Just heard about Federal District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs decision that Harvard’s race-correlated admission policy was not only legal, but right for all universities in America. Today is a day that will live in infamy! This is an absolute travesty of justice! I object to this ruling very sadly.

I empathize with Chinese and other Asians who think meritocratic achievements should be the only objective judgement of admission at a place of learning. But honestly, can you really afford to say no to the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg just to admit a Chinese kid who scored better?

If I was on Harvard’s board and was a fiduciary, I would absolutely not mess with its admission. I mean it would be financially irresponsible to do so. If my concerns were with respect to the creation of wealth and happiness for humanity, in retrospect, I would not hesitate to give the same judgement.

Of course there are a lot of other people who are white and attended college there, I knew a few, and they all seem absolutely best specimen of humanity. Like if you wanted to send a ship full of people to space and take best of us with them, Harvard freshman class would probably be the best bet.

They might not be very self sufficient, even as a group , but that’s probably not what Harvard is for. Harvard trains leaders. This is a declared and time honored objective of the institution. Leaders do a very specific thing in human society, but their jobs are very limited. Everyone cannot all lead. So perhaps we need to refine what we said just now and state Harvard freshman class is the finest collection of future human leaders.

I wonder if anyone ever thought through the theory of stable racial diversity in democratic society as implemented in America.

If we were to engage in any kind of attenuation of racial representation, wouldn’t it not make sense to set two bounds on the most privileged admissions? One upper bound, no more than half of the whole population shall be a single race (say white, or Hispanic,…) and that minority races shall have minimal representation (at least one male and one female from each major race)

This admitted naive proposal seem to guarantee that one race cannot out vote all other races. And the lower bound has the quality of Noah’s Arc to try to propagate all races.

That idea will probably subsequently beg a quantification of liberty and happiness, because we can not measure or state the merit of a system without an ideal that we can all agree to aspire to. Lacking that, the dual problem may be that power is evil in the absolute, and since absolute populace is absolute power in a democracy, above proportional upper bound follows.