Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Thursday, February 3, 2022

Affirmative Action

When I was a high school senior, I got a letter that MIT sent to girls who did well on the SATs. I don't remember the wording, but the message it conveyed was something like, "You might think it's hard to get into MIT. But MIT accepts 90% of female applicants who are in the top 40% of their class." (I'm sure I'm not remembering the numbers accurately, but it was something astonishing.) MIT was telling top female applicants that it had lower standards for female applicants than for male ones.

The letter utterly failed to achieve its purpose of getting me interested in MIT. It had the opposite effect. It wasn't the only reason that MIT dropped from my favorite school to my least favorite, but it was a factor.

While it wasn't the only reason that Harvard became my top choice, one thought I (rather stupidly) did have when it was time to decide was, "If I go to MIT, some people will say that I only got in due to affirmative action. Harvard actively discriminates against women, so if I go there, everyone will know I got in based on merit. No one can say it was because I was female."

Ironically, the fact that Harvard blatantly and officially discriminated against women when I was admitted hasn't stopped people from telling me, ever since then, that I must have gotten into Harvard because of affirmative action for women. I'm grateful when people who think it also say it to me, so I at least have a chance to correct them on Harvard's history. More problematic are those who say it behind my back.