In a major boost for a group of Asian Americans suing Harvard University over its affirmative action admissions policy, the Trump administration on Thursday signaled its support of a federal lawsuit against the university and contended that it illegally discriminates against Asian applicants in favor of whites. The move by the Justice Department is the latest sign in what many civil rights groups contend is the administration’s mounting attack on long-standing practices in which Harvard and other universities have used race as a factor in choosing who attends elite public and private schools. The suit, filed by Students for Fair Admissions on behalf of Asian Americans who have been rejected from Harvard, is seen as a bellwether case that could reach the Supreme Court and potentially reshape affirmative action at America’s universities and colleges. Students for Fair Admissions unsuccessfully fought the University of Texas in an affirmative action case two years ago that was ultimately decided in the Supreme Court. Advertisement In a filing Thursday in a Massachusetts federal court, Justice Department lawyers said Harvard illegally tries to “racially balance” its students, including using subjective personality ratings that give Asian Americans with otherwise stellar applications lower scores. Though the filing does not mean the department is joining the lawsuit, it does give greater weight to the case. READ: Trump administration rescinds Obama-era policies encouraging affirmative action and backs race-neutral school admissions » Harvard, which has asked the court to dismiss the case, has denied discriminating against Asian Americans. Students for Fair Admissions in June released an analysis of Harvard admissions data criticizing its use of considering traits such as “likability” and “kindness” in compiling personality scores. Harvard said the study was flawed and did not fully account for its complicated admissions process. “Harvard does not discriminate against applicants from any group, and will continue to vigorously defend the legal right of every college and university to consider race as one factor among many in college admissions, which the Supreme Court has consistently upheld for more than 40 years,” the university said in a statement. In a statement outlining Thursday’s court filing, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions said the department was stepping in to “protect the civil rights of the American people.” “No American should be denied admission to school because of their race,” Sessions said. “As a recipient of taxpayer dollars, Harvard has a responsibility to conduct its admissions policy without racial discrimination by using meaningful admissions criteria that meet lawful requirements.… The admissions policies at our colleges and universities are important and must be conducted lawfully.” The issue has sharply divided Asian Americans — particularly between Chinese Americans and other Asian groups. Support for race-based preferences has plummeted among Chinese Americans, from 78% in 2012 to 41% in 2016, according to surveys by AAPI Data, a program based at UC Riverside that collects demographic data and conducts policy research on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Advertisement Support for affirmative action remained unchanged at 73% among other Asian American groups during that same period, the surveys found. Nicole Ochi, an attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles, said Chinese language social media platforms such as WeChat have stirred opposition against affirmative action. She said “flat-out lies” have been posted, such as assertions that half of Asian Americans will get expelled from universities if affirmative action is brought back in such states as California, which banned public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race, sex or ethnicity with the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996. Ochi said her organization supports Harvard’s claim that it is not intentionally discriminating against Asian Americans and believes that race-based admissions policies are legal. Although her nonprofit does not support racial quotas, it believes race should be one of many factors allowed in an admissions process that takes a broad and holistic view of an applicant’s background. “The reality is that racism and segregation continues to limit educational opportunities … for students of color,” Ochi said. “Asian Americans need to work with counterparts in the African American and Latino communities to increase diversity and reduce bias in schools and workplaces.” Advertisement Since California’s ban on affirmative action took effect, the proportion of Asian Americans among admitted freshmen has slightly declined overall at University of California schools. The percentage of Asian Americans among UC Berkeley’s admitted freshmen grew from 33.6% in fall 1996 to 40.5% in fall 2017. But it declined at UCLA and UC San Diego to about 35% last fall after surpassing 40% in 2009. UCLA has increased its proportion of African Americans and other underrepresented minorities despite Proposition 209 using aggressive outreach and recruitment. Under UC’s “holistic” admissions process, applicants are evaluated on 14 factors including grades, standardized test scores, high school coursework, special talents and academic achievement despite low income and other hardships. The Justice Department’s move follows several developments on affirmative action under Sessions that have taken it in the opposite direction of his predecessors in the Obama administration. Last month, the department rescinded Obama-era guidelines encouraging the use of race to determine admission to educational institutions and suggested race-neutral policies were better. The removal of the guidelines, which the department said was part of a wider effort to cut down government regulations, reinstated ones used under President George W. Bush. Advertisement Last year, the department also opened a separate investigation into allegations against Harvard’s affirmative action policies that were raised in a lawsuit filed by a coalition of Asian American groups in 2015. That investigation is pending. “This is a Justice Department that has fully abandoned its mission and is now waging an all-out assault on efforts to promote diversity,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, in a statement Thursday. Although the case focuses on allegations of discrimination against a minority group, it could establish precedent affecting affirmative action practices across the board. “At the heart of this case is the unjustified presumption that test scores alone entitle a student admission to Harvard, and the unsupported allegation that race drives admission decisions,” Clarke added.