[RaccoonFace]

From the NYT:

Quote:


President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have helped tilt the Justice Department to the right on civil rights issues.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.
The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

The document does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions policies. But the phrasing it uses, “intentional race-based discrimination,” cuts to the heart of programs designed to bring more minorities to university campuses.

Supporters and critics of the project said it was clearly targeting admissions programs that can give members of generally disadvantaged groups, like black and Latino students, an edge over other applicants with comparable or higher test scores.

The project is another sign that the civil rights division is taking on a conservative tilt under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It follows other changes in Justice Department policy on voting rights, gay rights and police reforms.

Roger Clegg, a former top official in the civil rights division during the Reagan and George Bush administrations who is now the president of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, called the project a “welcome” and “long overdue” development as the United States becomes increasingly multiracial.

“The civil rights laws were deliberately written to protect everyone from discrimination, and it is frequently the case that not only are whites discriminated against now, but frequently Asian-Americans are as well,” he said.


John Gore, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, in 2014.

But Kristen Clarke, the president of the liberal Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, criticized the affirmative action project as “misaligned with the division’s longstanding priorities.” She noted that the civil rights division was “created and launched to deal with the unique problem of discrimination faced by our nation’s most oppressed minority groups,” performing work that often no one else has the resources or expertise to do.

“This is deeply disturbing,” she said. “It would be a dog whistle that could invite a lot of chaos and unnecessarily create hysteria among colleges and universities who may fear that the government may come down on them for their efforts to maintain diversity on their campuses.”

The Justice Department declined to provide more details about its plans or to make the acting head of the civil rights division, John Gore, available for an interview.
“The Department of Justice does not discuss personnel matters, so we’ll decline comment,” said Devin O’Malley, a department spokesman.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the educational benefits that flow from having a diverse student body can justify using race as one factor among many in a “holistic” evaluation, while rejecting blunt racial quotas or race-based point systems. But what that permits in actual practice by universities — public ones as well as private ones that receive federal funding — is often murky.

Mr. Clegg said he would expect the project to focus on investigating complaints the civil rights division received about any university admissions programs.

He also suggested that the project would look for stark gaps in test scores and dropout rates among different racial cohorts within student bodies, which he said would be evidence suggesting that admissions offices were putting too great an emphasis on applicants’ race and crossing the line the Supreme Court has drawn.
Some of that data, he added, could be available through the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which did not respond to a request for comment.

The Supreme Court most recently addressed affirmative action admissions policies in a 2016 case, voting 4 to 3 to uphold a race-conscious program at the University of Texas at Austin. But there are several pending lawsuits challenging such practices at other high-profile institutions, including Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The Justice Department has not taken a position in those cases.

The pending start of the affirmative action project — division lawyers who want to work on it must submit their resumes by Aug. 9, the announcement said — joins a series of changes involving civil rights law since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

In a lawsuit challenging Texas’ strict voter identification law, the Justice Department switched its position, dropping the claim that the law was intentionally discriminatory and later declaring that the law has been fixed. Mr. Sessions has also made clear he is not interested in using consent decrees to impose reforms on troubled police departments and has initiated a sweeping review of existing agreements.

Last week, the Justice Department, without being asked, filed a brief in a private employment discrimination lawsuit. It urged an appeals court not to interpret the ban on sex-based discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as covering sexual orientation. The Obama administration had shied from taking a stand on that question.

Vanita Gupta, who ran the civil rights division in the Obama administration’s second term and is now president of the liberal Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, noted that the briefs in the Texas voter identification and gay-rights cases were signed only by Trump administration political appointees, not career officials, just as the affirmative action project will apparently be run directly by the division’s front office.

“The fact that the position is in the political front office, and not in the career section that enforces antidiscrimination laws for education, suggests that this person will be carrying out an agenda aimed at undermining diversity in higher education without needing to say it,” Ms. Gupta said.

The civil rights division has been a recurring culture-war battleground as it passed between Democratic and Republican administrations.

During the administration of George W. Bush, its overseers violated Civil Service hiring laws, an inspector general found, by filling its career ranks with conservatives who often had scant experience in civil rights law. At the same time, it brought fewer cases alleging systematic discrimination against minorities and more alleging reverse discrimination against whites, like a 2006 lawsuit forcing Southern Illinois University to stop reserving certain fellowship programs for women or members of underrepresented racial groups.

