Harvard University and the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill are facing lawsuits over their race-based
admissions schemes, which hold Asian and white students to higher
standards because of their skin color.
The lawsuits were filed Monday by a group of interested parties,
including two unnamed college students who were rejected from
Harvard and UNC. According to Inside Higher Ed, the
Harvard applicant is of Asian ethnicity: He had a perfect ACT
score, two 800s on SAT II subject exams, and was valedictorian of
his high school. He didn’t get in.
Remarkably, Harvard has managed to keep its Asian student
population constant over the years, while universities that don’t
consider race as an admission factor have seen more and more Asians
gain admittance. According to
Inside Higher Ed:
What Harvard calls a holistic approach to admissions (in which
applicants are reviewed individually, with a range of criteria
considered) is actually a disguise for racial balancing in a system
where Asian Americans are held to higher standards for admission,
according to the lawsuit. As evidence, the lawsuit says that the
racial demographics of Harvard’s admitted class, first-year
enrollment and total student body have remained stable over the
last several years. …“In light of Harvard’s discriminatory admissions policies,
[Asian Americans] are competing only against each other, and all
other racial and ethnic groups are insulated from competing against
high-achieving Asian Americans,” the lawsuit reads.
The Supreme Court has previously upheld racial considerations in
university admissions, but the recent Fisher v. University of
Texas at Austin decision in 2013 further limited the
permissible uses of affirmative action. Plaintiffs believe UNC’s
admissions system would fail the Fisher rationale. It’s
also conceivable that the Court would rule affirmative action
entirely unconstitutional if presented the right kind of case.
Who can defend abject racial discrimination against Asians?
Harvard’s administrators and some of its faculty can. One professor
even had the gall to suggest that discriminating against Asians is
good for Asians. According to Fox
News:
“Asian-American students benefit greatly from attending the
racially and socio-economically diverse campuses that affirmative
action helps create,” Julie Park, assistant professor of education
at the University of Maryland and author of the book “When
Diversity Drops,” told FoxNews.com.
I should think Asian-Americans wold be better served by a
non-discrimination policy. All student applicants should have the
same right to a colorblind evaluation of their academic merits.
With any hope, the sinister justifications offered by Park and
others are becoming less compelling to the voting public, as well
as the courts that will adjudicate lawsuits like this one.
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