College diversity advocates say affirmative action under attack at Yale
New Haven — The U.S. Department of Justice’s efforts to remove race as a factor in college admissions is part of a wider campaign to dismantle affirmative action, according to advocates of the longstanding policy.
And local admissions officers say considering race and ethnicity in an application helps create a diverse student body, which benefits the university, the student and society as a whole.
On the other hand, Edward Blum, president of the group that lost a suit against Harvard University, said affirmative action is a “fuzzy concept” that should be used only to assist those who are at a socioeconomic disadvantage.
On Thursday, the Justice Department notified Yale University that it considered Yale to be in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or national origin. Colleges must comply with Title VI in order to receive millions of dollars in federal funds.
However, John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said Friday the group supports racial considerations in admitting college students because, like other ethnic groups, “Asian Americans benefit from affirmative action. It’s a myth that Asian Americans oppose affirmative action. The evidence does not support discrimination against our community.”
Yang’s group sided with Harvard in the lawsuit brought by Asian American students who had been rejected from the university. “For us the telling point about this investigation and this letter is the fact that the Department of Justice’s ultimate remedy is that race should not be used in the college admission process.”
That would be unfair to Asian Americans as well as to other groups, he said. “Race is a defining characteristic.” Not being able to talk about that “really denies a core part of your humanity,” he said.
He said opponents of using race as a factor in admissions seek to drive a wedge between ethnic groups “and trying to somehow suggest that this is not about race and this is somehow about merit. It really is a dog whistle at times to suggest that some people are more qualified than others . ... There has been no evidence to show that unqualified applicants are being accepted into these universities.”
A webpage of statistics about Yale’s admissions states that of 1,554 members of the class of 2023 (rising sophomores), half are male and half female, 51 percent identify as members of a minority group, 25.9 percent are Asian American, 15 percent Hispanic and 11.8 percent African American.
Blum said while the courts have allowed the use of race in college admissions, “there are lots of hoops that a university has to jump through before it can use race . ... Before a university uses race in its admissions policy to achieve racial diversity, it must use some nonracial means to achieve that diversity,” such as increasing the number of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
Jennifer Lee, a sociology professor at Columbia University, said the argument that race should not be considered disregards the different experiences of racial groups in the United States, creating “a gross false equivalency.”
“Asian immigrants coming to the United States are extremely highly educated,” and more educated than Asians who have not immigrated, she said. “They’re also more significantly highly educated than the U.S. mean.”
Affirmative action was developed as “a policy to restore racial justice to the descendants of slaves,” she said.
“When these cases came before the Department of Justice during the Obama administration, they were not even taken seriously.” The investigation of Yale is “the first time in our history that the Department of Justice is entertaining these claims in any kind of serious manner.”