In 2009, the Obama administration vowed to revitalize the agency and hired career officials who brought in many new lawyers with experience working for traditional, liberal-leaning civil-rights organizations.

http://archive.is/GOlIb

[Leonard D Neubache]

Or go full shitlord.

Restructure the affirmative action to provide enrollments on a religious per capita basis.

(((Kvetching))) is sure to intensify.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

But wait, the judge from Hawaii hasn't voiced his opinion yet...

[Going strong]

Couple of hours ago, I was saying (after the delicious decision on the imminent removal of Maduro), that "I could take more winning"!
Well, I can't actually, it's too much fucking-of-the-Left for one day!

So, God-emperor was right! For indeed he had warned us: he would bring us so much winning, we would actually beg him to slow his pace! Too much winning for one day, I'm overwhelmed, have mercy Emperor, we're just humans!

Banning of trans, removal of Maduro, opening Affirmative Action for Whites and Asians! I personally can't keep the pace. "Win, win, win: Mister president it's too much!"

President Trump will fuck the Left in so many ways and on so many levels in the next three (plus 4) years, we can't even begin to imagine...

[Paracelsus]

Come on, Trump, I like this, but tear up Obama's Dear Colleague letter!

[heavy]

I'm as excited about the media and social media outrage as I am about the actual repealing of affirmative action.

[MMX2010]

I keep poking liberals on Twitter to read the article that RaccoonFace wrote, but they either refuse (90%) or they read it but cannot truly understand the article (10%).

Mr. Clegg's point that America has become increasingly multiracial, PLUS articles pointing to an overhaul of legal immigration based on skills, lets you know what's going on here.

First, God-Emperor Trump is going to argue that Blacks + Whites + Asians + Latinos is less diverse than Blacks + Whites + Asians + Latinos + Every Other Race and Nationality.

Second, God-Emperor Trump will examine the admission rosters of every college, and if it so happens...




Sorry.


If it so happens that Blacks and Latinos are over-represented compared to high IQ Russians, French, Germans, Malawis, and Saudis, then Blacks and Latinos will have to surrender their extra seats because America is a nation of diverse immigrants.

[frenchcorporation]

(08-02-2017 11:10 AM)MMX2010 Wrote:  

If it so happens that Blacks and Latinos are over-represented compared to high IQ Russians, French, Germans, Malawis, and Saudis, then Blacks and Latinos will have to surrender their extra seats because America is a nation of diverse immigrants

Some people are under the illusion that non-white people are the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action. But the actual facts tell a different story....

White women are the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action.
http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/17/affirma...an-anyone/

Quote:

In the coming days, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule in a potentially landmark case on the constitutionality of affirmative action. The original lawsuit was filed on behalf of Abigail Fisher, a woman who claims that she was denied admission to the University of Texas because she is white. But study after study shows that affirmative action helps white women as much or even more than it helps men and women of color. Ironically, Fisher is exactly the kind of person affirmative action helps the most in America today.

Another study shows that women made greater gains in employment at companies that do business with the federal government, which are therefore subject to federal affirmative-action requirements, than in other companies — with female employment rising 15.2% at federal contractors but only 2.2% elsewhere. And the women working for federal-contractor companies also held higher positions and were paid better.

Even in the private sector, the advancements of white women eclipse those of people of color. After IBM established its own affirmative-action program, the numbers of women in management positions more than tripled in less than 10 years. Data from subsequent years show that the number of executives of color at IBM also grew, but not nearly at the same rate.

So if actually implemented, this will result in less white women in colleage, and more of everyone else. If he also bans legacy admissions (the type of affirmative action thats never discussed as such), there will be even less white people in universities. Which isnt what I think they were aiming for.


It's pretty funny. Lot of republican legislature gets pushed through because their supporters think it'll hurt groups who arent them the most - when in facts its going to fuck themselves over the hardest.

Also - Legacy admittance into universities is affirmative action and is rarely labelled accordingly. If letting more people into universities because of their (black/brown/whatever) ancestry is affirmative action, then letting anybody into universties because of their ancestry is also affirmative action.

Something tells me this won't be addressed.

[Genghis Khan]

Is it supposed to be a bad thing that (white) women get shafted if affirmative action is removed?

1. Women now dominate college 60% to 40%
2. Women like to date at or preferably above their own 'level'
3. Women heavily go into social sciences, where they get indoctrinated with SJW bullshit and come out hardcore feminists with notch counts in the double digits

Fewer women in college? Sounds like a win to me

That said, it seems they're specifically targeting racial affirmative action, not gender or legacy based.

