Harvard Exonerated From Affirmative Action Lawsuit, Claiming “We Thought We Already Accepted That One”

Wait there’s more than one?

December 6, 2020

The First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision on Monday that Harvard University was not guilty of racial discrimination against Asian-Americans after new evidence came to light that admissions officers “thought they already accepted that one.” The news came as a shock to Asian-American applicants who thought they were being discriminated against but now happily accept that it was an honest accident.

The pivotal moment of the hearing was when the plaintiff gave the example of Michael Huang, an applicant who, despite having straight A’s, a perfect SAT score, and numerous extracurricular activities, was rejected over other applicants with seemingly worse statistics. “Wait one second, that sounds familiar,” said defendant and admissions officer Jennifer Dortmund, “I could’ve sworn I accepted a Korean or something with that name.” After a brief recess to investigate the discrepancy, the admissions board announced that they didn’t realize there were multiple Asian applicants. “We thought our system glitched when it said there were 16 applicants named Michael Huang, so we just accepted one,” Dortmund explained, “we’ve just been tossing out applications that seem too perfect and have a similar Eastern-sounding name. We assumed it was like a CAPTCHA where you had to pick out the real humans.”

Since the decision, Harvard has launched an inquisition into its past admissions to see what students they’d accidentally rejected. “It was a no-brainer when we accepted a Vietnamese swim captain with a 4.0 GPA back in 2007,” admissions chair Walter Weiss related, “but when we got another one the next year, we thought the server was stuck in a loop. To fix the problem, we just had the system automatically filter out Vietnamese applicants. Worked like a charm!” Other admissions officers cited different approaches to solving the repetition issue. “I kept getting applications with similar Indian-y names like Isha Patel and Esha Patil, and I wasn’t sure which one was the typo so I just rejected both,” reported admissions officer Josh Smith.

With the board’s newfound realization of their past errors, Weiss hopes it will create a more inclusive admissions process. “We’re just glad that the misunderstanding was resolved. We will now be looking at our Asian applicants as diverse individuals before we reject them” he explained while tossing applications into the shredder. “Oh, I read them this time,” he promised with a wink.