Harvard’s Discrimination Dodge
http://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-discrimination-dodge-1436397289
The Obama Administration dismisses a bias complaint by Asian-Americans.
Harvard University is looking for legal cover to justify discriminating against Asian-Americans, and it has an ally in Washington. The Education Department on Tuesday said it had dismissed a complaint from 64 organizations alleging that Harvard uses de facto quotas to limit Asian-Americans on campus.
The percentage of Asian-American students at Harvard and other elite universities has held suspiciously steady for two decades at about 18%, while the number of college-age Asian-Americans has increased rapidly. In May the coalition asked the civil-rights arms of the Education and Justice Departments to investigate why Asian-Americans, who make up about 5% of the population but earn an estimated 30% of National Merit semifinalist honors, aren’t accepted to Harvard in numbers that reflect these qualifications.
The Department cited pending litigation as grounds for dismissal, and the only such suit is one against Harvard and the University of North Carolina filed in November by Students for Fair Admissions. This sounds reasonable, but wait. Harvard and UNC’s lawyers this week filed motions to halt the lawsuit until the Supreme Court reconsiders race-based admissions next term in Fisher v. University of Texas. That ruling won’t surface until 2016, and Harvard’s strategy is to drag out inquiries in hopes the Court blesses race-based admissions.
Yet Harvard’s hall pass from Education is a reason for the Supremes to strike down racial preferences—definitively. The Court stopped short in 2013 when it first ruled in Fisher, a case involving a white woman denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin. Justice Anthony Kennedy carved out a murky three-prong threshold for racial preferences, rather than overturning the 2003 decision Grutter v. Bollinger that sanctioned the use of race as a “plus” factor. Colleges treated Justice Kennedy’s standard the way students look at “suggested reading” on a syllabus; they ignored it.
A similarly narrow ruling next year could give Harvard and other top schools license to maintain de facto quotas. Asian-Americans need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than white students to be considered equal applicants on paper, and 450 points higher than African-Americans, according to independent research cited in the complaint.
Meantime, the Asian-American coalition says it will continue to push back, potentially broadening the complaint. Quota-like admissions also seem to exist at Yale, Princeton and elsewhere, and the feds won’t have litigation as an excuse to look the other way. But if the Obama Administration finds another excuse, as it probably will, Asian-Americans will need the Supreme Court to end their exclusion.
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