Manhattan Institute’s indispensable magazine City Journal has an excellent article by attorney Dennis Saffran entitled “Fewer Asians Need Apply.”

He’s writing about the obvious discrimination that many students of Asian ancestry face when they apply to top colleges. Admissions officials don’t want to have “too many” of them and resort to flimsy pretexts for rejecting students with superior academic backgrounds. MIT’s dean of admissions, for example, said of a Korean applicant with great scores, grades, and activities, “It’s possible he looked like a thousand other Korean kids with the exact same profile … that he wasn’t interesting enough to surface to the top and was yet another textureless math grind.” I guess stereotyping is bad unless you do it to someone in a group you can safely ignore.

Also fascinating is Saffran’s discussion of the similarities between the old Jewish quotas at Harvard and other Ivies (including measures for “geographical diversity” and “holistic evaluations”) and the ways they today keep down the numbers of Asians.

We read that one of the elite universities — Cal Tech — doesn’t play these games and focuses just on academic merit. But if it’s true that a university needs “diversity” to have a good educational environment, imagine how bad things must be there! Pity the deprived, under-educated students who graduate from Cal Tech.