Harvard Has Strong Chance To Prevail Over Trump In Immigration Lawsuit

2025/05/30 Leave a comment

Hopefully, will lead to another defeat for the Trump administration’s self-harming policies:

Harvard University has a strong chance to prevail in its immigration battle with the Trump administration over the right to enroll international students. After Harvard refused the Trump administration’s demands for the federal government to take over the university’s hiring, admissions and governance policies, the Department of Homeland Security removed the school’s certification to admit international students. The high-profile action against Harvard came as the Trump administration’s nominee for director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said he would eliminate Optional Practical Training and STEM OPT, another measure educators warn could cause international student enrollment at U.S. universities to plummet.

The Trump Administration’s Immigration Decision On International Students

On May 22, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem sent a letterto Harvard: “I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program [SEVP] certification is revoked.”

Without the certification, a school cannot enroll international students.

Enacted after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the SEVP rules and certification process were intended to encourage schools to report when students dropped out or no longer maintained a required course load and to remove fraudulent or illegitimate schools. The rules were never intended to be used to punish universities for not complying with unrelated demands by ending their ability to enroll international students….

The Wall Street Journal asked, “Is Trump Trying To Destroy Harvard?” in a recent editorial. “The Trump Administration has frozen billions in federal grants to Harvard University, threatened its tax-exempt status and sought to dictate its curriculum and hiring,” wrote the Journal. “Now the government seems bent on destroying the school for the offense of fighting back. And for what purpose? That’s how we read the Department of Homeland Security’s move Thursday to bar foreign students from attending the world-renowned institution.”

The editorial labeled the move against international students, a quarter of Harvard’s student body, “whose futures are suddenly in disarray,” to be “a short-sighted attack on one of America’s great competitive strengths: Its ability to attract the world’s best and brightest.”…

Source: Harvard Has Strong Chance To Prevail Over Trump In Immigration Lawsuit

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Horn: The Return of the Big Lie: Antisemitism is winning

2024/02/19 Leave a comment

Long read with concluding thoughts applicable to all groups on what universities and other institutions need to do:

It is fairly obvious what Harvard and other universities would need to do to turn this tide. None of it involves banning slogans or curtailing free speech. Instead it involves things like enforcing existing codes of conduct regarding harassment; protecting classroom buildings, libraries, and dining halls as zones free from advocacy campaigns (similar to rules for polling places); tracking and rejecting funding from entities supporting federally designated terror groups (a topic raised in recent congressional testimony regarding numerous American universities); gut-renovating diversity bureaucracies to address their obvious failure to tackle anti-Semitism; investigating and exposing the academic limitations of courses and programs premised on anti-Semitic lies; and expanding opportunities for students to understand Israeli and Jewish history and to engage with ideas and with one another. There are many ways to advocate for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence that honor the dignity and legitimacy of both indigenous groups and the need to build a shared future. The restoration of such a model of civil discourse, which has been decimated by heckling and harassment, would be a boon to all of higher education.

Harvard has already begun signaling change in this direction: The university recently reiterated and clarified rules regarding the time, place, and manner of student protests. For Harvard to take more of these steps would be huge, but I have struggled to understand why all of them still feel so small. Perhaps it’s because the problem is a multi-thousand-year fatal flaw in the ways our societies conceive of good and evil—and also because somewhere deep within me, I know what has been lost. There was a time, not so very long ago, when we didn’t have to prove our right to exist.

Among the mountains of evidence that Jewish students sent me, one image has stayed in my mind. There are videos of crowds chanting “Long live the intifada!” inside Harvard’s Science Center, and “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!” in Harvard Yard, along with other places equally familiar from my student days. But I keep coming back to the crowds marching and screaming in front of Harvard Law School’s Langdell library, because Langdell is a sacred place for me. On my 22nd birthday, in 1999, when I was a senior at Harvard, a law student I’d met at Hillel took me up through Langdell’s maintenance passageways to the library’s rooftop, where he asked me to marry him. I said yes.

