"At 76 I am old enough to have experienced the old-fashioned kind of discrimination.
It happened in 1965, when I was in my second year at Harvard Law School.
...He told me that the most important thing for any lawyer was to be able to relate to the clients, and that of course it is always easiest for clients to relate to lawyers who are like themselves.
...Since my experience in 1965, all of the firms at which I had interviewed have overcome their prejudices and now hire and promote Jewish lawyers, as well as women, blacks, Hispanics and Asians...
Yet as the old kind of discrimination has died out, a new form has emerged—this time under the banner of “diversity.” It’s good to open opportunities to people who were previously excluded.
But promoting “diversity” by discriminating against nonfavored categories of people seems quite a different thing.
A continuing suit against my alma mater is a case in point.
...Furthermore, Harvard’s admissions team has allegedly justified its rejection of qualified Asian-American applicants by giving negative assessments of their character traits.
The result, according to the plaintiff, is a de facto quota for Asian-Americans—very much like the express quota of 20% imposed by Harvard on the number of Jews it would admit in the 1920s.
...Thus, the old liberal ideal of equality of opportunity has been replaced by a new goal, demographic proportionality, pursued at the cost of inequality of opportunity..."
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