Those who worry some applicants receive unfair advantages in the college admissions process, have no fear. America’s legacy-admission-in-chief, President Donald Trump, and his administration are here to save the day.
The United States Department of Justice circulated an internal memo in early August calling for attorneys interested in “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.” In other words, the department posted a job for lawyers to work on perceived unfair affirmative action practices, despite their legality.
While this may seem slightly reasonable on the surface, a deeper look reveals just how flawed such investigations are. Considering race in college admissions is not actually a crime. And Trump’s more recent actions since the release of the August memo shed light on the administration’s true motivations behind the memo: to appease its conservative voter base regardless of how feasible these investigations might be.
According to Cornell Law School, affirmative action is “a set of procedures designed to eliminate unlawful discrimination between applicants, remedy the results of such prior discrimination, and prevent such discrimination in the future.” Race, then, can be a factor in admissions processes. This differs from racial quotas, which set requirements to admit a certain number of people from specific racial backgrounds.
Attacking policies that supposedly discriminate against majority students is sure to be fruitless, as the Supreme Court has affirmed that race can factor in college admissions. This was shown in cases such as Regents of University of California v. Bakke, which found that affirmative action is constitutional so long as actual racial quotas are not established, and Fisher v. University of Texas, which upheld this precedent.
It therefore appears the department’s investigation is not meant to look into anything worthwhile in college admissions, but rather to delegitimize the accomplishments of minority students by signaling that their admission comes at the expense of supposedly more deserving students.
This is because there is little chance the Department of Justice would even be successful in finding any universities violating the law, said UCLA lecturer Claudia Peña.
“Debates on affirmative action and the related three decades of litigation are sometimes referred to as culture wars,” Peña said. “Instigating culture wars was the backbone of the Trump campaign, and (Attorney General) Jeff Sessions was complicit in that strategy.”
Peña added that nearly 30 years of litigation has upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action and universities are given a lot of independence in their admissions practices, making it extremely unlikely an investigation would even find a program completely flouting the law.
After initial media opposition to the memo, the Department of Justice signaled they were really investigating discrimination against Asian-Americans. A recent lawsuit filed against Harvard alleges the university established illegal racial quotas that unfairly discriminate against Asian-Americans and the Justice Department may allegedly focus on Harvard’s admissions processes.
But if the lawsuit is truly all the Justice Department intends to investigate, it would have stated so explicitly, instead of serving up the memo as a job posting. To accept this explanation would be to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt that it is not targeting racial minorities.
And given Trump’s rocky relationship with race, it is difficult to allow his administration that. Last weekend, the president used a slur when speaking of black NFL players peacefully protesting injustice toward African-Americans in the legal system by kneeling during the national anthem. Weeks earlier, he described some of those protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, a group that included neo-Nazis and white nationalists, as “very fine people.”
These sorts of actions raise reasonable questions about Trump’s views on race in society. But they play well among his conservative base, which tends to feel that schools give preference to minorities at the expense of whites. A decision to investigate “race-based discrimination” in college admissions processes makes sense in this context then, despite the Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of such practices in the past.
Of course, Harvard’s admissions processes may be worth examining, as it seems it may have established quotas. But if that is the department’s intention, it should indicate as such, rather than vaguely refer to it as “race-based discrimination” – a phrase that can be easily interpreted as playing politics at the expenses of minority students. And given the Trump administration’s recent track record with race, perhaps reaching such a conclusion is part of the plan.
And certainly, a large number of Americans would prefer to do away with affirmative action: A July 2016 Gallup poll found around 70 percent of Americans believe colleges should admit applicants based solely on merit, rather than take into account applicants’ races and ethnicities to promote diversity. But in that case, the process should be handled through democratic means; for instance, California Proposition 209, approved by voters in 1996, prohibited affirmative action statewide. Affirmative action should ultimately be the people’s choice, not the choice of unelected government officials, especially considering the Supreme Court affirmed its constitutionality multiple times.
Legal action attacking “race-based discrimination” is sure to waste both time and taxpayer dollars that could be both be spent on more pressing legal issues. As the Supreme Court has made clear, fundamentally changing affirmative action requires a democratic process.
Despite one’s views on affirmative action, the internal memo demonstrates that the Department of Justice is focused on winning political points without taking actual meaningful action.
As an Asian American, I’m not afforded the same rights/benefits as other races, and we are the minority, in the greatest sense of the word. Too often do I see hard working, successful Asian Americans get overlooked for employment and promotional opportunities for no other reason than we’ve met our quota on your people. Sterotypes about Asian Americans and decisions made based on race quotas are abound among college enrollment and workforce hiring decisions. It’s not right and it has to stop somewhere. To call legal action to combat this discrimination an appeasment for conservatives is a direct, racist attack on Asian Americans and our right to equal opportunity and further marginilizes our people as a minority. SHAME ON YOU.
Check your white privilege. yes, even an asian can have it! /s
So now, Asian Americans are under attack by some libtard categorizing Asian Americans as “White.” I guess according to your standards, Asian Americans aren’t a minority. Your dismissive tone is derived from a racial animus contrived of your own failures and projected onto Asian Americans for whatever demented reason as to why you believe Asian Americans don’t deserve equal opportunity. Check your ignorance, and please don’t ever say such a racist this again.
do you know what the “/s” means? It means sarcasm. I was agreeing with you!
Your logic is flawed and maybe circular. Trump has been problematic about race, so when he does anything about race, it’s problematic. Then that new problematic thing becomes evidence that his next on race must be problematic.
If Harvard has a negative quota on Asians, that’s illegal. But so many of the elite universities are running a con game in which they disguise quotas as other admissions criteria. They used to (and maybe still do) say that instead of a quota they wanted to achieve a “critical mass” of each minority group. Strangely enough, the critical mass for blacks was the same percent as the quota for blacks, and the quota for Native Americans was the same percent as the quota for Native Americans, and, well, you get the picture. Whatever they are doing now, sometimes they call it “holistic admissions” or some such bushwa, but you can take to the bank that they are trying to achieve the quota levels of admissions for each ethnicity.
This was so poorly written I don’t even know how to respond. There is so much context missing here, including significant details about the state’s existing ban on affirmative action.
Basically the takeaway from this article is: “Discriminating on the basis of race, in favor of black and brown people is okay, because Trump or whatever.”
In any case, this collection of letters and words and commas is so sloppy that it leaves readers reasonably confident that the author simply needed to make a deadline. Do some more research, and lose the “because Trump” defense to your opinions.
This is the worst opinionated piece of “journalism” I’ve seen. As a liberal myself, I’m ashamed. What happened to decent journalism?