If a report in the NY Times is accurate, the Trump administration is getting ready to take on the most precious of liberal dogmas, the institutionalized racial discrimination in college admissions, aka affirmative action.
The Times reaches the conclusion that affirmative action will be under attack, even though the documents it has obtained for its reporting don’t actually say that. The Times reports, Justice Dept. to Take On Affirmative Action in College Admissions:
The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.
The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”
The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.
The document does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions policies. But the phrasing it uses, “intentional race-based discrimination,” cuts to the heart of programs designed to bring more minority students to university campuses.
There is the predictable freak out, particularly from virtue-signaling white liberals.
Race-based affirmative action has barely survived constitutional challenges in the courts, most recently in Fisher v University of Texas at Austin.
But just because it is legal to engage in institutional racial discrimination in college admissions doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
In fact the primary victims of race-based college admissions are people of Asian descent, occupying a place that Jews used occupy in campus admissions discrimination. It it well-documented that moving away from objective factors (grades, test scores) in the name of diversity means that applicants of Asian descent have to score substantially higher relative to other groups, even to whites. Lawsuits and administrative complaints have been filed alleging just such discrimination in admissions:
Murky, “holistic” admissions policies have shut out highly qualified Asian-American students at Ivy League schools for years, says a complaint that seeks federal intervention at Brown University, Dartmouth College and Yale University.The Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE) filed the complaint with the Departments of Justice and Education Monday, stating that as the population of college-age Asian Americans has grown in the past 20 years, their representation has leveled off or declined at Brown, Dartmouth and Yale. The group points the finger at the schools’ “highly subjective and discriminatory” admissions decisions.”The so-called ‘Holistic’ evaluation of applicants by Ivy League colleges disproportionately penalizes Asian-American applicants during the admission process, allowing admissions officers to unreasonably perceive Asian-Americans’ academic strengths as weaknesses and to unjustifiably give Asian-American students low scores in non-academic areas,” a summary of the complaint reads.
I agree with Chief Justice Robert’s sentiment that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
That such a concept is seen as heresy on campuses tells you how entrenched institutionalized racial discrimination has become.
UPDATE: So, was the NY Times report fake news? According to a statement released by DOJ, the initiative mentioned by the Times was specific to complaints by Asian Americans:
The Justice Department says it does not have broad plans to investigate whether university admissions policies discriminate against students based on race.Spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores says a job posting within the Civil Rights Division was related to a complaint filed by a coalition of 64 Asian-American associations in May 2015. They sued Harvard University, saying that school and other Ivy League institutions are using racial quotas to admit students other than high-scoring Asians.Flores says the department has not received or issued any further directive on university admissions in general. She adds that the department is “committed to protecting all Americans from all forms of illegal race-based discrimination.”
Well, if DOJ does not have a plan to try to eliminate institutionalized racial discrimination in admissions, it should.
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