Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Affirmative Action Win Justice Dept. Support

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

Obama "got in" to Harvard and he's dumber than 6 out of 10 average Asians.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/us/politics/asian-students-affirmative-
action-harvard.html

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department lent its support on Thursday to
students who are suing Harvard University over affirmative action policies
that they claim discriminate against Asian-American applicants, in a case
that could have far-reaching consequences for the use of affirmative
action in college admissions.

In a so-called statement of interest, the department supported the claims
of the plaintiffs, a group of Asian-Americans rejected by Harvard. They
contend that Harvard has systematically discriminated against them by
artificially capping the number of qualified Asian-Americans from
attending the school in order to advance less qualified students of other
races.

“Harvard has failed to carry its demanding burden to show that its use of
race does not inflict unlawful racial discrimination on Asian-Americans,”
the Justice Department said in its filing.

The filing said that Harvard “uses a vague ‘personal rating’ that harms
Asian-American applicants’ chances for admission and may be infected with
racial bias; engages in unlawful racial balancing; and has never seriously
considered race-neutral alternatives in its more than 45 years of using
race to make admissions decisions.”

[Read the statement of interest.]

The Justice Department has increasingly used such statements of interest
to intervene in civil rights cases. Before 2006, such statements appeared
only seven times in civil rights-oriented disputes, according to a recent
paper by law school student Victor Zapana. Between 2006 and 2011, they
were drafted in at least 242, almost all by the Obama administration on
issues such as videotaping police brutality and ensuring that blind people
and their service dogs have access to Uber.

But the Trump administration is turning the same tool against affirmative
action in college admissions, a major — and highly contentious — legacy of
the civil rights era, and one that white conservatives have opposed for
decades. In the past few years, the anti-affirmative action cause has been
joined by Asian-Americans who argue that they are being held to a higher
standard, losing out on coveted slots at places like Harvard as African-
Americans, Latinos and other groups get a boost.

A handful of states already ban public universities from relying on
affirmative action, pushing several toward a model that takes
socioeconomic factors into account instead of race. Public universities in
California and Washington have tried to engineer class-based diversity in
their student bodies, believing that giving a lift to lower-income
students will end up bringing more minority students in as well.

But these methods have not produced classes with an ethnic makeup that
mirrors that of the states where they have been used, and many selective
private universities continue to admit students partly on the basis of
race — though, until Harvard was forced to detail its internal admissions
policies recently, few could say how elite universities actually weighed
applicants’ race.

Now, universities that factor race into admissions have found a powerful
new opponent in the Trump administration, which argued in its filing on
Thursday that the court should deny Harvard’s request to dismiss the case
before trial.

The government said that Supreme Court rulings require that universities
considering race in admissions meet several standards. They must define
their diversity-related goals and show that they cannot meet those goals
without using race as a factor in admissions decisions.

The department argued that Harvard does not adequately explain how race
factors into its admissions decisions, leaving open the possibility that
the university is going beyond what the law allows.

[Read: Harvard’s admissions officers maintain a culling system in which
factors like where applicants are from, how much money they have and how
they fit goals for diversity may be just as important as perfect scores.]

“Harvard has failed to show that it does not unlawfully discriminate
against Asian-Americans,” the Justice Department said in a statement
Thursday.

Harvard said it was “deeply disappointed” but not surprised “given the
highly irregular investigation the D.O.J. has engaged in thus far.”

“Harvard does not discriminate against applicants from any group, and will
continue to vigorously defend the legal right of every college and
university to consider race as one factor among many in college
admissions, which the Supreme Court has consistently upheld for more than
40 years,” the university said in a statement.

A broad coalition of Harvard supporters filed briefs in support of the
school Thursday condemning the lawsuit and saying that it would
effectively threaten diversity at all American colleges.

Those groups include 25 alumni and student groups represented by the
NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the American Civil Liberties
Union, a group of economists who criticized the experts whose work was
used in the original lawsuit and a group of 531 social scientists and
academics who study access to college.

“Eliminating race-conscious admissions would disproportionately harm
applicants of color, including some Asian-Americans,” Harvard alumni said
in their filing.

“Applicants’ opportunities to amass credentials that make for a
competitive college application are greatly affected by race,” alumni and
students wrote. “Given racial bias in standardized testing and endemic
racial inequities,” they said the school must continue to consider race.

The Harvard case, which was brought by an anti-affirmative-action group
called Students for Fair Admissions, is seen as a test of whether a
decades-long effort by conservative politicians and advocates to roll back
affirmative action policies will ultimately succeed. The Department of
Education and Justice Department said in July that the administration was
abandoning Obama-era policies that asked universities to consider race as
a factor in diversifying their campuses and would favor race-blind
admissions instead.

Officials from both departments said that the Obama administration had
used guidelines to circumvent Congress and the courts to create
affirmative action policies that went beyond existing law.

Civil rights leaders and others argue that this stance effectively
undermines decades of policy progress that created opportunity for
minorities.

The department typically files statements of interest in cases that it
feels directly impact the federal government’s interests.

“As a recipient of taxpayer dollars, Harvard has a responsibility to
conduct its admissions policy without racial discrimination by using
meaningful admissions criteria that met lawful requirements,” Attorney
General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.

In briefs filed in support of Harvard at the end of July, students and
alumni said that they “condemn” the plaintiffs’ “attempt to manufacture
conflict between racial and ethnic groups in order to revive an
unrelenting agenda to dismantle efforts to create a racially diverse and
inclusive student body through college admissions.”

“It’s alarming that Trump is aligning himself with anti-civil rights
activist Edward Blum in this subversive attempt to say that civil rights
protections cause discrimination,” said Jeannie Park, the head of the
Harvard Asian-American Alumni Alliance and co-founder of the Coalition for
a Diverse Harvard, referring to the founder of Students for Fair
Admissions. “Trump does not speak for Asian-Americans, just as Blum does
not.”

At the heart of the case, is whether Harvard’s admissions staff hold
Asian-Americans to higher standards than applicants of other racial or
ethnic groups, and whether they use subjective measures, like personal
scores, to cap the number of Asian students accepted to the school.

“Harvard today engages in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping
that it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and
1930s,” Students for Fair Admissions said in a court filing.

Harvard, which admitted less than 5 percent of its applicants this year,
said that its own analysis did not find discrimination.

A trial in the case has been scheduled for October.

If it winds its way to the Supreme Court, it could be heard by Judge Brett
M. Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump’s nominee for the vacant seat once held by Justice
Anthony M. Kennedy. The case could have far-reaching implications for the
nation’s colleges and universities that consider race in their admissions
processes.

The Justice Department is pursuing its own investigation into Harvard’s
admissions policies based on a complaint it received.

The Obama administration used statements of interest in novel ways to
further its civil rights agenda, sometimes by making the unusual move of
intervening in local cases.

In 2013, the Justice Department intervened in a local case in Burlington,
Wash., where poor people contended that their public lawyers were too
overworked to adequately do their jobs. The Obama administration also
intervened in local legal disputes over legal aid issues in New York,
juvenile prisoners in California and transgender students in Michigan.

The Trump administration has filed statements of interest on other charged
topics this year. In February it supported the plaintiffs who are suing
pharmaceutical companies and drug distributors in a sprawling,
prescription opioids lawsuit in Ohio. This month it supported the merits
of a suit that says Facebook abets discriminatory housing practices.

Correction: August 29, 2018
An earlier version of this article misstated when the Justice Department
released a statement of interest supporting students suing Harvard in an
affirmative action case. The filing was made Thursday, not Friday.


--
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denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party ran out of gas and got run over by a Trump
truck.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
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Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum
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Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
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