I watched the video of the students marching and screaming in front of Langdell, and in an instant I remembered everything: studying in campus libraries for my Hebrew- and Yiddish-literature courses, talking for hours with Muslim and Christian and progressive and conservative classmates, inviting friends of all backgrounds to join me at Hillel, scrupulously following the Jewish tradition of “argument for the sake of heaven” in even the most heated debates, gathering for Shabbat dinners crowded with hundreds of students—and over those long and beautiful dinners, falling in love. My classmates and I often disagreed about the most important things. But no one screamed in our faces when we wore Hebrew T-shirts on campus. No one shunned us when we talked about our friends and family in Israel, or spat on us on our way to class. No crowds gathered to chant for our deaths. No one told us that there should be no more Jews. That night, my future husband and I worried only about getting in trouble for sneaking up to the library roof.

Source: THE RETURN OF THE BIG LIE: ANTI-SEMITISM IS WINNING

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Derek Penslar, Harvard Jewish studies professor controversy: This typifies what’s broken in antisemitism debates.

2024/01/29 Leave a comment

Good reflections:

It is with a heavy heart that I come to you asking you to care about something happening at Harvard.

I, too, have mocked the sheer quantity of reporting and writing and takes about what happens at a certain university outside of Boston. But this week’s Cambridge-based brouhaha neatly sums up the politicization of the conversation around antisemitism and the struggle against it.

Harvard recently announced two task forces: one on combating antisemitism and one on combating Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias. The university announced Derek Penslar, a faculty professor of Jewish history who directs the undergraduate program in that field, as co-chair of the task force on antisemitism. Shortly thereafter, some commentators denounced him for having signed an open letter that referred to Israel as an “apartheid regime” and for phrases from a book of his that was published this year. Billionaire Bill Ackman tweeted that Harvard was on a “path of darkness.” Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard and former U.S. treasury secretary, called on Penslar to resign. Some went so far as to call the professor an antisemite.

I do not know Derek Penslar, and whether or not he spends his time as co-chair of a task force on antisemitism at Harvard makes very little difference to me, as does what happens at Harvard generally. However, this particular sequence of events has implications beyond Harvard. The row matters not just for Jewish studies scholars, or those of us who write often about Jewish politics, but for anyone who seeks to understand antisemitism historically and in our present moment, so that they might combat it—which is to say, anyone who takes the reality of antisemitism seriously.

There have been a few lines of attack on Penslar, and there are thus a few issues at hand. First, there is the notion that he called Israel a “regime of apartheid.” In fact, Penslar, in the summer of last year, signed on to a letter by “academics, clergy, and other public figures from Israel/Palestine and abroad” who sought to “call attention to the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” That sentence included the line “There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.”

One can agree or disagree with this assessment, or with the decision to sign an open letter, but as Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky put it to the Harvard Crimson, “You have to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism to suggest that Derek Penslar is not a good fit for this role.” He added, “When you deliberately conflate the two, you utterly silence criticism of Israel, and you utterly silence pro-Palestinian speech—and that we can’t tolerate, not at a university in a free society.”

Others have said that while they take no issue with his scholarship, he isn’t right for this particular role. “I have no doubt that Prof Penslar is a profound scholar of Zionism and a person of good will without a trace of personal anti-Semitism who cares deeply about Harvard,” tweeted Summers. “However, I believe that given his record, he is unsuited to leading a task force whose function is to combat what is seen by many as a serious anti-Semitism problem at Harvard.” Summers went on to say that Penslar has “publicly minimized Harvard’s anti-Semitism problem, rejected the definition used by the US government in recent years of anti-Semitism as too broad, invoked the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analyzing Israel.” Although that’s all well and good for an academic, “for the co-chair of an anti-Semitism task force that is being paralleled with an Islamophobia task force it seems highly problematic.”

Summers’ argument is a long way of saying that while all of this is fine for scholarship, it feels wrong. It feels as if Penslar isn’t taking antisemitism seriously. But shouldn’t the scholarship be used to guide the sentiment? And shouldn’t the scholarship inform the struggle? Leaving aside that it seems strange to suggest that a professor of Jewish studies would downplay antisemitism for the sake of it, shouldn’t this task force’s conclusion be guided by fact? Or is the point of the task force to confirm what Summers already thinks? If its goal is the latter, that’s a bigger problem than Penslar’s appointment. And that’s true of all of us, not only those of us on a campus: that we should try to separate out the facts from our feelings and fear.

