Justice accuses Yale of discrimination
The Justice Department on Thursday accused Yale University of violating civil rights law by discriminating against Asian American and white applicants, an escalation of the Trump administration’s moves against race-based admissions policies at elite universities.
The charge, coming after a two-year investigation, is the administration’s second confrontation with an Ivy League school; two years ago, it publicly backed Asian American students who accused Harvard in a lawsuit of systematically discriminating against them.
The department’s finding could have far-reaching consequences for the ongoing legal challenges to affirmative action, which are expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court. Some conservative groups have long opposed affirmative action, and a handful of states have banned such policies at public universities.
‘‘There is no such thing as a nice form of race discrimination,’’ Eric Dreiband, assistant attorney general for the civil rights division, said in a statement announcing the Justice Department’s move against Yale. ‘‘Unlawfully dividing Americans into racial and ethnic blocks fosters stereotypes, bitterness and division.’’
The Justice Department said that Yale had violated Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action by using race not as one of many factors in deciding which applicants to invite to the freshman class, but as a predominant or determining factor in admissions — an effect that was multiplied for competitive applicants.
It directed Yale to suspend the consideration of race or national origin in its admissions process for one year, at which time, the university would need to seek clearance from the government to begin using race as a factor again, the department said.
Yale pledged to fight the order, saying Thursday that it would hold fast to its admissions process. In a statement, the university said that it looks at the ‘‘whole person’’ when deciding whether to admit a student — not just academic achievement, but interests, leadership and ‘‘the likelihood that they will contribute to the Yale community and the world.’’
‘‘The department’s allegation is baseless,’’ said Peter Salovey, Yale’s president. ‘‘At this unique moment in our history, when so much attention properly is being paid to issues of race, Yale will not waver in its commitment to educating a student body whose diversity is a mark of its excellence.’’
The Justice Department’s action comes about a month before arguments are set to be heard in the appeal of the case challenging Harvard’s admissions practices. The timing is so close that the department’s finding is likely to color the debate both inside and outside the courtroom.
Dreiband, the assistant attorney general, said the evidence in the civil rights division’s investigation indicated that Yale was racially balancing its classes by admitting similar proportions of each major racial group year after year and that it had not made a serious effort since at least the 1970s to find another way of building a diverse student body. ‘‘Our investigation indicates that Yale’s diversity goals appear to be vague, elusory and amorphous,’’ he said in a four-page letter explaining the department’s finding.
While some applicants — mainly African American and Hispanic students — were favored by Yale because of their race and ethnicity, others were disfavored, Dreiband said, and it was mainly Asian American and white applicants who were ‘‘unduly bearing the brunt of the preferences.’’
The system that Yale, Harvard and others point to with pride has become a national model.
Harvard has argued in a district court brief that while it sets no quotas, if it wants to achieve true diversity it must pay some attention to the numbers of students it admits of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. The university has also said that abandoning race-conscious admissions would diminish the ‘‘excellence’’ of a Harvard education.