Harvard Lawsuit:
Just another hateful and deceitful right-wing attack against African Americans
Imagine this: a minority group that makes up only six percent of the total U.S. population, but is admitted to a prestigious Ivy league school at an astounding rate of twenty-three percent of the total admission. That sounds great. In the world of facts, that is an astounding rate of success under any circumstance. Then why is the group, Students for Fair Admissions, bringing a lawsuit against Harvard by claiming this same minority group, Asian Americans, are victims of discrimination in the admissions process?
The Answer: Ed Blum
Blum has a long history of trying to turn back the hands of time when it comes to civil rights. He is not a lawyer, he’s a conservative activist that has filed over twenty-four lawsuits in an effort to bring down voting rights and affirmative action laws all around the country.
In an effort to use data to build his case, Harvard was forced to hand him information such as demographics, test scores and personal essays which he’ll cherry pick to prove his case this month. This information was turned over to Blum after the Department of Justice threatened legal action against Harvard administrators if they did not hand over admission data documents.
Blum position goes like this; the best and brightest of Asian Americans do not get admitted into Harvard because race is used, among other factors, in its admissions process. Blum wants all references to race be removed from the admissions process. In other words, affirmative action should be eliminated and he may have the court to do it.
In 2015, before the Houston Chinese Alliance, Blum revealed his goals behind the lawsuits. “That’s the goal of these lawsuits, is to eliminate the consideration of race and ethnicity in applying (for college). I needed plaintiffs. I needed Asian plaintiffs to challenge the Ivy League admissions policies.
Blum states, “Most Americans don’t want race to be part of your application to college,” he said. “They don’t want the police to use race as a profiling tool to prevent crime. They don’t want prosecutors to use race in the makeup of a jury. Your race and your ethnicity should not be something used to help you or harm you in your life’s endeavors.”
That’s a joke. First, unlike the racial profiling he speaks about above, Harvard admissions is not based solely on race. Harvard uses a whole person philosophy for their admissions. Things such as likability, kindness, and courage, along with test scores and race is used. If quantitative methods alone are used for admissions, a computer could decide who gets admitted. It seems to me that is the only way to fix admissions that would (maybe) raise the acceptance rates for Asian Americans at Harvard. If admissions were purely on a quantitative basis, there would not even be a need for sophisticated algorithms, straight math would suffice. But how would that actually look on campus in actual practice?
Of course, many highly qualified Asians (as well as many others) will not be admitted to Harvard. Forty-thousand students apply to Harvard each year, but only 2000 are selected. As stated, twenty-three percent of those admitted are Asian Americans, fifteen percent are African American and eleven percent are Hispanic. So, there’s 38,000 people who get turned down for admission to Harvard, many of them highly qualified. Some of those that are turned down may have higher quantitative numbers, i.e. test scores, GPAs, but that does not mean they are a better fit. Many of those are Asians and the majority are probably white, but there are Hispanics and African Americans in that group also. Blum and his supporters say that the best and brightest of Asian Americans are being overlooked in the guise of diversity, and they also falsely state that race is used as a single factor.
Sally Chen, a Harvard junior, and Chinese American stated on NPR, “…merit means nothing without context,” and continued, “..beyond this case rethink how we are structuring our education systems and how we are viewing merit as if it is something that is reflective through test scores, through reductive, quantitative methods only.”
As an educator, I’ve known plenty of high school students with high GPA’s and almost perfect national test scores. But If I were a hiring manager for some of those students, I would not have hired them because of their qualitative traits. There’s such a thing as work ethic, how they work with others, community involvement, soft skills, etc., that plays a key role in my opinion of how successful they’ll be in college or a job. Test scores and GPAs are very important and should also play a big part. However, it only tells part of the story. Large corporations, such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google would never think to hire anyone based solely on academic merit. And if they did, it would be unlikely that they would be as successful. So why should Harvard base their admission on quantitative data and eliminate other factors that gives better insight of who a person really is?
It is just another ploy to eliminate African Americans chances, (or at least make it more difficult) to receive a quality education. This is being done by using Asian Americans as a front for their real agenda. Even if they did get rid of affirmative action, white students would be the greatest beneficiary of this change, not Asians. If eliminating affirmative action evenly, then athletics consideration as well as legacy students should also be eliminated.
Armand Derfner, a civil rights lawyer and constitution law scholar shed a little light on Blum’s intentions, “The lesson he’s spreading is that the problem in our society is that blacks have it too good and whites are getting screwed, and that’s a heck of a lesson in this society.”
There are other incidental problems that this lawsuit will bring out. Trump has managed to divide this country along racial lines and this has been a successful strategy both in Washington and Main Street America. Pitting African Americans against Asian Americans is an excellent strategy. The conservatives that are really behind this false issue can stand on the sidelines and watch with glee as yet another unnecessary rift between two groups of people play out in the courtroom. This rift could easily spread from the classrooms and into the daily lives of this group the same way that the rift between democrats and republicans has affected the lives of people in business, entertainment, sports, education and other social settings from the workplace to street traffic. This lawsuit is just one more straw that will help break the already fragile back of civility between the two races. Even if the lawsuit fails, damage to the relationship between the two races could go on for a generation or more.
With the supreme court leaning against civil rights, this may just be one of many changes coming down the line for the next 40 years. Blum’s challenges of the admission practices at the University of Texas failed twice with a narrow margin in the Supreme Court. But that was before Trump nominated conservative lackey, Brett Michael Kavanaugh to the court. And to make the situation more dire, the United States Department of Justice, led by Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, backs Blum’s claim by stating Harvard’s race-conscious admission policies perpetuate, “unlawful racial discrimination” against Asian Americans.
Anna Cowenhoven, Harvard’s spokesperson, stated in the Harvard Crimson, “We are deeply disappointed that the Department of Justice has taken the side of Edward Blum and Students for Fair Admissions, recycling the same misleading and hollow arguments that prove nothing more than the emptiness of the case against Harvard,”
One thing everyone should think about is what improvements will be made for admissions to Harvard for Asian Americans. If race is not mentioned at all, but the personal wholeness factors are still considered, I don’t see any increase in numbers. The parts of the application that are eliminating them would still be there to continue to eliminate them. But Blum and his conservative agenda will win. Because if it goes to the Supreme Court, and affirmative action is eliminated at Harvard, it would be eliminated everywhere, including hiring practices and this is what the conservatives want. Asians would be left out, no longer needed as a tool for right wing ideology. Or, as mentioned earlier, they could go to a strictly quantification model that would eventually destroy higher education as we know it today.
Somewhere along the way we need to figure out why we need affirmative action in the first place. There’s a slew of issues that people like Blum don’t really care to solve. It’s like demanding passengers to escape from a sinking ship while at the very same time actively destroying their lifeboats. People are living in poverty and going to poor schools and receiving sub-par education and are subjugated to the outskirts of mainstream society unless they can rap or play sports. The cycle of poverty is like a whirlpool, sucking people and communities deeper into debt, poor health, crime, drugs and violence. Schools are not great in those neighborhoods.
If they actually eliminate affirmative action, that may actually be a good thing for African Americans in the long run. We are apt to become more politically involved, motivated and resourceful and this will make us more resilient. But let it be known that before this happens, there’s going to be a very long ugly period, and we have to do our best to prepare for what’s ahead.