Finally, and as egregiously, there is the fact that Penslar’s critics evidently combed through his scholarship for phrases they could present as antisemitic. “Lessons in how NOT to combat antisemitism, Harvard edition,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League. “Start by naming a professor who libels the Jewish state and claims that ‘veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization’ to your antisemitism task force. Absolutely inexcusable. This is why Harvard is failing, full stop.” This is a reference to Penslar’s 2023 book Zionism: An Emotional State, which is roughly 300 pages long and which looks at the emotions that have shaped Zionism, as they have—per the book’s own blurb—all national movements. The New York Post, which pulled out the “veins of hatred” line, also noted that Penslar wrote, “Jewish culture was steeped in fantasies (and occasionally, acts) of vengeance against Christians.”

I am not sure whether the focus on this line was supposed to be damning, but if it was: Yes, Jewish culture has moments of revenge fantasy. For example, Purim, which we will celebrate in about two months, concludes with Jewish vengeance. Exploring themes like vengeance or hatred is not an endorsement of seeing Jews through that lens; it’s part of the work of studying Jewish history, as it would be for any group’s history.

Penslar’s lines were cherry-picked and taken out of context, as the American Academy for Jewish Research has pointed out, but there is a larger point, too, which is that any rigorous work on Jews—like any rigorous work on literally any people, anywhere in the world, at any point in history—will feature moments in which individuals or the collective acted in ways that some might consider less than flattering, if not downright abhorrent.

None of that makes antisemitism acceptable. If a person really cares about the study of and fight against antisemitism, they need to be able to hold in their minds both the nuanced realities of history and present-day politics and the rich and varied tapestry that is Jewish existence, as well as that antisemitism is unacceptable. To write off the former as somehow in conflict with the latter is grossly unfair to scholarship—and it pretends that we can fight antisemitism in a vacuum, divorced from the real world. But it’s the real world in which real antisemitism exists. It isn’t only anti-intellectual and cynical. It’s also counterproductive to the critics’ stated goal.

Source: Derek Penslar, Harvard Jewish studies professor controversy: This typifies what’s broken in antisemitism debates.

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McWhorter: Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

2024/01/09 Leave a comment

Of note:

Since Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard University on Tuesday, it has become an article of faith among some of her supporters and other observers that she was targeted, criticized and essentially driven from the job largely because of her race. The idea is that the people who questioned her abilities and academic integrity — be they Harvard donors who found fault with her leadership after Oct. 7 or conservative activists who led an inquiry into plagiarism in her scholarly work — were marked and even motivated by animus toward a Black woman attaining such a degree of power and influence.

The Rev. Al Sharpton denounced Gay’s resignation as “an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling.” Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wrote that the attacks against Gay “have been unrelenting & the biases unmasked.” Harvard’s Corporation, or governing board, noted the “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol.” And Gay herself, writing in The Times last week, referred to “tired racial stereotypes about Black talent,” and described herself as an “ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety” due to her status as “a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution.”

But I don’t think the notion that racism was substantially to blame for Claudine Gay’s trouble holds up.

As both Gay and Harvard note, she received openly racist hate mail. This is repulsive. But however awful it must have been for Gay to endure their abuse, those people did not force her resignation.

Nor does it seem that Gay was ousted on the basis of her race in the aftermath of her Dec. 5 testimony before Congress on the topic of antisemitism on campus. Of three university presidents who attended, only one resigned under duress shortly after the hearing, and she — Liz Magill of Penn — was white.

No, the charge that ultimately led to Gay’s resignation was plagiarism, of which more than 40 alleged examples were ultimately unearthed. And plagiarism and related academic charges have of course also brought down white people at universities many times. Ward Churchill was fired from the University of Colorado for academic misconduct, including plagiarism, in 2007 in the wake of his controversially assailing people working in the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns.” The president of the University of South Carolina, Robert Caslen, resigned thanks to a plagiarism episode in 2021. And the president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned due to questions of data manipulation just last July.

For many, the central issue seems to be that Gay’s plagiarism would not have been uncovered at all were it not for the efforts of conservative activists, which is true. The question then is whether the people who led the charge to oust Gay from her job — principal among them the right-wing anti-critical race theory crusader Christopher Rufo and the billionaire financier and Harvard donor Bill Ackman — were acting out of racial animus, or even an opposition to Black advancement.

