Ira Glass, This American Life, 12-7-18, Episode 663
Listen to audio or read transcript below:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/663/how-i-read-it/act-one-2
Transcript:
Act 1, the veritas is out there.
So I just found this out that since the 1990s, if you got into college, and you decided to attend the college, at lots of schools, you can work at your own admissions file. See what the admissions people said about you when you were applying. In fancy schools that are hard to get into, you can try to figure out why they decided to admit you in the first place, which lots of kids do.
But the downside is, you might find something you didn't want to see, and then you have to deal with that. Diane Wu does the story of one Harvard student that happened to.
Diane Wu
At Harvard, going to see your admissions file has suddenly got caught up into something much bigger. As you might have heard, Harvard's being sued for allegedly discriminating against Asians. Asian applicants with high GPAs and test scores have a lower acceptance rate than other students with the same numbers.
Harvard does consider a student's race when they apply as one of many factors. The group that's suing them wants them to stop doing that altogether. It's a group called Students For Fair Admissions. They're trying to get rid of affirmative action all across the country. And this case is likely to be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Alex Zhang is a junior, co-president of the Chinese Students Association. I met him the first week of the trial. He's solidly team Harvard in the lawsuit, because Harvard is on the side of keeping affirmative action.
For him, it was a moral decision. Of course, diversity is good, and getting rid of affirmative action is bad. So he wrote a statement for an amicus brief, and got his student group to sign on to another one.
Friends of his were looking at their admissions files. So Alex decided to go as well, partly because he was curious how his file stacked up against the claims made in the lawsuit. But also, he just wanted to see how he got in. He'd always wanted to find out.
Alex Zhang
I'm really curious about the interview component, because I just feel like that's what did it.
Diane Wu
Did you have a really good interview?
Alex Zhang
Yeah, a really good interview with a really old and experienced alumni.
Diane Wu
The way this usually works-- you meet with an alumni volunteer for an hour or so in a coffee shop or wherever in your hometown. Alex is from Portland, Oregon. He had an exceptional interview. It lasted two hours. Then even more unusual, his interviewer set up a second meeting.
Alex Zhang
He did this whole thing, where he ran through all my extracurriculars, kind of tallied up hours and stuff, just was very rigorous, even asked for some contacts for references, which, apparently, he wasn't supposed to do.
Diane Wu
He was really--
Alex Zhang
He did that because he wanted to have everything on the table for him to advocate for me.
Diane Wu
Alex wanted to know, did this guy get me in? The alumni interview is important at Harvard, because usually, it's the only face-to-face contact the school has with an applicant. And admissions officers use it, plus other information, to assign applicants this thing called a personal rating.
The personal rating is actually the crux of the lawsuit. It's basically a rating of your personality. The words Harvard uses to describe what they're looking for are things like leadership, courage, sense of humor, effervescence. It's like they want to fill the school with future senators, perky Griffindors, and Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde types.
Students for Fair Admissions says the personal rating is where the discrimination happens, where implicit bias leaks in. Because at Harvard, Asian applicants get a lower personal rating than white applicants. Harvard does not dispute those numbers, but says they don't consider an applicant's race when assigning the personal rating.
A couple days after I met him, Alex called me from a study lounge. He'd just gone to see his file, sat with 15 other kids around a table at the registrar's office and paged through it. He wasn't allowed to take the file with him, but could take pictures on his phone. He scrolled through the photos and read parts of it to me.
Alex Zhang
Let me take a quick look. The first sheet is the Harvard scores, so they have this weird coding jargon that I don't really understand yet. I'll probably look it up later.
Diane Wu
We got quickly to the part he was curious about-- the report from his alumni interviewer, which was the most remarkable part of his file. For starters, it was long.
Alex Zhang
My interviewer wrote, like, five pages of notes.
Diane Wu
Wow.
Alex Zhang
Which I think is kind of unusual.
Diane Wu
It is. Everyone else I checked with had only two pages. Reading through, Alex saw that his interviewer, Jim McCandlish was really going to bat for him. He told Alex that he was one of the best candidates he'd met in more than 20 years of interviewing. Though Alex learned, a lot of Jim's thoroughness-- the extra interview, the references he called-- that was Jim checking into whether or not Alex was for real.
Alex Zhang
It seems like he was skeptical of a lot of stuff I did, at least was concerned about this resume-builder mentality and wanted to verify whether I did that authentic work.
