What’s to keep universities from ignoring the nation’s highest court on racial preferences?
Students for Fair Admissions president Edward Blum threatened Yale with a lawsuit on Tuesday for discriminating against Asian-American applicants (“Racial Preferences on the Sly?” Review & Outlook, Sept. 18). Yale’s class of 2028, the first group admitted since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action last year, is 24% Asian, down 6 percentage points from the class of 2027. Meanwhile, the percentage of black freshmen remained unchanged and the percentage of Latino freshmen increased.
This isn’t the first time Yale has been accused of anti-Asian discrimination. In 2016, a coalition of over 130 Asian-American organizations filed a complaint with the Justice Department alleging that the university penalizes Asians in undergraduate admissions. In 2018, the Justice Department under former President Donald Trump launched an investigation. Among other things, the Trump Justice Department discovered that while the admittance rate for black applicants in the top academic decile was 60%, for Asian applicants, it was 14.32%—which in 2020 the Trump administration said violated Title VI.
Elite universities will continue to discriminate against Asian-Americans, Supreme Court rulings be damned, unless the executive branch holds them accountable. The Biden-Harris administration has refused. Only two weeks after entering office, the administration dropped the Trump lawsuit against Yale. After the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, President Biden urged universities to give “serious consideration to the adversities that students have overcome,” such as “personal experiences of hardship or discrimination, including racial discrimination.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Renu Mukherjee is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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