Last Friday, Students for Fair Admissions filed its motion for summary judgment against Harvard for its admissions discrimination against Asian-American applicants on the basis of race. You can read the motion and the various supporting documents here.
Edward Blum, president of the organization, said, “Today’s court filing exposes the startling magnitude of Harvard’s discrimination against Asian-American applicants,” adding that it “definitively proves that Harvard engages in racial balancing, uses race as far more than a ‘plus’ factor, and has no interest in exploring race-neutral alternatives.” He also said, “We believe that the rest of the evidence will be released in the next few weeks, and it will further confirm that Harvard is in deliberate violation” of federal civil-rights law.
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s New Study – Meanwhile, the Center for Equal Opportunity has released a new study by Althea Nagai, our research fellow: “Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions.” It documents the heavy evidence of a cap on Asian-American admissions at not only Harvard but also MIT — although not, notably, at Cal Tech, which unlike the other two schools does not weigh skin color or national origin in its admissions.
Discriminating against any ethnic group in this way is deplorable and, if the Constitution and civil-rights laws were interpreted the way they were written, illegal as well. And the fact that not only whites but also some minority groups are being discriminated against — purportedly to achieve the “educational benefits” of student body “diversity” — should startle, even given the current case law. As America becomes increasingly multiethnic and multiracial — and indeed individual Americans become more and more multiethnic and multiracial — it also becomes increasingly untenable for our institutions to rank groups in this way.
Again, Harvard has been sued for its policies, and the Justice Department is itself investigating the matter. We hope that CEO’s study and the lawsuit will both help hasten the end of this politically correct discrimination at Harvard and all schools.
I’ve already mentioned that the study is available on CEO’s website, www.ceousa.org, and you can watch the Federalist Society event where it was released here.
Harvard’s “Defense” — According to Harvard, Asian Americans are too nerdy in their focus on grades and test scores. That’s my take, anyway, on how the school is defending the lawsuit that has been filed against it for anti–Asian-American admissions discrimination. As noted above, the plaintiffs in that case filed a summary-judgment motion in federal district court on Friday last week, and in anticipation of that the school’s president has posted an open letter and linked to a fuller defense here (it tweaked that post after Friday’s filings). Both are instructive.
Harvard’s suggestion is that the lawsuit would require the school to ignore everything about a student applicant except his or her grades and test scores. That’s false, of course: Harvard can consider whatever it likes, so long as it doesn’t subject people to illegal discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity. What’s more, the implication that considering the “whole person” will inevitably result in fewer Asian Americans being admitted is racially offensive stereotyping. And it echoes — as the plaintiffs have noted — Harvard’s past policy of having an anti-Semitic cap on the number of Jews admitted.
I’ll also note that the linked discussion is misleading in implying that the U.S. Education Department found a parallel administrative complaint filed with it to be non-meritorious; it dismissed the complaint only because the department’s policy is to do so whenever a matter becomes the subject of a lawsuit, as is the case here. It’s also wrong to suggest that in all the world only one Edward Blum objects to racial and ethnic discrimination in university admissions. Mr. Blum is hardly alone: Most Americans agree with him.
The president’s letter is no doubt right, however, in trumpeting Harvard’s stubborn insistence against “a truth questioned — again and again and again.” It’s just that here the truth Harvard wants questioned is that it is wrong to treat people differently because of skin color or what country their ancestors came from.
“Too Many Asians”: Mayor de Blasio edition – New York City has some famous selective high schools, such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, that determine admission solely by scores on the Specialized High School Admissions Test. The result is a politically incorrect mix of students at these schools — not many blacks and Latinos, some whites, and lots and lots of Asian Americans — and this makes Mayor Bill de Blasio sad. He wants, in particular, more black and Latino kids at these schools, and of course this means fewer of the others, particularly Asian Americans. And so he wants to get rid of that darn test.
Now, no selection system is perfect, and one can certainly argue that in theory it would be good to take other factors into account besides a student’s score on just one test, grades being the most obvious example.
But there are also many advantages to the current system that will be lost if it is changed: its simplicity, objectivity, and transparency. And those are great virtues indeed, especially when the government is divvying up a scarce resource that people — parents — feel very passionate about. And just imagine the never-ending fights among groups and parents once the test is abandoned and a new system has to be fashioned and implemented. Well, actually, you don’t have to imagine it: The raw emotions are already out there for everyone to see.
The Left will not be happy until New York City follows Harvard and MIT and fully embraces some form of racial and ethnic preference in the name of “diversity,” and that means, again, that Asian Americans will get treated the worst, probably worse even than whites, all in the name of equality.
Mayor de Blasio, in a recent essay, says he wants to replace the current test with a new process that will weigh the student’s middle-school rank and scores on statewide tests that the students are already taking. While it’s good that this wouldn’t involve direct consideration of race or ethnicity, it doesn’t sound like a perfect system either — being in the top 10 percent at one school is not the same as being in the top 10 percent at some other school, and why should the statewide tests be better than the specially designed one now being used?
What’s more, that’s just the opening bid, and once the current system is discarded it’s inevitable that there will be strong pressure to weigh race and ethnicity. And what’s even more, the mayor has made clear his motive: He doesn’t like, in the aggregate, the skin color and national origin of the current student body, and he is reverse-engineering his way to the racial and ethnic mix he prefers. That sort of motive violates federal civil-rights law and the Constitution.
So the mayor flunks, and the test should stay.
And the Harvard admissions office also flunks the antidiscrimination test.