<doc-sep>[Read the statement of interest.] The Justice Department has increasingly used such statements of interest to intervene in civil rights cases. Before 2006, such statements appeared only seven times in civil rights-oriented disputes, according to a recent paper by law school student Victor Zapana. From 2006 to 2011, they were drafted in at least 242, almost all by the Obama administration on issues such as videotaping police brutality and ensuring that blind people and their service dogs have access to Uber. But the Trump administration is turning the same tool against affirmative action in college admissions, a major — and highly contentious — legacy of the civil rights era, and one that white conservatives have opposed for decades. In the past few years, the anti-affirmative action cause has been joined by Asian-Americans who argue that they are being held to a higher standard, losing out on coveted slots at places like Harvard as African-Americans, Latinos and other groups get a boost. A handful of states already ban public universities from relying on affirmative action, pushing several toward a model that takes socioeconomic factors into account instead of race. Public universities in California and Washington have tried to engineer class-based diversity in their student bodies, believing that giving a lift to lower-income students will end up bringing in more minority students as well. But these methods have not produced classes with an ethnic makeup that mirrors that of the states where they have been used, and many selective private universities continue to admit students partly on the basis of race — though, until Harvard was forced to detail its internal admissions policies recently, few could say how elite universities actually weighed applicants’ race. Now, universities that factor race into admissions have found a powerful new opponent in the Trump administration, which argued in its filing on Thursday that the court should deny Harvard’s request to dismiss the case before trial.<doc-sep>WASHINGTON — The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday formally expressed its support for a group of Asian Americans who are suing Harvard University, claiming that it discriminates against them in its admissions program. Their lawsuit is the latest effort by opponents of affirmative action to scale back programs that consider an applicant's race as one factor in deciding who can attend the nation's colleges and universities. Efforts to get the Supreme Court to end affirmative action have been unsuccessful, though the court has imposed additional restrictions. "No American should be denied admission to school because of their race," said Attorney General Jeff Sessions in announcing that the Justice Department filed a document known as a statement of interest, allowing the government to support one side in civil lawsuits between two private parties. In explaining its decision to enter the case, the Justice Department said, "Asian Americans face a significant disadvantage in Harvard's admissions program compared to applicants of other races." Harvard has failed to demonstrate that considerations of race as a last resort to achieve a goal of campus diversity and cannot explain how much weight it gives to an applicant's race, it said. The government's statement of interest said Harvard aims for the same racial demographics in each entering class, in spite of the Supreme Court's ban on quotas and racial balancing. Asian Americans made up 18 percent of the admitted classes in 2014 and 2015 and 20 percent in 2016 and 2017. Harvard has steadfastly denied that it violates the Supreme Court's affirmative action rulings. "Harvard College does not discriminate against applicants from any group in its admission processes," the university said, adding that it will "vigorously defend the right of Harvard and other universities to seek the education benefits that come from a class that is diverse on multiple dimensions." The lawsuit was filed in 2014 and has involved court fights over how much Harvard is obligated to reveal about the mechanics of its admissions practices. Though it is a private university, it receives millions in federal grants, requiring it to abide by federal civil rights laws that ban discrimination based on race and other factors. "Harvard has long since abandoned an admissions policy that purported to merely use race contextually to fill the last few seats in the entering freshman class. Harvard now labels every applicant by race on the claim that it is pursuing the so-called 'critical mass' diversity objective," the lawsuit said. The group suing Harvard, Students for Fair Admissions, is made up of Asian Americans and others who have been denied admission to Harvard, and is led by Edward Blum, a consistent opponent of affirmative action. His efforts were behind the Supreme Court's most recent affirmative action decisions involving the program at the University of Texas at Austin. The group's website seeks to hear from students who did not get into the schools of their choice. "Were You Denied Admission to College? It may be because you're the wrong race," the site says. The American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday morning it planned to file a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Harvard, citing the Trump administration's prior advocacy of 'race-blind' admissions policies.