“The New Jews of Harvard.”

HARVARD’S ASIAN PROBLEM:  Jason Riley has an oped in the Wall Street Journal titled “The New Jews of Harvard.”  Harvard is likely on the first of many elite, liberal/progressive universities (redundant, I know) to now find their affirmative action admissions policies biting them in the tuchus.

A coalition of more than 60 Chinese, Indian, Korean and Pakistani organizations is asking the U.S. departments of Justice and Education to investigate possible racial bias in undergraduate admissions at Harvard. The complaint announced on Friday, echoing a lawsuit filed by another group in November, accuses Harvard and other elite institutions of holding Asian-Americans to far higher standards than other applicants, a practice used to limit the number of Jewish students at Ivy League schools in the first half of the 20th century. . . .

A 2009 paper by Princeton sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford found that “Asian-Americans have the lowest acceptance rate for each SAT test score bracket, having to score on average approximately 140 points higher than a white student, 270 points higher than a Hispanic student and 450 points higher than a black student on the SAT to be on equal footing.”

It’s too early to tell whether the Obama administration will take action or wait for the legal process to play out.

I’m pretty sure we know that the Obama Administration won’t be spending its resources to fight for equality for Asian Americans, as it has evinced a single-minded obsession in pursuing only racial matters that affect blacks.
The Asian-American coalition’s lawsuit could be the nail on the coffin for affirmative action, though the Supreme Court may nail it down sooner if it grants review in the new round of litigation in University of Texas v. Fisher.  As Chief Justice Roberts said in the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

32

Posted at 8:57