有助于降低犹太裔申请者的录取数。
This was one of an array of shifty strategies that some Ivies started using. The fine podcast “Gatecrashers,” produced by Tablet Studios, covers more of them in detail. Admissions processes that were once relatively undemanding were loaded up with questions about parental origins as well as the requirement that one include a photo, all intended to screen for Jewishness. The college interview, now ordinary for the Ivies, began as part of the same screening strategy. In 1928, Columbia University — located, of course, in Manhattan — established a special Brooklyn branch called Seth Low Junior College, intended to maintain a separate locus for Jewish students.
这就是一些藤校开始采用的众多狡猾手段之一。对于更多此类手段，由Tablet Studios制作的优秀播客节目《不速之客》(Gatecrashers)进行了详细介绍。曾经相对没那么苛刻的招生过程，后来充斥着关于学生父母出身的问题，以及在申请中必须附上照片的要求，一切的一切都是为了筛查犹太人的身份。大学面试如今已是藤校常态，起初这也是筛选策略的一部分。1928年，哥伦比亚大学——地址自然位于曼哈顿——在布鲁克林创立了名为塞斯洛初级学院的特别分校，就是为了让犹太学生单独在这里上学。
Today, increasing diversity may mean giving preferential treatment to some Black and Latino students who otherwise might not qualify for admission. And this practice, whether intended or not, has had the effect at Harvard — which, in a 2013 internal investigation, was found to display bias against Asian American applicants — of artificially keeping down the number of students of Asian descent. (Lest anyone think I’ve forgotten about legacy admissions, I’ll just note that I’ve said before in this newsletter that we should do away with the forms of affirmative action that tend to benefit rich white students, too.)
今天，增加多样性可能意味着给予一些黑人和拉丁裔学生优待，否则他们难以被录取。这种做法，无论有意与否，都在哈佛导致了亚裔学生变少的效果——2013年的一项内部调查发现，哈佛对亚裔美国申请者存有偏见。（为了避免有人认为我忘记了传承录取，我只想指出，我之前在这个通讯栏目中说过，我们也应该废除那些往往有利于富有白人学生的平权措施。）
Of course, no one explicitly says Harvard has too many Asians, but the parallel between old-school justifications for keeping a student body from being too Jewish and a process that keeps it from being too Asian are discomfiting. According to the plaintiffs’ data, Asian American applicants were 25 percent more likely than whites to be rated, dismissively, as “standard strong,” meaning that they’re academically excellent but merely in a garden variety way for Harvard applicants. They were also shown to be rated by admissions officers as less personable than applicants of other races with similar applications. This is alarmingly close to the kinds of prejudices held about Jewish students in the old days. Harvard itself documented in an internal study in 2013 that the undergraduate student body would be 43 percent Asian using academic scores and rankings alone, as opposed to the 19 percent that they constituted at the time.
当然，没有人明说哈佛的亚裔太多，但当年控制学生当中犹太人比例的理由与现在控制学生当中亚裔比例的程序是遥相呼应的，这令人不安。根据原告的数据，亚裔美国人申请者比白人更有可能被负面地评定为“标准优等生”，意思是他们在学业上是优秀的，但对哈佛申请者来说，就比较普通了。数据还显示，负责招生的官员还认为，与各方面情况差不多的其他种族申请者相比，亚裔学生不如他们讨喜。令人担忧的是，这与过去针对犹太学生的偏见何其相似。哈佛大学自己在2013年的一项内部研究中发现，若仅以学业成绩的排名作为录取依据，本科生群体中的亚裔将占43%，而当时亚裔的比例为19%。
There’s no reason to suppose that the reason for these sneaky biases in the admissions system is bigotry against Asians. Rather, the idea is to demonstrate a lack of bigotry against Black and Latino students, to justify it with the claim that diversity enhances the educational experience of all students and to achieve it by artificially keeping Asian numbers down while hoping they go quietly along with the program.
没有理由认为招生系统中这些见不得人的偏见源自对亚洲人的轻视。相反，这么做是为了表明对黑人和拉丁裔学生没有偏见，是为了以多样性提升所有学生教育体验的说辞来证明这一点，并通过人为地压低亚裔学生的人数来实现这一点，同时希望他们一声不吭地接受这样的做法。
But despite this supposedly beneficent motivation, students of Asian descent have every right to feel discriminated against and to challenge an admissions policy that makes it such that achievement by an Asian kid is valued less than the same or perhaps lesser achievement by a Black, Latino or, for that matter, white kid.
但尽管有这种所谓的善意动机，亚裔学生完全有权感到受到歧视并挑战这样的招生政策，它使得亚裔孩子的成绩不像黑人、拉丁裔或白人孩子的成绩那样受到同等重视，甚至是轻视。
And again, even without this unfair burdening of Asian American applicants, the idea that diversity crucially enhances education is fragile. Certainly, diversity has benefits: Classroom discussions of societal issues can be enriched by a variety of life experiences. But those benefits cover only a sliver of what college work consists of. Diversity won’t impart Spanish’s irregular verbs. It won’t help much with the basics of Econ 101.
而且，即使没有亚裔美国申请人遭遇不公这个弊端，认为多元化能极大促进教育的想法也是站不住脚的。当然，多样性有各种好处：课堂上关于社会问题的讨论可以通过各种各样的生活经验而丰富起来。但这些好处只涵盖了大学教育的一小部分。多样性无法传授西班牙语的不规则动词。对经济学的基础知识知悉，它也无甚帮助。
Deep down, I suspect we all know that it would be quite possible for students to get a sterling education at a university where every student was a white person from Colorado. Few graduates would muse that their education was incomplete because there were no kids from the Northeast or the South around. Any benefit would be auxiliary at best, not worth founding an admissions policy upon.
