Recently, Students for Fair Admissions, a new nonprofit organization, filed a lawsuit alleging that Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American applicants. Every year, Harvard admits roughly the same proportion of white, black, Latino, and Asian students. Never will you see a bumper crop of students from any one ethno-racial group that will scramble what appear to be Harvard’s finely balanced racial demographics. You’d almost think that this remarkable stability was the product of a deliberate design. And indeed, that is precisely what Students for Fair Admissions claims is going on: In the name of ethno-racial diversity, Harvard is, in effect, imposing a limit on Asian-American enrollment. This quota forces high-achieving Asian-American applicants to compete not against all students irrespective of race, but against one another. The result is that at least some Asian Americans who would have been admitted under a colorblind admissions process have been forced to go elsewhere. Harvard insists that there is no quota system at work, and that crafting a diverse cohort of undergraduate students is central to achieving its educational mission.
But there is no question that Students for Fair Admissions has hit a nerve. Critics of affirmative action are often accused of defending white privilege, or failing to be sufficiently sympathetic to the challenges facing those who belong to racial minorities. By focusing on Asian Americans who’ve been disadvantaged by racial preferences, Students for Fair Admissions is suggesting that, in their efforts to achieve diversity, Harvard and schools like it have in fact been punishing minority strivers. Those who lead elite colleges and universities are generally unfazed by accusations of “reverse discrimination” against whites. The accusation that they are imposing a quota on Asian-American students has an entirely different resonance — for one thing, it brings to mind the quotas that once limited the numbers of Jewish students, a comparison that Students for Fair Admissions makes explicitly in its complaint.
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