Elite Universities: Liars or Cheats?

After Brown vs Board of Education was decided in 1954, the Democrat-run segregationist South engaged in “massive resistance,” requiring years of follow-up court cases and Department of Justice action to enforce desegregation. It was understood that after the Supreme Court ruled against race-based affirmative action admissions last year in the Harvard and UNC cases that Democrat-run institutions would engage in massive resistance once again.

And already we have the circumstantial evidence. Several elite universities have released the demographic profiles of their newest incoming class—the first admitted since the decision—with several showing no change in the racial composition of their new freshman class. (The notable exception is MIT, where the proportion of Asian students went up considerably.)

In their pleadings to the Supreme Court in the Harvard case, Harvard and other elite universities claimed that without the latitude to consider race as a primary factor in admission, they would not be able to achieve their “diversity” goals for their student body. But now they are boasting that they are achieving their diversity goals anyway.

So either universities lied to the Court last year, or they are cheating now. (Or have decided surreptitiously to move to essentially something like lottery or open-enrollment admissions based on reduced criteria to broaden their pool of students they can admit.)

Edward Blum, the hero of the Harvard and UNC cases, is having none of it. He has written Duke, Princeton, and Yale putting them on notice that they risk lawsuit if they are defying the Supreme Court, noting that “your racial numbers are not possible under true race neutrality.” Here’s one of the letters:

If there is a second Trump Administration, the civil rights division of the Justice Department should begin a very aggressive investigation of elite universities, both for admissions practices, and for not protecting the civil rights of their Jewish students—if they still have any Jewish students next year.

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