在内心深处，我想我们都知道，在一所每个学生都是来自科罗拉多州的白人的大学里，学生们完全有可能获得良好的教育。很少有毕业生会认为由于周围没有来自东北部或南部的孩子，他们的教育是不完整的。任何好处充其量只是辅助性的，不值得将其作为制定招生政策的基础。
Yet many will say that if we stop evaluating students in part on race, we abandon social justice. Do we, though? I think that in the 2020s we should maintain a social justice mission in admissions, but base it on socioeconomics. Yes, that would mean middle- and upper-class Black and Latino students would no longer get special consideration. But on that, we must question the tacit, Jesse Jackson-esque “Yale or jail” assumption in much of the discussion of racial preferences, which sometimes implies that students not admitted to one of a few tippy-top schools are somehow seriously hobbled from achieving career success.
然而，许多人会说，如果我们停止在一定程度上根据种族来评估学生，我们就放弃了社会正义。但是这样吗？我认为在2020年代，我们应该在招生程序中保持社会正义使命，但要以社会经济为基础。是的，这意味着中产和上层黑人和拉丁裔学生将不再得到特殊关照。但在这一点上，我们必须质疑在种族偏好的大部分讨论中默认的、杰西·杰克逊式的“非耶鲁即监狱”假设，这有时意味着如果学生没有被几所顶尖学校之一录取，就会严重阻碍他们在事业上的成功。
A 2012 study co-authored by the Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono (who is participating in the suit against Harvard as an expert witness for the plaintiffs) suggests that Black students placed in schools to which their grades and test scores might not ordinarily gain them admission who initially choose to pursue majors in engineering, natural sciences, or economics are less likely to graduate in those majors. The implication, then, is that they would have successfully completed those subjects at a still respected but less competitive school. Other studies have suggested similar phenomena in law school and medical school.
由杜克大学经济学家彼得·阿尔西迪亚科诺（他作为原告的专家证人参与对哈佛的诉讼）与人合著的一项2012年的研究表明，如果最初选择攻读工程、自然科学或经济学专业的黑人学生被安置在原本成绩和考试分数通常达不到录取要求的学校，他们从这些专业毕业的可能性会变小。因此，这意味着如果他们去的是一所仍然受人尊敬但竞争激烈程度较低的学校，会成功地完成这些学业。其他研究也提出，在法学院和医学院有类似的现象。
To be sure, without racial preferences, the number of Black and Latino students at selective universities does go down. However, it does not eclipse. And there’s no tragedy in Black and Latino students attending other excellent if somewhat less selective schools. Theodore Shaw, a U.N.C. School of Law professor and the director of U.N.C.’s Center for Civil Rights, warns that eliminating racial preferences would have “severe” effects on Black and Latino students’ opportunities. But this seems to imply that students at schools other than the most selective ones are significantly hindered from attaining meaningful education, training, career opportunities and connections. The dedicated and talented people who teach at and staff such universities would be surprised to hear this.
可以肯定的是，如果没有种族偏好，精英大学的黑人和拉丁裔学生人数确实会下降。但是，它不会埋没人才。黑人和拉丁裔学生就读于其他优秀但入学要求较低的学校也不是悲剧。北卡罗来纳大学法学院教授和民权中心主任西奥多·肖警告说，消除种族偏好将对黑人和拉丁裔学生的机会产生“严重”影响。但这似乎意味着，除了最难进的学校之外，其他学校的学生在获得有意义的教育、培训、职业机会和人脉方面受到了严重阻碍。在这些大学任教和工作的敬业和优秀的人们听到这个消息会感到惊讶。
Racial preference in university admissions was an admirable experiment in the era that immediately followed the civil rights advances of the 1960s and ’70s, when a much larger proportion of Black America lived in poverty and legal segregation was a recent memory. But there will always be those who question, with good reason, whether their effort should count for less than the same effort from someone else in deference to matters of history they did not experience. One need not be a bigot to feel that way.
在紧随1960年代和70年代民权进步之后的那个时代，大学招生中的种族偏好是一个令人钦佩的实验，当时更大比例的美国黑人生活在贫困中，人们刚刚走出合法的种族隔离。但总会有人提出不无道理的质疑，即在大家付出同等努力的情况下，仅仅为了尊重他们并没有亲历过的历史而去贬低他们的努力这一点是否合理。有这种感觉的人不一定就是狭隘。
Racial preferences should now be thought of like chemotherapy, a cure that can cause side effects that should be applied judiciously. We’ve applied the cure long past that point, and have drifted toward an almost liturgical conception of diversity that makes less sense by the year.
种族偏好现在应该被视为化疗，一种可能导致副作用的治疗方法，应审慎使用。这种治疗方法我们已经用了太久，早已过时，并且已经转向了一种近乎礼仪性的多元化概念，而这种概念本身也越来越说不通了。
In a 2003 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, said, “we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences” in the university admissions context “will no longer be necessary.” That was considered resonantly wise at the time. But now we have only about six years to go. Folks, it’s time.
在2003年最高法院的一项裁决中，桑德拉·戴·奥康纳大法官在多数意见中写道，“我们预计25年后在大学招生中不再需要使用种族偏好。”这在当时被广泛认为是明智的。但现在我们只剩下大约六年的时间了。各位，是时候了。