If affirmative action is a civil rights violation than surely admissions preferences for the majority white donor-related and legacy applicants must be too, advocates proposed in a federal civil rights complaint challenging Harvard’s legacy admissions filed Monday.
“There’s no birthright to Harvard,” said Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) Executive Director Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal. “As the Supreme Court recently noted, ‘eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’ … Your family’s last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.”
The complaint, filed with the U.S. Department of Education, alleges the legacy and donor admissions practices at Harvard have created “widespread violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964” by disadvantaging Black, Latinx and Asian American applicants. The filing urged the department to launch a federal investigation into Harvard’s practices and declare them illegal.
It was filed on behalf of the Chica Project, African Community Economic Development of New England and Greater Boston Latino Network by the Boston nonprofit LCR.
The move comes just a couple days after the Supreme Court ruled against Harvard and UNC, declaring the schools’ affirmative action, or race-based admissions, practices were unconstitutional.
In light of the schools’ newly restricted ability ability to give a hand to students from diverse backgrounds, pro-affirmative action advocates said “it is even more imperative now to eliminate policies that systematically disadvantage students of color.”
The NAACP also issued a call Monday for over 1,600 colleges and universities to end legacy preferences, eliminate “racially biased” entrance examinations and take other steps to promote diversity.
“It is our hope that our nation’s institutions will stand with us in embracing diversity, no matter what,” said NAACP President & CEO Derrick Johnson.
At Harvard, the LCR complaint outlines, 70% of donor-related and legacy applicants are white. Donor-related applicants were nearly 7 times more likely to be admitted than non-donor-related applicants in a sample from 2014-2019, LCR said, and legacies were nearly 6 times more likely to be admitted.
Only a quarter of Harvard’s white legacy and donor students would have been admitted without their preferential status, the complaint states, citing a 2019 National Bureau of Economic Research study.
“‘Removing legacy preferences increases the number of admits for each of the non-white groups,'” the complaint quotes from the study.
Legacy practices have been banned in many universities including all higher education institutions Colorado, the University of California, Johns Hopkins University and Amherst College, the complaint notes, and some such universities have reported a “positive effect on diversity.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to discontinue one practice that was impactful in creating a more equitable, multiracial democracy, and on the other hand, allow for a preference that allows wealthy, white individuals to hold positions of power they have for the past 200 years,” said Harvard senior Muskaan Arshad. “I think its unconscionable to most students. But it’s definitely an interesting conversation to have here where half of the people in the school are wealthy white legacies.”
A Harvard spokesperson said the school will not comment on the complaint, pointing back to the school’s statement following the affirmative action ruling expressing a commitment to “a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.”
“As we said, in the weeks and months ahead, the University will determine how to preserve our essential values, consistent with the Court’s new precedent,” Harvard Senior Communications Officer Nicole Rura wrote.
“I think legacy admissions is clearly the next step to target,” Arshad said. “Even with affirmative action gone, our goal is still to allow for diverse classrooms and equitable admissions process, and there are still ways to achieve that.”
