Harvard fight could redirect 40 years of affirmative action
Source: CNN
By Joan Biskupic, CNN Legal Analyst and Supreme Court Biographer
Updated 3:34 AM ET, Sun August 6, 2017
Story highlights
The Trump administration could launch its own lawsuit against university policies
A 1978 Supreme Court decision allowed colleges to consider an applicant's race
Washington (CNN)The Justice Department this week signaled it would pursue Asian-American students' complaints of bias in admissions at Harvard University, a move that could ultimately alter the future of affirmative action nationwide.
Four decades after a landmark US Supreme Court ruling, affirmative action that brings diversity to college campuses has become entrenched. Yet it has been continually challenged, upheld by one-vote margins at the US Supreme Court.
For nearly three years, Harvard has been fighting a lawsuit targeting its admissions practices brought by a small advocacy group that enlisted Asian-American students. They claim the Ivy League campus caps the number of high-achieving Asian Americans as part of "racial balancing" that favors African Americans and Hispanics.
The advocates behind the case have a record of related litigation, and their long-held goal has been to end nationwide affirmative action programs designed to help blacks and other traditionally disadvantaged minorities.
Now it appears the Trump administration could throw its weight into the case or, even more potently, launch its own lawsuit against university policies
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At UCLA aff. action was officially banned by a popular initiative.
Black, Native American, disadvantaged Asian ethnicities, Latino admits fell down by "catastrophic" levels: The percentages were high, but since the admits were already at a low number that meant not so many actual kids affected. A few hundred at most.
The East Asian percentage went up, but since they started from a large base that meant something like a couple thousand students.
On the whole, more "people of color." But protests percolated up through the ground everywhere because Prop 8 discriminated against "people of color." It hurt some, it helped more, but overall those it hurt were more important than those it helped not because of POC solidarity but because each person's mostly just a representative for their group. It was also humiliating because most members of those minorities were all "I'm in here because of my qualifications, not my ethnicity" only to see the numbers for their group drop by 50 or 70 or 80%. Meaning that half or more of those subpops got in because of affirmative action. Rage all around at galactic gargleblaster strength.
The administration's and faculty doing admission application evaluations were fairly consistent. This was bad. They liked affirmative action. The faculty had ways of lying in a deniable manner and they discussed them with newbies: "Gee, reverse numbers, instead of 1901 put down 1091. If the eval below a black student's who's probably not going to make it says 'excellent due to exceptional GPA and SAT scores, plus strong personal statement' put that on the black student's form and say that you just wrote it on the wrong form." Etc. Intentional errors.
Overall people were aghast at the very high numbers of East Asian admits that were projected and the administration and some faculty said that couldn't be allowed to happen. (It did, but not as much as it could have.) For two reasons. First, it would be an explicit admission that many, many thousands of East Asians had been kept out because they "didn't look like California." It's one thing to argue that a white kid was excluded because out of a 30000 person student body there were 1000 blacks admitted, 500 with affirmative action. It's another thing to argue that out of a 30000 person student body 5000 East Asians weren't admitted because their needed to be excluded because of affirmative action ... not for whites, but for blacks, Latinos, etc. If the student body needed to look like California was in place to help 1000 minorities then it needed to be in place to keep out East Asians.
The second reason was when all those East Asians were suddenly admitted with qualifications higher than many whites, it would boost the relative academic standing of the student body. Admit the most qualified without a race-filter and suddenly the average increases. That meant that the standards for admitting blacks and Latinos would also be higher, which would do the same number of black and Latino non-aff. action admits that it did on white admissions.
There were others, but some boil down to "UCLA must look like California" or "look like America". "If it's mostly Asian and the state's majority white, what will white people think?" is the same "look like California" argument with bolo instead of a tie. They were worried about legacies (don't know if legacies got points, but they were something the university wanted--rah-rah spirit on the part of alumni who donated a lot of money and did a lot of good would be diminished if their kids were excluded--imagine the DNC looking at voter turnout, "Yeah, we'll get 90% of the people here voting for us, but they won't like it when we raise taxes on their employer and it's offshored, so we can expect them to not turn out or even vote against us next election." The response is seldom, "Hey, it's principle, we don't like that industry, it's not green enough, so just screw those voters."
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You've never seen so many people running around trying to find a proxy at any price for race to get around a law enacted by democratic means. Could they use class and socio-economic standing? Could they use geography, and say that everybody from Compton gets a multiplier while if you're from a high-performing district you don't? In other words, it was clear: They wanted to keep out East Asians.
