Ed Blum is at it again. After succeeding in dampening (but not blotting out) racial preferences in public university admissions, he is now looking for potential plaintiffs to sue three schools: Harvard, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In a Pope Center article, Harry Painter discusses the reasons why Blum, the former stockbroker who instigated Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, is going after those universities.

In the case of UNC, the school’s amicus brief in the Fisher case revealed that the school chooses to use “holistic” admissions policies—of which race is one consideration—even though it could have used the race-neutral Texas “Top-Ten” program to achieve diversity. According to Blum, using racial preferences when it could have avoided them makes the school vulnerable.

As for Harvard, Blum is convinced (as are many others) that Harvard has a quota on Asian-Americans. Painter brings up interesting history about quotas on Jewish students at Harvard in the 1920s—quotas that may have been less restrictive than those on Asian-Americans today. He cites Jerome Karabel, author of The Chosen, a book about admissions to elite schools. Karabel found that in order to keep down the population of highly qualified Jewish students, the Ivy League introduced all manner of preferences that are still in use today. Painter writes that those included: “legacy preferences, geographic preferences, recommendation letters, interviews, essays, and consideration of extracurricular activities.”