The US Department of Justice on Thursday accused Yale University of illegally discriminating against Asian-American and white undergraduate applicants through its admission policies, the latest attack by the Trump administration on affirmative action policies.
In a letter to Yale’s lawyers, the Justice Department threatened a civil lawsuit unless the Connecticut-based private university agreed not to use “race or national origin” in its upcoming 2020-21 undergraduate admissions cycle. It gave Yale until August 27 to comply.
“If Yale proposes to consider race or national origin in future admissions cycles (beyond 2021), it must first submit to the Department of Justice a plan demonstrating that its proposal is narrowly tailored as required by law,” the letter said.
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In response, the Ivy League school said it was “proud” of its admissions programme and refused to change them on the basis of what it called a “meritless” and “hasty” allegation.
Affirmative action policies are measures designed to increase access to higher education for systematically marginalised groups, such as black applicants.
While the US Supreme Court has previously ruled that academic institutions receiving federal funding – of which Yale is one – can consider race in certain circumstances during the admissions process, the Justice Department said the university’s affirmative action policies were not “narrowly tailored” and said its diversity goals were not “sufficiently measurable”.
“Yale’s race discrimination imposes undue and unlawful penalties on racially disfavored applicants, including in particular Asian-American and White applicants,” Justice Department officials wrote in their letter, adding that Asian-American and white applicants had one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African-American applicants with “comparable academic credentials”.
Specifically, the Justice Department said that Yale’s admissions practices violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, colour or national origin” in any programme or activity that receives federal funding.
The findings are the result of a two-year investigation triggered by a complaint from Asian-American groups, the department said in a statement, without naming the groups.
“There is no such thing as a nice form of race discrimination,” said Eric Dreiband, assistant attorney general for civil rights. “Unlawfully dividing Americans into racial and ethnic blocs fosters stereotypes, bitterness and division.”
In a statement, Yale “categorically” denied the allegation and accused the Justice Department of reaching its determination before allowing the school to provide all the information it had requested.
“Had the department fully received and fairly weighed this information, it would have concluded that Yale’s practices absolutely comply with decades of Supreme Court precedent,” university spokeswoman Karen Peart said.
“We are proud of Yale’s admissions practices, and we will not change them on the basis of such a meritless, hasty accusation,” she said.
The Justice Department’s accusations follow a similar effort to challenge the affirmative action policies at Harvard University, an attempt that failed last autumn when a federal judge ruled that the Ivy League school’s admissions programme, while imperfect, passed “constitutional muster”.
The department threw its support behind that lawsuit – brought by an anti-affirmative action advocacy group called Students for Fair Admissions – and in February filed an amicus brief in support of the group’s appeal against the decision.
In July 2018, the Trump administration moved to rescind several Obama-era guidelines encouraging educational institutions to consider applicants’ race when weighing their applications, guidance that education and justice officials said went “beyond the requirements of the Constitution”.
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