Diane Wu
Like when Alex said he worked on homelessness at the youth commission, Jim wondered, is he just saying that because he googled my law firm and read that I represent disadvantaged people? Quote, "was this a perfect for MIT mechanical engineer playing me?" Perfect for MIT, I guess, is code for too boring for Harvard.
Jim called up Alex's supervisor at the youth commission and found out, no, Alex genuinely cared about homelessness and works there even more than he'd let on. Alex read Jim's interview notes to me matter-of-factly, then paused to note this one section.
Alex Zhang
Oh, here's an interesting portion actually.
Diane Wu
Jim was writing about a conversation he'd had with that supervisor. Apparently, he had asked not just about Alex, but about Alex's mom, too. He writes--
Alex Zhang
She is far from the stereotypical, quote, "tiger mother." His mom is supportive, but not directive. So I guess there's just those two, three sentences on my mom.
Diane Wu
How do you feel about that? How would you feel about that characterization of your mom?
Alex Zhang
I mean, it's true. Yeah, she's supported, but not directive. She pushes me. She pushes me hard, but has always sort of let me push in the direction I wanted.
Diane Wu
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 Zhang
Oh, yeah. That's a good point.
Diane Wu
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 did have a strange feeling about it, even if he wasn't sure exactly why.
Alex Zhang
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.
Diane Wu
In other words, if you want to get into Harvard, don't be too Asian.
Alex Zhang
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.
Diane Wu
Yeah.
Alex Zhang
Yeah.
Diane Wu
There's another thing like this in Jim's notes, another spot where he points to an Asian stereotype and says it doesn't fit Alex. It has to do with the fact that Alex is quiet, which is a stereotype about Asian students. One, actually, that Harvard was called out for using in a 1990 federal investigation.
But in Alex's case, Jim casts it as a plus. He writes, "Alex is reserved, quietly confident, uses language frugally but effectively. There is no teenage patois." Perfect-for-MIT engineer, by the way, also plays into a stereotype of Asians only being interested in science and math. This one didn't bother Alex, though, since he literally wanted to be an engineer when he was applying.
Alex Zhang
The tiger mother part is definitely interesting. No other mom is called a tiger mom. That's what you call a Chinese mom. Only Chinese moms are called tiger moms. It definitely seems like he's trying to disprove what a reviewer might assume about the reasoning for why I do things.
Diane Wu
Yeah. How do you feel about that?
Alex Zhang
I don't know. So he actually has a Chinese wife.
Diane Wu
Is he Chinese? He's not Chinese.
Alex Zhang
No, he's an old white guy, very American, grew up very American, went to Harvard during the time when it was, like, four white people played baseball on the baseball team. Everything's with good intentions. But I think he might just be a little more old-fashioned.
Diane Wu
Alex actually knows Jim pretty well. They kept in touch after his interview. Their families became friends. Alex's mom helped teach Jim's wife how to drive. He gets dinner with Jim whenever he's back home.
Alex left our conversation feeling pretty fine about what he'd read. But then he stepped back into a campus caught in the force field of the lawsuit, where anything to do with race, and bias, and admissions felt hypercharged.
One of the biggest ways the lawsuit has shaken up Harvard is that certain statistics are now public, like the school said that without affirmative action, one out of two black kids wouldn't get it. Latino kids-- they'd lose one out of three. Kids whose parents went to Harvard, who are, by the way, mostly white have a seven times better chance of getting in than regular kids.
It's making students ask questions they'd rather not about how they got in. It's uncomfortable. I talked to two black students who chose not to see their files this fall. Both were worried it would say, let's take her because she's black. They didn't think it would, but still. One of them had the request form open on her computer for more than a week before she decided, nah, maybe senior year.
For Asian students, the question is the opposite. It's not am I here because of my race, but am I here in spite of it? It's cranked people's race goggles up to level 10. One of Alex's friends wrote on Facebook about a comment in her file. "She's a bright student, but what distinguishes her from other bright students?"
To her, this was racially coded. When she read it she saw, she seemed smart, but is there anything that makes her different from other Asian students? Well, if that was racially coded, Alex thought, you should see mine. He texted some close friends from his freshman year Chinese class.