[TigerMandingo]

Anything that makes things worse for white American women is a win-win to me.

[MMX2010]

frenchcorporation Wrote:

Also - Legacy admittance into universities is affirmative action and is rarely labelled accordingly. If letting more people into universities because of their (black/brown/whatever) ancestry is affirmative action, then letting anybody into universties because of their ancestry is also affirmative action.

I won't post the Twitter exchange, but I easily defeat anyone who complains about Legacy Admissions.

The shortest argument is that American economic policy is the most important thing, because it determines everyone's wealth. The easiest way to prove that you understand the economy is to possess wealth, therefore Legacy Admissions are awesome.

There are some additional rhetorical statements for when the argument goes astray, but that's the central point.


Overall, I think this proposal should be tied with the RAISE ACT to predict how it'll be implemented. In short, both can be expected to replace poor Mexican immigrants with wealthier, smarter immigrants from all nations. (It probably won't be used to displace White women.)

[Disco_Volante]

Medical schools taking 50% women classes needs to stop. They're destroying healthcare for people by having so many doctors get pregnant and switch to parttime. They invest in 20+ years of education to create 1 doctor then the dumb bitches realize they don't like working 60-70 hours a week for the rest of their lives and quit.

[godzilla]

Legacy admissions are great at private institutions. The schools benefit in that aspect. However, for state schools, which are heavily subsidized by states (at least the ones I'm aware of), legacy admissions should be banned outright. I'd rather the government not be involved in college in the first place though.

[Off The Reservation]

[TooFineAPoint]

(08-02-2017 12:21 PM)frenchcorporation Wrote:  

So if actually implemented, this will result in less white women in colleage, and more of everyone else.

Good.

(08-02-2017 12:21 PM)frenchcorporation Wrote:  

Lot of republican legislature gets pushed through because their supporters think it'll hurt groups who arent them the most

[Kona]

(08-02-2017 08:30 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  



But wait, the judge from Hawaii hasn't voiced his opinion yet...

Well here I am.

Normally, I have mixed feelings about affirmative action. However....

My sister recently graduated from a very expensive university in California. She has a computer science degree now, and got perfect grades.

It seems to me though, the skill she really honed is smoking dope and listening to "Bad bitches is whats i like" and "i got panda's in Atlanta" repeatedly. Instagram she's got covered, but Microsoft office and QuickBooks present a challenge.

Im beginning to wonder if checking the Pacific Islander box might have helped her along? That group is very underrepresented, and maybe she was kept on to keep the numbers up? Maybe the school just sucks.

There's my ruling.

Aloha!

[Hypno]

Trump still needs to rescind executive orders that require companies that do business with the government to have affirmative action plans. With one stroke of a pen he can accomplish something concrete. This for now is just a press release.

[Mentavious]

(08-02-2017 05:38 PM)Kona Wrote:  

(08-02-2017 08:30 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  



But wait, the judge from Hawaii hasn't voiced his opinion yet...

Well here I am.

Normally, I have mixed feelings about affirmative action. However....

My sister recently graduated from a very expensive university in California. She has a computer science degree now, and got perfect grades.

It seems to me though, the skill she really honed is smoking dope and listening to "Bad bitches is whats i like" and "i got panda's in Atlanta" repeatedly. Instagram she's got covered, but Microsoft office and QuickBooks present a challenge.

Im beginning to wonder if checking the Pacific Islander box might have helped her along? That group is very underrepresented, and maybe she was kept on to keep the numbers up? Maybe the school just sucks.

There's my ruling.

Aloha!

Pics?

[Leonard D Neubache]

(08-02-2017 01:33 PM)Disco_Volante Wrote:  

Medical schools taking 50% women classes needs to stop. They're destroying healthcare for people by having so many doctors get pregnant and switch to parttime. They invest in 20+ years of education to create 1 doctor then the dumb bitches realize they don't like working 60-70 hours a week for the rest of their lives and quit.

Yeah, it's bad when they bail out. But you know what's worse?

When they keep "working".

[Samseau]

Affirmative action is actually one of the least problematic parts of our education system.

The entire guaranteed loans thing fucks it up way worse. If schools were on the hook for unpaid student loans, most Blacks, Latinos and Women would never even step foot in most universities.

