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Title : "This American Life" reveals more than you might expect about how Harvard discriminates against Chinese-American applicants.
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"This American Life" reveals more than you might expect about how Harvard discriminates against Chinese-American applicants.

I strongly recommend this 25-minute segment of "This American Life," "The Veritas Is Out There" (listen at that link or read the transcript). A propos of the lawsuit against Harvard, which alleges that Harvard discriminates against Asian-American applicants, a Chinese-American who did get into Harvard looks at his own admissions file and sees what the alumnus who interviewed him had to say. This student, Alex Zhang, is on Harvard's side in the lawsuit: He wrote an amicus brief supporting Harvard and he got the Chinese Students Association to sign another pro-Harvard amicus brief. He doesn't change sides when he sees what's in his file, but he is sorely challenged.

The interviewer wrote a very long memo, strongly pushing Alex, but you can tell that the interviewer believed that the way to do that is to distinguish him from other Asian-American applicants. At one point the interviewer wrote "was this a perfect for MIT mechanical engineer playing me?" The "This American Life" producer, Diane Wu editorializes: "Perfect for MIT, I guess, is code for too boring for Harvard."

The most telling line in Alex's file is about his mother: "She is far from the stereotypical 'tiger mother.'" Wu asks Alex how he feels about that, and he says "it's true." Wu pushes harder: "Is it weird to you at all that the interviewer is pointing to stereotypes that you aren't? Is he a perfect-for-MIT engineer playing me, or does he have a tiger mom?" Alex concedes, "That's a good point."

Wu knows she's pushing: "As soon as I asked the question, I felt like I overstepped, like I was planting the idea in Alex's head that something racial was going on. But when I heard tiger mother, I thought, there is the implicit bias they're talking about in the lawsuit in a way more explicit form than I was expecting."

Alex cannot resist too much or he'll forfeit credibility: "Yeah, that is really weird. I guess it kind of goes into a narrative like the Asian applicant has to disprove certain things to be considered viable for something ivy league."

Wu paraphrases: "In other words, if you want to get into Harvard, don't be too Asian."

Alex: "Hmm. That makes sense. I don't know what his motivations are, my interviewer's motivations. Maybe the interviewer was like, oh, I should distinguish him from other Asians, or maybe he just does it subconsciously."

Wu:

Alex's friends saw his screen grab [of his admissions file] saying tiger mom and perfect-for-MIT engineer and texted him back, oh, my god and that's kind of horrible. Tiger mom was actually a lot more explicit than any of the examples of bias that came up at the trial. It was really a fight over statistics and economic models, but a few stereotypes did come up. They were subtle. Things like Harvard referring to Asian applicants as one-dimensional or book smart.

So "This American Life" gets Alex talking to the alum who wrote the memo, Jim McCandlish (who is, according to Alex, "an old white guy" with a "Chinese wife"). McCandlish without obvious prompting, reveals an attitude that is — though he doesn't seem to notice — very damaging to Harvard's position in the lawsuit. This is McCandlish:

Most likely, at least certainly from a place like Oregon, the interviewer is Caucasian. And we know there are stereotypes. I'm just curious how that plays out. If you have an expectation that an Asian interviewee is going to have a drab personality or meek and mild, you may play into your stereotype and not develop the rapport that would defeat the stereotype or at least resist it. You're in a really gray area of human nature.

Alex asks him about "tiger mom," and McCandlish says, "Well, recall, I live with one" (that's how he refers to his wife, this man who went to Harvard).  He adds: "I live with a tiger mom and fight it all the time." (I'm not sure what "it" is. Does he fight the tigerish qualities of his own wife or is he fighting other people who hold a negative stereotypes against persons of Chinese descent?)

Later, McCandlish says — and remember, he went to Harvard — "I use that term because I'm an Amy Tan fan." He must have meant Amy Chua, author of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." Amy Tan is another author, as Wu explains. Tan wrote "The Joy Luck Club." (But see this review of Amy Tan's memoir "Where the Past Begins" that says it would make sense to call it "Post-Battle Hymn Of The Damaged Daughter Of A Tiger Mother.")

In an interview with Wu that McCandlish didn't allow to be recorded, Wu says he admitted that he was trying to get Alex in by — in Wu's words — "overtly pointing out to the admissions officers that Alex was different from other Chinese-American applicants. That this young man did not fit whatever stereotypes that he or the admissions officers might have."

Later, we hear Alex wondering why having a "tiger mom" should count against you: "Is that not part of your upbringing and who you are now?... There seems to be these very negative connotations about the way Asians are raised or the way that they behave growing up. And it just seems like there's this very deeply ingrained prejudice and misunderstanding."

Thus articles "This American Life" reveals more than you might expect about how Harvard discriminates against Chinese-American applicants.

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