And here things get slightly more complicated. Rufo and Ackman are unabashedly opposed to what both perceive as an ongoing leftward drift at elite universities such as Harvard. And both are opposed to the D.E.I. — or “diversity, equity and inclusion” — programs that are increasingly prominent on campuses, within corporations, and elsewhere. According to Ackman, D.E.I. is “not about diversity” but rather is “a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed.” Rufo and Ackman both believed that, in accordance with the precepts of D.E.I., Gay had been appointed as Harvard president more for her skin color than for her professional qualifications.

To analyze this position as mere racism, though, is hasty. No one is trading in “stereotypes” of Black talent by asking why Gay was elevated to the presidency of Harvard given her relatively modest academic dossier and administrative experience. It was reasonable to wonder whether Gay was appointed more because she is a Black woman than because of what she had accomplished, and whether this approach truly fosters social justice. There was a time when the word for this was tokenism, and there is a risk that it only fuels the stereotypes D.E.I. advocates so revile.

To put it succinctly: Opposing D.E.I., in part or in whole, does not make one racist. We can agree that the legacy of racism requires addressing and yet disagree about how best to do it. Of course in the pure sense, to be opposed to “diversity,” opposed to “equity” and opposed to “inclusion” would fairly be called racism. But it is coy to pretend these dictionary meanings are what D.E.I. refers to in modern practice, which is a more specific philosophy.

D.E.I. programs today often insist that we alter traditional conceptions of merit, “decenter” whiteness to the point of elevating nonwhiteness as a qualification in itself, conceive of people as groups in balkanized opposition, demand that all faculty members declare fealty to this modus operandi regardless of their field or personal opinions, and harbor a rigidly intolerant attitude toward dissent. The experience last year of Tabia Lee, a Black woman who was fired from supervising the D.E.I. program at De Anza College in California for refusing to adhere to such tenets, is sadly illustrative of the new climate. (Like Ackman, she believes that what he calls the “oppressor/oppressed framework” of D.E.I. contributes to campus antisemitism by defining Jews as “oppressors.”)

D.E.I. advocates may see their worldview and modus operandi as so wise and just that opposition can only come from racists and the otherwise morally compromised. But this is shortsighted. One can be very committed to the advancement of Black people while also seeing a certain ominous and prosecutorial groupthink in much of what has come to operate under the D.E.I. label. Not to mention an unwitting condescension to Black people.

Try this thought experiment: Harvard appoints “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo to become the new president of Harvard. She comes equipped with the strongest D.E.I. credentials imaginable, but with a very slender academic record. Do you imagine that conservative activists would sit back contentedly, merely because she’s white?

Or take a non-hypothetical example: After a successful tenure as the president of Smith College, Ruth Simmons became the first Black woman president of an Ivy League School when she took over Brown in 2001. Yet I am aware of no conservative crusade against her during her decade-plus in that office — despite the fact that she led a yearslong campuswide examination of the school’s role in the slave trade.

The idea that a menacing right-wing mob sits ever in wait to take down a Black woman who achieves a position of power is a gripping narrative. But its connection to reality is — blissfully — approximate at best. It is facile to dismiss opposition to modern D.E.I. as old-school bigotry in a new guise. The lessons from what happened to Professor Gay are many. But cops-and-robbers thinking about racial victims and perpetrators will help answer few of them.

Source: Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , , , ,

Education Dept. Opens Civil Rights Inquiry Into Harvard’s Legacy Admissions

2023/07/27 Leave a comment

Logical result of the affirmative action decision, applying it to class and privilege of legacy admissions:

The Education Department has opened a civil rights investigation into Harvard University’s legacy admissions policy, inserting the federal government directly into a fierce national debate about wealth, privilege and race after the Supreme Court gutted the use of affirmative action in higher education.

The inquiry into one of the nation’s richest and most prestigious universities will examine allegations by three liberal groups that Harvard’s practice of showing preference for the relatives of alumni and donors discriminates against Black, Hispanic and Asian applicants in favor of white and wealthy students who are less qualified.

The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights has powerful enforcement authority that could eventually lead to a settlement with Harvard or trigger a lengthy legal battle like the one that led to the Supreme Court’s decision to severely limit race-conscious admissions last month, reversing a decades-long approach that had increased chances for Black students and those from other minority groups.

