HEATHER MAC DONALD (MANHATTAN INSTITUTE FELLOW): What's at stake is colorblindness in this country, whether we finally want to treat people as individuals rather than groups. And what's at stake is the poisonous tribalism that colleges have been spreading into the world at large, that is tearing this society apart. Harvard, like every other college, requires Asians to meet a much higher standard of academic qualifications to get in and admits Blacks and Hispanic students with much lower qualifications on the assumption that somehow race is the most important thing about you. They say well, for diversity we need to have racial preferences. You can't predict what I think because I'm white. I'm not going to predict what you think because you're Black.
STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): But that's affirmative action, isn't it?
MAC DONALD: Absolutely. It's the essence of it. And here's the problem, Steve. Not only is this grotesquely fair -- unfair to Asians, it is also the source of so much racial division on campuses because students who were admitted with much lower qualifications, which is the case for most Blacks and Hispanics today, they struggle academically. And --
DOOCY: You mean once they get into Harvard?
MAC DONALD: Once they get into any school for which they've been admitted with less qualifications than their peers. This is true for gender -- if MIT had admitted me under a gender quota and I had 650s on my math SATs and everybody else had 800s, I'd fail freshman calculus. And then the diversity bureaucracy gets its hands on these preference beneficiaries and said the reason you're not keeping up, the reason you feel uncomfortable, is because of racism. It teaches them to see racism where none exists. They carry that into the real world, and the divisions continue.
AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): So it's not survival of the fittest, it's not the strongest man wins, it is -- affirmative action wants it to look like what America looks like, right? There's a percentage of whites, a percentage of Hispanics, a percentage of Blacks, a percentage of Asian-Americans. If you look at the statistics though, and this might be Harvard's argument, in the United States, 6 percent Asian-American. But Harvard allows 22 percent Asian-American to come -- to be a part of their students. So they might say, well we're actually accepting many more than what America looks like.
MAC DONALD: Well, schools -- there are very few schools that don't have racial preferences. CalTech is one. Stuyvesant High School is another. Asians are 40, 45 percent based on their test scores. If you look at test scores, Asians are whipping everybody's ass. Why? Because they have a culture of academic achievement. They should not be penalized for that culture, they should be rewarded. The rest of us should be studying as hard as they do.
EARHARDT: What do they -- is it just culturally, they study so much more?
MAC DONALD: Yes. They give up television. They say, we have to be -- we have to beat every other Asian. They don't have to beat everybody else because they're already on high, but their parents stress academic achievement from the very moment they are conscious.