The schools know the money is backstopped by the gov, so they shuffle in tons of under qualified candidates under the guise of "diversity" (so they can virtue signal all day long) but when these same people drop out or fail to get a job upon graduation, the universities pretend they never existed in the first place.

The college system is broken from top to bottom, and focusing on affirmative action is but a small start. Even if they were to eliminate race based applications, the schools would then focus on giving preference to "lower-income" students so they can get that sweet loan money. More White males would get fucked over instead of Blacks/Latinos/Women. How is this an improvement?

Still, fixing affirmative action would definitely help things out in the dating market (although our generation is still fucked), but at this point addressing affirmative action is merely treating a symptom and not the root cause. It's the free money which corrupts shit the most. If they took away the backstopped loans, affirmative action would disappear overnight.

[eradicator]

(08-03-2017 08:23 AM)Samseau Wrote:  

Affirmative action is actually one of the least problematic parts of our education system.

The entire guaranteed loans thing fucks it up way worse. If schools were on the hook for unpaid student loans, most Blacks, Latinos and Women would never even step foot in most universities.

The schools know the money is backstopped by the gov, so they shuffle in tons of under qualified candidates under the guise of "diversity" (so they can virtue signal all day long) but when these same people drop out or fail to get a job upon graduation, the universities pretend they never existed in the first place.

The college system is broken from top to bottom, and focusing on affirmative action is but a small start. Even if they were to eliminate race based applications, the schools would then focus on giving preference to "lower-income" students so they can get that sweet loan money. More White males would get fucked over instead of Blacks/Latinos/Women. How is this an improvement?

Still, fixing affirmative action would definitely help things out in the dating market (although our generation is still fucked), but at this point addressing affirmative action is merely treating a symptom and not the root cause. It's the free money which corrupts shit the most. If they took away the backstopped loans, affirmative action would disappear overnight.

What would be better? Expansions to trade schools? A lot of people apply to college and go because they got accepted even though they really aren't suited to it, and then get a near worthless liberal arts degree and have a lot of debt. If they went to a trade school and started working at 20, they would be making money right away and have good productive skills and be in much better shape starting out in life.

Sure, there is something to be said for getting the college experience, but you can do that to some extent at a community college.

[Sonoma]

This is wonderful news.

I don't understand some of the complaints about this that I've seen here

[Nalka]

I say burn the whole concept of "university" down. Set up a nationwide set of standardized tests administered through the libraries and let people study online. Anyone can take any class they want at any time and then take the test to get certified in that subject. They should be working straight out of high school and taking classes getting certs as they go along. Constant learning and keeping up with the latest industry developments.

No student loans, no taking 5 or more years to party and waste taxpayer money. No leftist indoctrination. No studying useless crap.

[WalterBlack]

(08-02-2017 12:50 PM)Genghis Khan Wrote:  

Fewer women in college? Sounds like a win to me

How about replacing American women with slim women from Eastern Europe and Asia?

(08-03-2017 08:23 AM)Samseau Wrote:  

Affirmative action is actually one of the least problematic parts of our education system.

The entire guaranteed loans thing fucks it up way worse. If schools were on the hook for unpaid student loans, most Blacks, Latinos and Women would never even step foot in most universities.

The schools know the money is backstopped by the gov, so they shuffle in tons of under qualified candidates under the guise of "diversity" (so they can virtue signal all day long) but when these same people drop out or fail to get a job upon graduation, the universities pretend they never existed in the first place.

The college system is broken from top to bottom, and focusing on affirmative action is but a small start. Even if they were to eliminate race based applications, the schools would then focus on giving preference to "lower-income" students so they can get that sweet loan money. More White males would get fucked over instead of Blacks/Latinos/Women. How is this an improvement?

A lot of "diverse" candidates get a free ride, so I'm not sure how changing the loan situation would help.

Asian Americans get fucked over too. I told an Indian-American kid to say "Other" instead of "Asian" when he applies for college.

Affirmative Action Battle Has a New Focus: Asian-Americans

Quote:

By most standards, Austin Jia holds an enviable position. A rising sophomore at Duke, Mr. Jia attends one of the top universities in the country, setting him up for success.

But with his high G.P.A., nearly perfect SAT score and activities — debate team, tennis captain and state orchestra — Mr. Jia believes he should have had a fair shot at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Those Ivy League colleges rejected him after he applied in the fall of 2015.