<doc-sep>The Trump administration on Thursday sided with Asian-American students suing Harvard University over the Ivy League school’s consideration of race in admissions. The Justice Department said in a court filing Thursday that the highly-selective school failed to demonstrate that it did not discriminate on the basis of race — the latest step in Team Trump’s effort to eliminate race as a factor in college admissions. The department’s “statement of interest” was in a case filed in 2014 by Students For Fair Admission, which argues that one of the world’s most prestigious universities uses subjective criteria to discriminate against Asian-American applicants with outstanding credentials. According to Harvard’s website, 22 percent of the Class of 2021 is Asian-American, while the US Asian-American population as a whole is 5.6 percent. In a statement to The Post, the university said Justice was “recycling the same misleading and hollow arguments that prove nothing more than the emptiness of the case against Harvard,” and denied that it discriminated in admissions. “Harvard does not discriminate against applicants from any group, and will continue to vigorously defend the legal right of every college and university to consider race as one factor among many in college admissions, which the Supreme Court has consistently upheld for more than 40 years,” the statement said. The Supreme Court permits colleges and universities to consider race in admissions decisions, but says it must be done in a narrowly designed way to promote diversity, and should be limited in time. Universities also have to show why their consideration of race is appropriate. But in Harvard’s case, Justice Department officials said, the university hadn’t explained how it used race in admissions and had not adopted meaningful criteria to limit the use of race. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said, “No American should be denied admission to school because of their race.” Sessions argued the school’s use of a “personal rating,” which includes highly subjective factors such as being a “good person” or “likeability,” may be biased against Asian-Americans. He said the school admitted that it scores Asian-American applicants lower on personal rating than other students, and argued that Harvard admissions officers manipulate the racial makeup of incoming classes. “The Supreme Court has called such attempts to ‘racially balance’ the makeup of a student body ‘patently unconstitutional,'” Sessions said in a statement. Edward Blum, president of SFFA, hailed the administration’s action. “We look forward to having the gravely troubling evidence that Harvard continues to keep redacted disclosed to the American public in the near future,” he said. The Justice Department’s court filing opposed Harvard’s request to dismiss the lawsuit before trial. The filing followed a July decision by the Justice and Education departments to abandon Obama-era guidelines that instructed universities to consider race in their admissions process to make the student body more diverse. Democrats criticized that decision, saying that the Trump administration was taking away protections for minorities. According to Harvard’s website, 22 percent of the Class of 2021 is Asian-American, while the US Asian-American population as a whole is 5.6 percent.<doc-sep>
(CNN) — The Justice Department offered a public show of support in court Thursday to a group suing Harvard for what it says is discrimination against Asian-American applicants to the elite university. A filing in the ongoing Massachusetts case is the Trump administration’s most significant entry into the debate over affirmative action and sets up a fight on the diversity policy that could have wide implications for higher education. “The record evidence demonstrates that Harvard’s race-based admissions process significantly disadvantages Asian-American applicants compared to applicants of other racial groups – including both white applicants and applicants from other racial minority groups,” the Justice Department said in court papers Thursday. “The evidence, moreover, shows that Harvard provides no meaningful criteria to cabin its use of race; uses a vague ‘personal rating’ that harms Asian-American applicants’ chances for admission and may be infected with racial bias; engages in unlawful racial balancing; and has never seriously considered race-neutral alternatives in its more than 45 years of using race to make admissions decisions.” Harvard has rejected the assertion that it sets caps on the number of Asian-American students, and admissions officials say they consider all aspects of applicants’ backgrounds and their ability to contribute to the academic setting. In a statement, Harvard said it was “deeply disappointed” with the Justice Department for siding with the group that is “recycling the same misleading and hollow arguments.” “Harvard does not discriminate against applicants from any group, and will continue to vigorously defend the legal right of every college and university to consider race as one factor among many in college admissions, which the Supreme Court has consistently upheld for more than 40 years,” the university said. The case is set to go to trial in Boston in October. Looking ahead to Supreme Court The Justice Department has for months signaled it may side with the group, Students for Fair Admissions, which was created by Edward Blum, a conservative advocate who has long fought affirmative action that gives blacks and Hispanics a boost. Justice Department officials are also conducting their own investigation into the Harvard admissions policy born from a similar complaint filed by a coalition of Asian-American associations. In the filing, known as a statement of interest, the Justice Department alleges Harvard has failed to prove that it does not unlawfully discriminate against Asian-Americans, and asks the court to rule against the university’s request to close the case before trial. Both sides have an eye toward the Supreme Court, which first allowed for racial affirmative action in a landmark 1978 case. The court last year upheld the race-conscious admissions program at the University of Texas in a tight, and closely-watched ruling. Announcing the filing, Justice Department officials said the government has a legal interest in the case because Harvard accepts millions of dollars each year in federal funding. 01:55 - Source: CNN Asian-Americans accuse Harvard of bias “No American should be denied admission to school because of their race. As a recipient of taxpayer dollars, Harvard has a responsibility to conduct its admissions policy without racial discrimination by using meaningful admissions criteria that meet lawful requirements,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said. The support from the Trump administration in the case came on the same day that a group of over 500 social scientists and scholars aligned itself with Harvard in an amicus brief, writing that Students for Fair Admissions is relying on “unreliable and isolated measures of merit” and “the myth of an Asian penalty” in admissions.