常春藤名校录取有多腐败？

 常春藤名校录取有多腐败？
昂茨（Ron Unz）是一个犹太裔的商人，哈佛本科，斯坦福理论物理硕士。他试图获得共和党1994年加州州长竞选的党内提名但没有成功，但当时他获得了34.3%的选票，被人笑称为“物理学书呆子的竞选”。他写于2012年的这篇38页长文《美国任人唯贤的神话》（The Myth of American Meritocracy）在美国教育界如同重磅炸弹，其翔实的资料（有120处引文）和严密的逻辑使得他的论点极难被反驳。

   他甚至在论述中逐一讨论了反方论点和论据，让人更难以挑战他的论述。 

   可惜的是，这样的真知灼见不能为今天的主流媒体所容，这篇文章很快就“沉下去”了。他这篇文章的篇幅如此之大，以至于连华裔家长也没几个读完。

   正因为此，我特意写了一个浓缩篇，算是节约一下大家的时间，但是本人水平有限，还是强力推荐大家去读原文：The Myth of American Meritocracy 

   常春藤录取制度的时代背景

   昂茨文中第一页就点明了整个问题的大背景：今日美国贫富悬殊愈演愈烈，中产阶级每况愈下。在这种向上流动性大减，“胜者全拿”的社会里，对绝大多数家庭而言进入常春藤名校是保证子女将来有出息的唯一道路。

   This situation, sometimes described as a “winner take all society,” leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their children will reach the winners’ circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges. 

  上图显示了美国社会顶层的1%人口占有了35.4%的财富，前5%的人口占有了63.1%的社会财富，剩下的95%民众只有36.9%的社会财富。
昂茨无情地揭开了美国常春藤名校录取程序的老底，设计出这种独特的的超复杂和充满主观因素的录取程序（uniquely complex and subjective system）的最初动机是：解决常春藤名校里犹太人太多的问题。

    二十世纪二十年代年之前包括哈佛在内的常春藤名校是按学术成绩来录取的，渐渐的学术成绩优异的犹太裔学生大量涌入常春藤名校。掌控着常春藤名校的盎格努撒克逊后裔们在二十年代发明了这套号称考虑多方面条件的录取制度好把犹太学生的比例限制在15%之内。

    During the 1920s, the established Northeastern Anglo-Saxon elites who then dominated the Ivy League wished to sharply curtail the rapidly growing numbers of Jewish students, but their initial attempts to impose simple numerical quotas provoked enormous controversy and faculty opposition. Therefore, the approach subsequently taken by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and his peers was to transform the admissions process from a simple objective test of academic merit into a complex and holistic consideration of all aspects of each individual applicant; the resulting opacity permitted the admission or rejection of any given applicant, allowing the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired. As a consequence, university leaders could honestly deny the existence of any racial or religious quotas, while still managing to reduce Jewish enrollment to a much lower level, and thereafter hold it almost constant during the decades which followed. 

   其实其中的秘密说出来一文不值，基于学习成绩的录取制度也许谈不上是什么好制度，但是至少公平透明，客观性强。但是哈佛大学在二十年代年引入的这套复杂，充满主观因素的录取制度最妙之处就在于完全失去透明性，你很难直接对比两个学生，而校方就可以一手遮天，一方面把犹太裔学生数目限制在一定比例下，一方面脸不红心不跳地否认自己有任何歧视性政策，是不是听上去很熟悉？
那犹太人社团最终是怎么打破这种歧视的呢？无他，掌握了权力而已。 

   Indeed, Karabel convincingly demonstrates that the collapse of the long-standing Jewish quotas in the Ivy League during the decade following World War II only occurred as a result of massive media and political pressure, pressure surely facilitated by very heavy Jewish ownership of America’s major media organs, including all three television networks, eight of nine major Hollywood studios, and many of the leading newspapers, including both the New York Times and the Washington Post. By contrast, Asian-Americans today neither own nor control even a single significant media outlet, and they constitute an almost invisible minority in films, television, radio, and print. For most Americans, what the media does not report simply does not exist, and there is virtually no major media coverage of what appear to be de facto Asian quotas at our top academic institutions.
Different political blocs waged long battles for control of particular universities, and sudden large shifts in admissions rates occurred as these groups gained or lost influence within the university apparatus: Yale replaced its admissions staff in 1965 and the following year Jewish numbers nearly doubled. 

   昂茨说的很直白：二战之后，犹太社团通过靠着大规模在媒体和政治上造势给予常春藤名校巨大的压力。与此同时犹太社团几乎接管了美国的主流媒体，所有三大电视网，九个好莱坞制片厂中的八家，很多大报社，包括纽约时报和华盛顿邮报都被其控制。而掌握了权力的胜利果实如此甜蜜：1965年耶鲁更换了招生办公室的工作人员，第二年，犹太裔学生数量翻番。
与此相反的是，今天亚裔啥也没有，在电影电视电台和出版物上亚裔几乎毫无踪迹。对大多数美国人而言，主流媒体不报道的事情就不存在，亚裔被歧视当然也就不会有多少人注意到了。
亚裔成为新的“犹太人”，成为被歧视的新目标。 

   昂茨列出了触目惊心的数据：

  Princeton sociologist Thomas J. Espenshade and his colleagues have demonstrated that among undergraduates at highly selective schools such as the Ivy League, white students have mean scores 310 points higher on the 1600 SAT scale than their black classmates, but Asian students average 140 points above whites. The former gap is an automatic consequence of officially acknowledged affirmative action policies, while the latter appears somewhat mysterious.

