Harvard Admissions Slammed by Group That Lost Race-Bias Case
Harvard Admissions Slammed by Activists Who Lost Race-Bias Trial
(Bloomberg) -- Harvard University uses race as far more than a mere “plus” factor in making its admissions decisions, violating federal law in a “heavy-handed, limitless way,” according to a group that lost a six-year legal battle with the nation’s oldest college.
Students for Fair Admissions, which opposes affirmative action, asked a federal appeals court Tuesday to overturn an October ruling that Harvard doesn’t discriminate against Asian-Americans and that its consideration of race as one criterion among many in its admissions decisions is lawful.
The group contends Harvard’s use of race goes too far, turning it into a “dominant consideration in admitting Hispanics and African Americans,” to the detriment of Asian-American applicants.
SFFA said in its appeal that U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston erred in how she read past court decisions to allow “race to be used in this heavy-handed, limitless way.”
Harvard responded that the filing shows the ultimate goal of SFFA is to remove “the consideration of race in college and university admissions.”
“We will vigorously defend the court’s decision, which makes clear that Harvard does not discriminate on the basis of race in its admissions process, and that Harvard’s pursuit of a diverse student body is central to its educational mission and consistent with longstanding Supreme Court precedent,” the university said in a statement.
Students for Fair Admissions is led by Edward Blum, a persistent and vigorous critic of race-conscious admissions who has led multiple legal challenges to affirmative action. For just as long, the Supreme Court has upheld the practice in student selection, but the court has grown more conservative in recent years and in a new review may look less favorably upon it.
The group argued in its appeal -- as it did in the trial before Burroughs without a jury -- that Harvard illicitly engaged in “racial balancing” by artificially limiting Asian-Americans’ numbers.
“It is quite unusual for a civil-rights defendant to confess,” SFFA said in the filing. “Yet Harvard admits that its goal is to ensure racial balance, and that it has engineered the admissions process to achieve that illegal pursuit.”
Blum’s legal team retreaded some arguments that failed with Burroughs, including that Harvard today engages in the same kind of stereotyping “that it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s.” The group also faulted the university’s shift to a “holistic” approach to admissions from a practice of accepting just top students.
SFFA said Harvard has failed to show that its use of race in admissions was necessary to assure a diverse student body. The group argues that the college could achieve this goal without considering race by changing the factors it uses when weighing applicants, specifically by boosting the rating of students from low-income backgrounds and eliminating the boost it now gives to the children of alumni, donors, faculty and staff.
“This would slightly increase the number of underrepresented minorities on campus, increase the number of Asian Americans, and drastically increase socioeconomic diversity,” according to the filing.
The case is Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 14-cv-14176, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts (Boston).
--With assistance from Patricia Hurtado.
To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Burnson in San Francisco at rburnson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Blumberg, Peter Jeffrey
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