The important question should be, Do Asian-American students outperform others at Harvard in their senior year and after graduation? If they do, then perhaps the admissions office is being unfair to them. If they don't, then perhaps their performance on standardized tests is not a perfect predictor of performance in other areas that the university should legitimately value. I suspect that the admission's office is not being unfair, but this is certainly a question that they themselves should be able to monitor. They do track the progress of their own admits.
 

Thank god you can leave posts here anonymously.

I disagree with your criterion. Harvard is trying to create a community, and communities need to have people who are talented, sociable, and sometimes, ... well, assimilated.

People complain that MIT and Caltech reek of depression. Sadly, that may well be the flip-side of near-perfect academic meritocracy. If you put together too many people who studied too hard in high school, and are not well-rounded you get high rates of suicide, depression, and alcoholism relative to what most people in this country seem to want. As a result, I would not be surprised if many admissions officers identity applicants as "grinds" who have done everything their parents told them to but have written really boring essays. And a lot of Asian-American students, it seems, fall into that category.

Is it fair that they work so hard to be rejected? Not really, no. But in order for Harvard to have something resembling a vibrant social life it needs people who are willing to come out and play.

Parts of this argument were used against the Jews in the past at Harvard, and as a Jew myself I can't say I like it. Lowell was not particularly sensitive, and he appears to have been the sort of racist who believed that stereotypes held absolutely, that no Jew was worth considering on his/her own merits since he/she was bound to be socially inferior to his/her Caucasian counterparts. But the fact of the matter was that Jews at Harvard did section themselves off, creating a strongly divided community, and did not conscribe to the cultural norms of their day.

So how do you address this? Lowell cut the number of Jewish students from about 20% to 15%. This is blatantly racist, as described above. But with a little work he could have solved his problem in a way that was independent of race - pick students he thought would get along well at Harvard (in addition to studying hard) and make good future leaders. If many Jews did not happen to stand up to his criteria, the worse for them, but you could not call him racist, only fixed in a certain ideology which Jewish students chose not to follow.

The fact of the matter is that both sides won. Jewish people became Americans in the eyes of pretty much everyone (though god knows it took a while), and the antisocial stereotype now sits in the wastebasket of history (at least in the northeast). And lots of them go to Harvard, vastly more than their population percentage would predict. The Jews came around to America, and America came around to the Jews.

So this is what I think is going on here: It's not that Harvard doesn't like Asians, Harvard doesn't like grinds, and doesn't like self-segregation. And many prospective Asian students seem to drift in that direction. But in a generation, this will not be the case, and as Asian-Americans succeed in American society, America will doubtless come around to Asian values - and I would say in some ways that it could use them. But for the time being, we just have to work on seeing things each other's way.
 

The letter writer makes a reasonable point also.