   也就是说，常春藤的白人学生平均SAT分数要比非洲裔同学要高310分（满分1600分），但是亚裔要比白人同学平均还要高140分。310分差距应该是反映了对非洲裔学生的照顾政策，但是140分差距则很难解释。 

   在过去二十年里亚裔的人口，特别是18岁到21岁年龄段人口（上图虚线）大幅增长，于此对应的是，录取时不考虑种族因素的加州理工的亚裔学生比例也随之增长（和虚线伴随增长的那条实线）。但是奇怪的是所有八所常春藤名校（其他八条实线）的亚裔比例都被稳稳地控制在15%-20%区间，而这一切，据校方说，只是巧合！

   今天犹太裔学生学术成绩的崩溃（The Strange Collapse of Jewish Academic Achievement） 

   昂茨没有停下来，他用大量数据揭示了一个很多人不清楚的事实：今天犹太裔学生学术成绩的崩溃，如今犹太裔高中生的学术成绩不但远不如亚裔，连非犹太裔的白人学生也不及。以下段落大家可以仔细阅读，其中数据实在惊人：哈佛大学录取的新生中45%是白人，而犹太裔学生高达25%，也就是非犹太裔学生只有20%。而实际上只占总人口2.1%的犹太裔学生的学术成绩不如非犹太裔的白人学生，离亚裔差得就更远了，但是他们占了常春藤大蛋糕里最大的一份。

   In fact, Harvard reported that 45.0 percent of its undergraduates in 2011 were white Americans, but since Jews were 25 percent of the student body, the enrollment of non-Jewish whites might have been as low as 20 percent, though the true figure was probably somewhat higher.The Jewish levels for Yale and Columbia were also around 25 percent, while white Gentiles were 22 percent at the former and just 15 percent at the latter. The remainder of the Ivy League followed this same general pattern.
This overrepresentation of Jews is really quite extraordinary, since the group currently constitutes just 2.1 percent of the general population and about 1.8 percent of college-age Americans.52 Thus, although Asian-American high school graduates each year outnumber their Jewish classmates nearly three-to-one, American Jews are far more numerous at Harvard and throughout the Ivy League. Both groups are highly urbanized, generally affluent, and geographically concentrated within a few states, so the “diversity” factors considered above would hardly seem to apply; yet Jews seem to fare much better at the admissions office. 

  在昂茨看来，犹太裔学生学术成绩的崩溃是如此明显，你无论用哪个指标去衡量都一样。原因呢？无他，新的一代犹太裔学生失去了父辈和祖父辈努力向上的动力，读到此处不禁让人唏嘘，二战结束之后的那一代星光灿烂的犹太裔科学家，工程师，医生和律师们，如果知道后辈如此不长进，不知道会有何感想。昂茨甚至不留情面地指出，要不是苏联解体为犹太社团带来了一波勤奋好学的新犹太移民，犹太学生团体的平均学术成绩还要更糟。
他极其伤感地指出：几十年前，当一流高中生中25%是犹太裔的情况下，犹太裔占据25%的常春藤席位是非常合理的。如今犹太裔在一流高中生的比例已经跌到了6%，可是犹太裔学生在常春藤大学中的比例还略有增加。

   My casual mental image of today’s top American students is based upon my memories of a generation or so ago, when Jewish students, sometimes including myself, regularly took home a quarter or more of the highest national honors on standardized tests or in prestigious academic competitions; thus, it seemed perfectly reasonable that Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools might be 25 percent Jewish, based on meritocracy. But the objective evidence indicates that in present day America, only about 6 percent of our top students are Jewish, which now renders such very high Jewish enrollments at elite universities totally absurd and ridiculous. 

   我觉得耐人寻味的是，抨击现行体制的昂茨(Ron Unz)和诉讼现行体制的布鲁姆(Edward Blum)都是犹太裔，难道他们都是我们常说的“自恨”类型么？当然不是，他们反对现行体制因为他们看出现行体制是不可持续和损害美国的长远利益的。 

   昂茨雄辩般的总结陈词

   Power corrupts and an extreme concentration of power even more so, especially when that concentration of power is endlessly praised and glorified by the major media and the prominent intellectuals which together constitute such an important element of that power. But as time goes by and more and more Americans notice that they are poorer and more indebted than they have ever been before, the blandishments of such propaganda machinery will eventually lose effectiveness, much as did the similar propaganda organs of the decaying Soviet state. Kahlenberg quotes Pat Moynihan as noting that the stagnant American earnings between 1970 and 1985 represented “the longest stretch of ‘flat’ income in the history of the European settlement of North America.” The only difference today is that this period of economic stagnation has now extended nearly three times as long, and has also been combined with numerous social, moral, and foreign policy disasters. 

   权力导致腐败，集中的权利尤甚。在学校很大程度上决定人命运的社会大背景下，常春藤名校的录取被把持在很小的一群人手中。而今天这种集中的权力和对权力的滥用竟然还被主流媒体无穷无尽地吹捧和美化。这种腐败将对美国的将来造成未可估量的损害，最终所有的族裔都将为此付出代价。