The College Fix

It started with Jews in the 1920s and it continues with Asian-American students today, according to a lawsuit filed against Harvard for its admissions policies.

The Project on Fair Representation filed lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, it said Monday.

Both claim the schools are in “blatant failure to comply with recent Supreme Court directives with regard to race preferences” and “are emblematic of the behavior of the vast majority of competitive colleges throughout the country.”

The Harvard suit says it’s “strictly limiting” the number of Asian-American students it admits each year and “engaging in racial balancing year after year.” The UNC suit says that like Harvard, the school is “not in compliance with the new Fisher strict scrutiny requirements” and that UNC itself has admitted in a court filing it can increase racial diversity through race-neutral means.

The plaintiffs are members of a new nonprofit, Students for Fair Admissions, which is reaching out to students who believe they were unjustly “rejected from a competitive university” in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and federal civil rights laws.

The project’s director, Edward Blum, said in the press release that the two suits “are the first of what are expected to be several similar challenges to other competitive colleges that continue to unconstitutionally use racial preferences in admission decisions.”

Harvard has an ugly history of capping certain groups who would otherwise be admitted, the release said:

The “Harvard Plan” itself—and the concept of an admissions system based on a “holistic” review of applicants instead of admission based on academic accomplishment—was formulated for the specific purpose of discriminating against Jews. Harvard’s “holistic review” today is primarily a similar tool to limit the number of Asian Americans it admits each year.

Read the release.

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