It was particularly disturbing, Mr. Jia said, when classmates with lower scores than his — but who were not Asian-American, like him — were admitted to those Ivy League institutions.

“My gut reaction was that I was super disillusioned by how the whole system was set up,” Mr. Jia, 19, said.

Students like Mr. Jia are now the subject of a lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions by imposing a penalty for their high achievement and giving preferences to other racial minorities.

The case, which is clearly aimed for the Supreme Court, puts Asian-Americans front and center in the latest stage of the affirmative action debate. The issue is whether there has been discrimination against Asian-Americans in the name of creating a diverse student body. The Justice Department, which has signaled that it is looking to investigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” may well focus on Harvard.

The Harvard case asserts that the university’s admissions process amounts to an illegal quota system, in which roughly the same percentage of African-Americans, Hispanics, whites and Asian-Americans have been admitted year after year, despite fluctuations in application rates and qualifications.

“It falls afoul of our most basic civil rights principles, and those principles are that your race and your ethnicity should not be something to be used to harm you in life nor help you in life,” said Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that is suing Harvard.

His group, a conservative-leaning nonprofit based in Virginia, has filed similar suits against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas at Austin, asserting that white students are at a disadvantage at those colleges because of their admissions policies.

The federal government potentially has the ability to influence university admissions policies by withholding federal funds under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids racial discrimination in programs that receive federal money.

In many ways, the system the lawsuit is attacking is one Harvard points to with pride. The university has a long and pioneering history of support for affirmative action, going back at least to when Derek Bok, appointed president of Harvard in 1971, embraced policies that became a national model.

The university has extended that ethos to many low-income students, allowing them to attend free. Harvard has argued in a Supreme Court brief that while it sets no quotas for “blacks, or of musicians, football players, physicists or Californians,” if it wants to achieve true diversity, it must pay some attention to the numbers. The university has also said that abandoning race-conscious admissions would diminish the “excellence” of a Harvard education.

Melodie Jackson, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said that the university’s admissions policy was fair; that it looked at each applicant “as a whole person,” consistent with standards established by the Supreme Court; and that it promoted “the ability to work with people from different backgrounds, life experiences and perspectives.”

Harvard’s class of 2021 is 14.6 percent African-American, 22.2 percent Asian-American, 11.6 percent Hispanic and 2.5 percent Native American or Pacific Islander, according to data on the university’s website.

For the Harvard case, initially filed in 2014, Mr. Blum said, the federal court in Boston has allowed the plaintiffs to demand records from four highly competitive high schools with large numbers of Asian-American students: Stuyvesant High School in New York; Monta Vista High School in the Silicon Valley city of Cupertino; Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.; and the Boston Latin School.

The goal is to look at whether students with comparable qualifications have different odds of admission that could be correlated with race and how stereotypes influence the process. A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges, a difference some have called “the Asian tax.”

The lawsuit also cites Harvard’s Asian-American enrollment at 18 percent in 2013, and notes very similar numbers ranging from 14 to 18 percent at other Ivy League colleges, like Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Yale.

In contrast, it says, in the same year, Asian-Americans made up 34.8 percent of the student body at the University of California, Los Angeles, 32.4 percent at Berkeley and 42.5 percent at Caltech. It attributes the higher numbers in the state university system to the fact that California banned racial preferences by popular referendum in 1996, though California also has a large number of Asian-Americans.

The data, experts say, suggests that if Harvard were forbidden to use race as a factor in admissions, the Asian-American admissions rate would rise, and the percentage of white, black and Hispanic students would fall.

Harvard argued that Mr. Blum’s group lacked standing to sue, but the court rejected the motion in June, based on signed declarations from several Asian-American applicants to Harvard who were rejected and who are members of the organization.

A year ago, the Supreme Court upheld a University of Texas admissions plan that allows race and ethnicity to be considered as one of many factors in admission. But some legal experts noted that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in his dissent, said the Texas plan discriminated against Asian-Americans, and they saw that as a future theme to be pursued by opponents of affirmative action.

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, echoed that view on Wednesday.

“The idea of discriminating against Asians in order to make room for other minorities doesn’t seem right as a matter of principle,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

Mr. Dershowitz said that investigating discrimination against whites, however, raised a different set of questions.

“Generically, whites have not been the subject of historic discrimination,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “When you start getting into subgroups of whites, then the question becomes a more subtle one.”