Alex Zhang
I sent a couple screen grabs from my admissions file to them. I was like, hey, I can't get this off my mind. I didn't react that strongly to it until after I saw this stuff online. And now, I'm starting to feel pretty troubled by it.
Diane Wu
What was the part that was troubling to you?
Alex Zhang
My main trouble was, oh, does he feel like he needs to prove that I'm not like other Asians to the admissions office? And is that what it takes to get in nowadays? Most other college interviewers, I just talked for, like, an hour, an hour and a half. But Jim was doing a background check, you know? Why did he feel the need to do so rigorous of a background check?
Diane Wu
Alex's friends saw his screen grab 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.
Alex wanted to see what Jim was actually thinking when he wrote tiger mother. See if it really was a racial thing, like his friends were saying. So he gave him a call. Alex taped the call and with Jim's permission, sent it to me.
First, they catch up a little bit. Alex tells Jim about how he went to go see his file. He mentions an op-ed he co-wrote for the student newspaper.
Alex Zhang
Did you read the op-ed I wrote, by any chance? I don't think I sent it to you.
Jim McCandlish
Yes, you did send it. I read it, and I totally regret that I did not respond. It was very well done.
Diane Wu
It was very well done, Jim says.
Alex Zhang
Oh, really? You thought so?
Jim McCandlish
Yes.
Alex Zhang
I'm glad you thought so.
Diane Wu
They talk about the lawsuit. And before Alex can even bring up tiger moms, Jim volunteers his own ideas about implicit bias in admissions. He's been thinking about the effect of the interviewer's biases because--
Jim 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.
Diane Wu
Jim, of course, went above and beyond to spend the time with Alex to get that rapport, to make sure he really understood Alex as an individual, not to write him off immediately.
Alex Zhang
So I'm actually kind of curious about some stuff you wrote. Yeah, so you wrote five pages of notes. There's probably 2,000 words at least.
Jim McCandlish
[INAUDIBLE]
Alex Zhang
Yeah, and most of that was in the personal quality section, which I was the most curious about reading.
Jim McCandlish
OK. So here I am right on the edge. What do they say?
Diane Wu
It takes another eight minutes for Alex to get the nerve to bring it up-- tiger mom.
Alex Zhang
You mentioned that you asked her about my parents.
Jim McCandlish
Yeah, I was trying to figure out whether or not you were basically driven by the parents in any way.
Alex Zhang
You use the term tiger mother, saying my mom's not like that. That's very much affiliated with Asian parenting. So when I read that, it just was a little unexpected.
Jim McCandlish
Well, recall, I live with one.
Diane Wu
I live with one, Jim's saying. He's talking about his wife, who is Chinese. They have a young daughter.
Jim McCandlish
I live with a tiger mom and fight it all the time.
Alex Zhang
You think that's a particularly Chinese thing?
Jim McCandlish
I think the Chinese on the west side have a very definite, strong influence that way.
Diane Wu
West side-- Jim's talking about the wealthier side of Portland where he and Alex lived.
Jim McCandlish
No question in my mind.
Alex Zhang
Huh, gotcha. Because for me, it's kind of like, if you had a Chinese applicant, would you be suspicious that perhaps their parent or their mom was like that?
Jim McCandlish
If I saw somebody, Alex, that had their fingers in a lot of pies, and I had no way to ascertain the depth of what they were doing-- what I'm looking for and looked for was the person who was thriving on their own, that is self-motivated. And it isn't just Chinese. I use that term because I'm an Amy Tan Fan.
Diane Wu
Amy Tan wrote The Joy Luck Club. Apparently, after this conversation, Jim's wife told him that she did not also write Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. That was Amy Chua. His wife offered to buy him the book.
Jim McCandlish
But anybody I interview, the longer I did it, the more suspicious I was.
Diane Wu
After doing these interviews for 20 years, Jim was not naive to kids puffing up their extracurriculars or getting coached on how to act in the interview. He's saying he was tough on everyone.
I talked to Jim later. He didn't want to be recorded, but he was open about what he wrote. He told me, yeah, part of what he was doing was 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. And his no-holds-barred strategy to get Alex in, it seemed to work.
The first reviewer, who went through Alex's file before his interview, wrote, "hope the alumni interview can add." The next reviewer saw Jim's report, then wrote, "interview in and is pretty remarkable for its in-depth review, comes out in the right place and is reassuring."