The move by the Biden administration comes at a moment of heightened scrutiny of college admissions practices following the ruling, which has resurfaced long-simmering anger about the advantages that colleges often give to the wealthy and connected.

Harvard gives preference to applicants who are recruited athletes, legacies, relatives of donors and children of faculty and staff. As a group, they make up less than 5 percent of applicants, but around 30 percent of those admitted each year. About 67.8 percent of these applicants are white, according to court papers.

After the court’s decision, President Biden said legacy admission policies expand “privilege instead of opportunity.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, tweeted that the practice is “affirmative action for the privileged.” Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina and a presidential candidate, called for Harvard to eliminate “preferential treatment for legacy kids.”

At Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Connecticut, President Michael S. Roth announced earlier this month the end of legacy admissions at his school, saying the practice was a distraction and “a sign of unfairness to the outside world.” The federal inquiry comes after a formal complaint filed by three groups earlier this month.

Lawyers for the groups — the Chica Project, the African Community Economic Development of New England, and the Greater Boston Latino Network — said Harvard’s practice gives an undeserved leg up to the children of wealthy donors and alumni.

“It is imperative that the federal government act now to eliminate this unfair barrier that systematically disadvantages students of color,” Michael Kippins, a litigation fellow at Lawyers for Civil Rights, said when the complaint was filed.

The Education Department said in a statement that “the Office for Civil Rights can confirm that there is an open investigation of Harvard University under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Title VI is a part of federal law that prohibits discrimination, exclusion from participation or denial of benefits “on the ground of race, color or national origin.”

Nicole Rura, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said in a statement that the university was already reviewing the way it admits students to ensure it is in compliance with the law after the court’s decision.

“Our review includes examination of a range of data and information,” she said, adding that the university will continue to “strengthen our ability to attract and support a diverse intellectual community.”

Ms. Rura added: “As this work continues, and moving forward, Harvard remains dedicated to opening doors to opportunity and to redoubling our efforts to encourage students from many different backgrounds to apply for admission.”

Harvard’s legacy preferences have been investigated before.

In the 1980s, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights investigated allegations that Asian American applicants were being discriminated against in favor of white students, according to court papers. The investigation blamed the difference in admission rates on legacy preferences, and found that the university had legitimate reasons for favoring legacies.

The Harvard trial that led to the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision revealed just how important legacy admissions are to Harvard. The plaintiffs described the final round of admissions, called the lop. Applicants on the cusp of admission or rejection were placed on a list that contained only four pieces of information: legacy status, recruited athlete status, financial aid eligibility and race. Based on this information, the admissions committee would decide which finalists to cut, or lop.

Harvard and other universities have defended legacy admissions.

They argue that giving preference to the children of alumni helps build a valuable sense of loyalty and belonging, and spurs alumni to volunteer their time and give money to the university, which can be used for scholarships. Harvard argued at trial that overall, legacy applicants were highly qualified.

But critics of legacy admissions said the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision underscores the need to end those preferences as well.

“Let’s be clear — legacy and donor admissions have long served to perpetuate an inherently racist college admissions process,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. “Every talented and qualified student deserves an opportunity to attend the college of their choice. Affirmative action existed to support that notion. Legacy admissions exist to undermine it.”

A newly released study by a group of economists based at Harvard found that legacies at elite colleges were more qualified overall than the average applicant. But even when comparing applicants who were similar in every other way, legacy applicants still had an advantage. The study, by Opportunity Insights, which studies inequality, also raised the question of whether, by scuttling practices like legacy admissions, colleges could potentially diversify the leadership ranks of American society.

On Wednesday, Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, plan to reintroduce legislation that would bar universities from giving preferential treatment to the children of alumni and donors.

A poll released last year by the Pew Research Center found that 75 percent of the people surveyed believed that legacy preferences should not be a factor in college admissions.

In his concurring opinion in the Harvard case, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch took a swipe at Harvard for its legacy admissions.

“Its preferences for the children of donors, alumni, and faculty are no help to applicants who cannot boast of their parents’ good fortune or trips to the alumni tent all their lives,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “While race-neutral on their face, too, these preferences undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants the most.”

Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in the Harvard case, submitted a statistical analysis in court finding that Harvard could come close to achieving the racial diversity it wanted if it eliminated preferences for children of alumni, donors and faculty, and increased preferences for low-income applicants.

Harvard resisted, saying it would not get the academic caliber it wanted.

About 70 percent of legacy applicants admitted to Harvard are white, according to a 2019 study by Peter Arcidiacono, an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions.

Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, sounded a cautionary note on Tuesday. He suggested that however appealing, ending the tradition of legacy admissions might not be as simple as it seemed, given an absence over the years of related litigation brought by organizations representing minority groups.

“Like a significant majority of all Americans, S.F.F.A.’s members hope that colleges and universities end legacy preferences,” Mr. Blum said in a statement.

Officials at the Education Department declined to discuss the possible outcomes of the investigation, citing rules about not commenting on open investigations.

The vast majority of similar cases are resolved by reaching a resolution with the university to address the concerns of the department, according to Art Coleman, managing partner of EducationCounsel, which advises colleges and universities.

If a resolution cannot be reached, the matter can be referred to the Justice Department, which can initiate litigation and follow normal litigation rules. A case may also go to an administrative hearing, with the ultimate potential sanction being withholding all federal funds.

“That almost never happens,” Mr. Coleman said, because it would deprive tens of thousands of students of educational opportunities.

The Office of Civil Rights has an obligation to investigate plausible claims, Mr. Coleman said. “That’s not, as it might be couched, some judgment that’s being made for political reasons,” he said. “O.C.R.’s got an obligation under its regulations to investigate any complaint that states a viable legal claim with sufficient facts behind it.”

Source: Education Dept. Opens Civil Rights Inquiry Into Harvard’s Legacy Admissions

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Appeals Court Rules Harvard Doesn’t Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants

2020/11/14 Leave a comment

Of note (will be appealed to SCOTUS where, given Trump appointments, may be overturned):

A federal appeals court in Boston has ruled Harvard doesn’t intentionally discriminate against Asian American applicants in its admissions process.

The panel of judges upheld a federal district court’s decision from last year, teeing up a possible case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch, who wrote Thursday’s decision, agreed with the lower court that “the statistical evidence did not show that Harvard intentionally discriminated against Asian Americans.”

Students for Fair Admissions, an advocacy group, first filed its lawsuit in 2014, saying that Harvard’s race-based considerations for applicants discriminated against Asian American students in process.

“Today’s decision once again finds that Harvard’s admissions policies are consistent with Supreme Court precedent, and lawfully and appropriately pursue Harvard’s efforts to create a diverse campus that promotes learning and encourages mutual respect and understanding in our community,” a spokeswoman for Harvard told NPR.”As we have said time and time again, now is not the time to turn back the clock on diversity and opportunity.”

Proponents of ending race-based considerations at U.S. universities were unfazed by Thursday’s decision and plan to bring the case to the Supreme Court, according to Edward Blum, the conservative strategist behind SFFA.

Blum said in a statement to NPR member station GBH that he plans to ask the Supreme Court to end the consideration of race in admissions at Harvard and all other universities.

The question of how much race should be a factor in college applicants is a hotly contested one. President Trump’s administration has challenged colleges on using race in admissions policies, claiming such practices violate federal law. Last month, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Yale University, saying its policies violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yale has said the lawsuit is “baseless.”

Wen Fa, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in the Harvard case, said Asian Americans are harmed by the school’s admissions rules.

“The Supreme Court’s intervention is needed so that universities comport with” federal law, Fa said.

Stella Flores, an associate professor of higher education at New York University, said she hopes the court will rely on decades of research and data that show the benefits of such policies. Race is but one factor within the broad and “holistic admissions policy” at Harvard and other schools, she said.

Flores and Fa say the new conservative majority of the Supreme Court makes predicting whether the justices will take up the case difficult.

The court has previously decided on similar questions. It upheld race-based admissions policies in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, as well as the 2013 and 2016 Fisher v. Univ. of Texas at Austin decisions.

In Grutter, the justices were asked to determine whether the University of Michigan Law School’s use of racial preferences in student admissions violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment or Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In the 5-4 Grutter opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said race-based admissions policies should be for a limited time only, Fa said.

That phrasing may be enough for the current court to take up the case, he said.