The Harvard lawsuit likens attitudes toward Asian-Americans to attitudes toward Jews at Harvard, beginning around 1920, when Jews were a high-achieving minority. In 1918, Jews reached 20 percent of the Harvard freshman class, and the university soon proposed a quota to lower the number of Jewish students.

That history, Mr. Dershowitz said, made affirmative action opponents wary of admissions policies that resulted in a college population reflecting a group’s share of the general population.

Some Asian-American students believe Harvard’s system has enriched their educational experience. Emily Choi, who will be a junior with a history and literature concentration at Harvard this fall, said the university had been her dream school since she visited in seventh grade.

She graduated from Ardsley High School in Westchester County, N.Y., as editor of the newspaper, president of the Latin Club and vice president of the student council with a 4.0 G.P.A. and 35 out of 36 on the ACT.

She was not aware of concerns about discrimination against Asian-Americans until she arrived on campus and heard about the lawsuit, she said, and she was glad of the diversity she found at Harvard.

“I firmly believe in affirmative action,” Ms. Choi said. “The diversity at Harvard has been key to my learning, and I think that if there weren’t so many people of different backgrounds, I wouldn’t be forced to think about things in new ways.”

Mr. Jia, who is not a party to the lawsuit against Harvard, graduated in 2016 from Millburn High School in New Jersey.

He applied to 14 colleges, including Duke, Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Rutgers, New York University, Georgetown and the University of Pennsylvania. His SAT score was 2340 out of 2400, his G.P.A. was 4.42 and he took 11 Advanced Placement courses.

In addition to playing tennis, participating in the debate team and playing violin in the state orchestra, he did advocacy for an Asian-American student group.

“All I know is that my student profile and all the extracurriculars I was involved in, and the grades I achieved were, I think, sufficient to get into a couple of the schools I applied to,” he said.

The experience has left Mr. Jia questioning the admissions process. “I felt that the whole concept of meritocracy — which America likes to say it exercises all the time — I felt that principle was defeated a little in my mind,” he said.

But, he added, he is coming to terms with the results. “I didn’t want to blame everything on one reason.”

Of course, the woman sees no fucking problem...

[WalterBlack]

Harvard University's 2017 intake 'majority non-white' for first time

Quote:

More than half of Harvard University's next student intake will not be white, for the first time in its 380-year history, official figures show.

The varsity, which has educated more US presidents than any other, will take 50.8% of its freshmen from minority groups.

That compares to 47.3% last year.

Asian Americans make up 22.2%, followed by African Americans at 14.6%, Hispanic or Latino students at 11.6%, and Native American or Pacific Islanders at 2.5%.

The milestone figures come just days after Harvard was drawn into a row over affirmative action between the US justice department and the New York Times.

On 1 August, the paper claimed the justice department was preparing to sue campuses with affirmative action admissions policies, as it feels they are biased against white applicants.

It said resources from the department's civil rights division would be used for the legal action, citing an internal memo.

However, the justice department insisted it had no plans to investigate whether colleges pick their entrants based on race.

It said the document seen by the paper, which referred to "a new project on [...] intentional race-based discrimination" was actually about a 2015 complaint by a coalition of Asian-American groups.

The complaint accused Harvard and other Ivy League colleges of using quotas that keep out Asians with high test scores.

Rachael Dane, a spokesperson for Harvard, said the university was "committed to enrolling diverse classes of students".

"To become leaders in our diverse society, students must have the ability to work with people from different backgrounds, life experiences, and perspectives," she said.

"Harvard's admissions process considers each applicant as a whole person, and we review many factors, consistent with the legal standards established by the US Supreme Court."

The Supreme Court has outlawed the use of racial quotas in college admissions, but ruled that universities can consider race as part of a "holistic review" of applicants.

Roger Clegg, president of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity and a former top official in the justice department's civil rights division, told the BBC he felt affirmative action was outdated.

"I understand the visceral sense that African Americans have been treated badly in this country for a very long time, and right after we got rid of Jim Crow [segregation laws], it wasn't such a bad idea to give special consideration over someone who was a recent beneficiary of Jim Crow. But now we're in 2017. Jim Crow is long gone and we're talking about giving Latinos a preference over Asian Americans. What possible sense does that make?" he said.

An alternative view comes from Brenda Shum, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. She told the BBC that students of all colours benefited from a more diverse college experience.

"...We owe it to our students to provide them with integrated learning environments that are reflective of the world in which they're living," she argued.