Op-Ed: I’m an Asian American Harvard grad. Affirmative action helped me get in. How affirmative action is hurting America’s next generation.
Harvard University.
I’m an American, a man who has graduated from an all-white Harvard University, and I will forever be an honorary white man, because affirmative action is the thing that got me here.
I was just an international exchange student. I didn’t have a single American friend. There weren’t even any non-American friends; I didn’t have any non-American friends. I didn’t have a single friend who was Asian-American. So this white man, and this white-looking white man–he was a teacher, but not for me–he goes up to me as a fellow exchange student, and he says, “Hey man, I’d like to see if you could get into Harvard.” I say, “Well, you don’t have any kids,” to which he says, “What are the application requirements?” I say, “Well, I have a master’s degree, and I was in the United States military for four years, but I don’t have a bachelor’s degree.” He said, “Good.”
I went to a lot of Ivy League colleges. I started my college education at Harvard in 1991. I took a four-year course called Analyze This, and they were all like, “Oh, that’s an eight-week course, what’s that?” And I’m like, “No, it takes eight years to make an eight-year degree.” And they’re like, “So what?” I’m like, “An eight-year, eight-day, eight-hour course will teach you how to evaluate a problem, how to think about it, and how to do it.” I got a very good education–not a brilliant one, but a good education. My educational history is probably the worst in my family since my parents have only had one child. My dad moved to Canada for work,
