It is with great sadness the Center for Equal Opportunity mourns the passing of Althea Nagai, longtime CEO Senior Research Fellow, who died today after a long illness. Althea was a member of the CEO family from its inception in 1995. Her work exposing the breadth and depth of racial preferences in college admissions shaped public opinion and not only helped lay the groundwork for nine statewide ballot initiatives to ban the government’s use of race, but also the landmark Supreme Court cases against the University of North Carolina and Harvard banning preferences in college admissions.
Althea was the author of dozens of CEO studies at more than 80 undergraduate and graduate colleges and universities. Indeed, her essays “Too Many Asian Americans” and “Harvard Investigates Harvard” laid bare the harm that racial preferences inflict on Asian Americans, which was a key factor in the Supreme Court’s decisions. Her final study, “Racial and Ethnic Preferences at the University of Maryland,” documented how schools will need to make substantive changes to their admissions procedures if they are to comply with the Supreme Court rulings in SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina. All of her groundbreaking studies can be viewed here.
Her analysis was elegant, and her writing made a complicated issue clear and comprehensible. Althea was a wonderful colleague for some 30 years. But she was also a friend, who will be deeply missed.
She was preceded in death by her late husband and co-author of many CEO studies, Robert Lerner. She is survived by her husband of many years Ken Masugi and son Joshua Yoshio Lerner.
