Harvard University faces a legal suit that tackles its students’ admissions after the Supreme Court rejected affirmative action in college admissions; activists want to abolish legacy admissions.
A Boston-based nonprofit, Lawyers for Civil Rights, has filed a lawsuit against Harvard University on behalf of Black and Latino communities, Newsweek reported.
The nonprofit argues that 70 percent of Harvard’s legacy and donor-related applicants are white, despite the fact that legacy admissions have historically favored white families.
Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) filed the complaint with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the United States Department of Education (DOE), alleging that Harvard University’s admissions procedure violates Title XI of the Civil Rights Act. The lawsuit will investigate the university’s legacy admissions policy.
According to the lawsuit, Harvard’s acceptance rate for legacy applicants between 2014 and 2019 was “almost six times higher than the acceptance rate for non-legacy applicants.”
“Such preferences are not justified by any educational necessity because Harvard cannot show that the use of these preferences is necessary to achieve any important educational goal, the lawsuit states, adding, “The benefit is derived simply from being born into a particular family.”
In response to the Supreme Court’s decision to appeal affirmative action, Harvard released a statement welcoming minority students and saying that its university is a place of opportunity and diversity.
“Last week, the University reaffirmed its commitment to the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.
Harvard has a long history of using affirmative action in its admissions process. The university argues that affirmative action is necessary to create a diverse student body, which is essential for a rigorous and intellectually stimulating education.
In 2014, a group of white students sued Harvard and the University of North Caroliina, alleging that the universities’ affirmative action policies discriminated against them on the basis of race. The case went to trial in 2018, and in 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against Harvard.
On June 29, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action at colleges and universities across the country, ruling that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unconstitutional and severely restricting a policy that had long been a pillar of higher education, The New York Times reported.
“The Harvard and U.N.C. admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the equal protection clause,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping and lack meaningful end points.”
