IVY LEAGUE DISCRIMINATION AGAINST ASIANS.

In the news is a “federal civil rights complaint charging Harvard University with discrimination against Asian-American applicants. The complaint documents a pattern of bias, at Harvard and other Ivy League colleges, that, in its methods and its impact, closely parallels the imposition of de facto Jewish quotas at these schools in the 1920s. By spotlighting how racial preferences for other minorities have ironically contributed to this reprise of Harvard’s bigoted past, with Asians playing the role of modern-day Jews, the plaintiffs hope to prompt the Supreme Court to overturn Bakke v. Regents of the University of California, its 1978 decision allowing the use of such preferences in college admissions. For, as the complaint starkly illustrates, whatever merit affirmative action may once have had, it is a policy relic of an essentially biracial society of the 1970s that has become ludicrous in the multiracial America of 2016.

The Harvard case and a companion case against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFA), an advocacy group representing Asian-American and other students rejected by top colleges that employ racial preferences. {snip}

The Harvard lawsuit, with an eye on eventual Supreme Court review, urges the justices to go a step further and overturn Bakke. Laying out a damning indictment that, in using race-based preferences rather than race-neutral alternatives to increase African-American and Latino enrollment, Harvard and the other Ivies have established quotas limiting Asian enrollment, the complaint asserts: “Given what is occurring at Harvard and at other schools, the proper response is the outright prohibition of racial preferences in university admissions–period.” 

Asians, of course, have often been termed the “New Jews” in reference to their focus on academic achievement. But as Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden observed in a chapter with that title in his 2006 book The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges–and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, this status has also meant “inheriting the mantle of the most disenfranchised group in college admissions."

 

Policies in the Ivy League and many other places mean that most non-affluent whites and Asians have little chance of gaining admission, no matter how high their scores and grades. There aren't enough spaces left when the kids of big donors and affluent prior graduates and those selected to enhance "diversity" are admitted.   The U.S. Supreme Court needs to intervene in the case of state schools and straighten out this mess.  Equal protection of the law should protect everyone equally.  Why is that so hard to swallow for some people?  Private schools do not have to abide by the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the law.