Besides his write-up, Jim gave Alex a personal rating of 1, the highest possible score. He gave Alex ones across all categories. The official admissions officers were not as effusive. They gave him a 2 for his personal rating, twos and threes for the rest. Wrote that his personal qualities seem to be still evolving.
Alex Zhang
After I read mine, my impression was that if you hadn't written such an in-depth, positive review that I probably wouldn't have gotten it, which is kind of an interesting thought.
Jim McCandlish
That's surprises me. You were at the top of everything. That surprises me. I thought I was a gravy.
Alex Zhang
Yeah, I really appreciate how much you did.
Jim McCandlish
Well, I appreciate you. So how was New York?
Diane Wu
They go on to talk about Alex's summer job in Manhattan, the classes he's taking this fall. Jim starts in on a story about his kid before telling Alex, oh, hey, turn that recorder off.
I met up with Alex again after that phone call. He wasn't totally satisfied by it, thought Jim didn't get the gravity of tiger mother, hadn't thought it all the way through. But he had no hard feelings.
Though when Alex thought more about tiger mother, he realized, it was not just the use of the term that unsettled him, but also, the assumption that it was a bad thing in the first place. Something that Harvard would want to make sure none of its students had.
Alex Zhang
This idea that a tiger mom would even be-- I know it is a thing in our culture for a lot of parents, but also is weird that there's a fixation on that by American society. Also, the question is, why does it matter if your parents pushed you in that way? Is that not part of your upbringing and who you are now?
I don't know. 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.
Diane Wu
Alex, personally, was grateful for when his mom pushed him when he was younger.
Alex Zhang
I remember in high school, my mom was gave me a lot of pressure. Make sure you connect with the teachers and talk to them during break time, so they can get to know you, because it's really important. They're going to have to write you recommendations. And I didn't want to do it, but I guess I had to.
Diane Wu
Your mom was on the ball.
Alex Zhang
Yeah, she's really on top of stuff, which is really good. Because she did it without killing me, overworking me. She's a really good mom.
Diane Wu
In race-conscious admissions, it's not just the university that's conscious of race. It's also the applicants themselves. Almost all the students of color I asked had considered whether and how to portray their race in their package. Just one white student had.
Alex is from a mostly white neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Growing up, his classmates often couldn't see past his race. They teased him for having a flat face, about being a nerd. One girl exclusively called him Asian instead of Alex.
In middle school, he started playing basketball, partly to downplay his Chinese-ness, fit in with the white kids. Out on the court, though, someone would still always call him Yao Ming. But he didn't write about any of that in his personal essay.
Instead, it's about how he transforms from a lonely elementary school kid playing video games by himself to big man on campus at his high school.
Diane Wu
You didn't talk about race in your essay. That's not the topic. It doesn't mention race at all. Was that part of the subtext of what you were writing, looking back on it?
Alex Zhang
Probably, yeah. In high school, I had a lot of internalized hatred about being Asian. I had this whole perception that I needed to differentiate myself. So I think one of my views is that, oh, we aren't seen. This also goes to myself being really cautious of the system or potential biases.
So I was like, oh, I probably need to show that I have been more social, or I have been a leader, have done these cool things.
Diane Wu
It struck me that it might be that while you were preparing your application, you were making some similar-ish calculation to maybe what Jim was making.
Alex Zhang
Yeah.
Diane Wu
Not I want to differentiate myself from all other applicants, but I extra want to differentiate myself from other Asian applicants.
Alex Zhang
Probably. And again, looking back, I don't like it in the same way that I don't like if Jim would have had to talk me up just because I'm Asian. I don't like that I [INAUDIBLE] that way if it was because of that.
Diane Wu
I asked Alex if what he saw in his file shifted his position at all in the lawsuit. No, he said. To him, tiger mom was weird for sure, but it wasn't discrimination. It didn't sway the argument one way or another. For Alex, what he saw in his file, what his friends have been seeing, it's more personal.
Alex Zhang
A lot of the comments my friends have been making and stuff, they're not things that make as much of an argument for either side as much as, like, oh, this is what being Asian is like.
Diane Wu
In other words, even when you make it into one of the fanciest colleges in the world, when you finally feel like people see you for who you are, your whole complicated self, just one word or phrase can snap you out of it. Remind you, right, right, this is how they see me. This is how it really works.
Ira Glass
Diane Wu is one of the producers of our show.
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