Source: Appeals Court Rules Harvard Doesn’t Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants

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ICYMI: No New International Students At Harvard Due To Immigration Rules No New International Students At Harvard Due To Immigration Rules

2020/07/28 Leave a comment

Of note:

In a stunning announcement, a Dean of Harvard told first-year international students they could not come to Harvard this fall because the Trump administration has not changed immigration rules on online instruction. The setback for students came only a week after a Harvard and MIT lawsuit persuaded the administration to withdraw guidance that would have forced out returning international students whose universities do not hold in-person classes for health reasons.

On July 21, 2020, Harvard Dean Rakesh Khurana wrote to all Harvard students to share a message sent to first-year international students. “I am writing today to share the difficult news that our first-year international students will not be able to come to campus this fall,” wrote Dean Khurana. “Despite the Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] division’s decision to withdraw the directive that would have prohibited currently enrolled international students in the United States from taking an all-online course load this fall, this reversal does not apply to our newly admitted international students who require F-1 sponsorship. At present, any incoming student who received a Form I-20 to begin their studies this fall will be unable to enter the U.S. in F-1 status as course instruction is fully remote.”

Under ICE regulations, “For F-1 students enrolled in classes for credit or classroom hours, no more than the equivalent of one class or three credits per session, term, semester, trimester, or quarter may be counted toward the full course of study requirement if the class is taken online or through distance education and does not require the student’s physical attendance for classes, examination or other purposes integral to completion of the class.” (Emphasis added.)

When ICE issued guidance on March 9, 2020, that allowed currently enrolled international students to continue online because of the health crisis, it did not change the regulation nor address new students (it was the middle of the semester). The July 6, 2020, guidance required at least some in-person classes and included both new and returning international students. When ICE withdrew that July 6, 2020, guidance, the status quo became the guidance in place before March 9, 2020, as interpreted by universities, which means that the long-standing regulation (an incoming international student is not permitted a visa if more than 3 credit hours are remote) remains in effect for new international students. That will be the case unless the Department of Homeland Security makes clear another policy is in effect.

“We are deeply disappointed with the Department of Homeland Security’s  failure to provide updated and responsive guidance to colleges and universities as we requested they do on July 17,” said Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, in an interview. “New international students should be allowed to enter the United States to pursue their education. Many of these students have spent months – and more likely years – of preparation to start their education at our institutions. Their absence from the U.S. hurts all students and will have lasting effects. It undermines our nation’s standing as the destination of choice for international students. We will be looking to see what actions can be taken.”

Harvard is also pursuing additional options. “The University is working closely with members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation to extend the online exemption to newly admitted students and ensure that this flexibility remains in place for the duration of the public health emergency,” wrote Dean Khurana. “Unfortunately, we don’t anticipate any change to the policy in time for the fall semester.”

Dean Khurana said in his message that while the university explored options that allowed for “some in-person instruction as a way to enable first-year international students to obtain an F-1 Visa and join us on campus,” it was rejected “given the unpredictability of current government policies and the uncertainty of the Covid-19 crisis.” In addition to the health issues that prompted Harvard to go online in the fall, the university was concerned about putting new international students in a situation where they entered the U.S. but were forced to leave and could not return to their home country.

“Given this development, our first-year international students should consider the following two options: You can start your Harvard experience from home, taking courses remotely,” wrote Dean Khurana. “We have worked hard to create a robust program for all of our students to learn online, and we hope you will consider this option. Alternatively, you may defer the start of your time at Harvard.”

The 2020-2021 academic year may be a historically low year for international students coming to the United States. “The enrollment of new international students at U.S. universities in the Fall 2020-21 academic year is projected to decline 63% to 98% from the 2018-19 level, with between 6,000 to 12,000 new international students at the low range, and 87,000 to 100,000 at the high range,” according to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy.

“The decline of as many as 263,000 students from the 2018-19 academic year total of approximately 269,000 new international students would be the lowest level of new international students since after World War II when the numbers started to be tracked,” notes the analysis. “The 12,000 level represents new international students if only new students from Mexico and Canada enrolled. Given uncertainties surrounding even Mexican and Canadian students, the most pessimistic forecast would put the number of new enrolled international students at only half the 12,000 level.”

At present, the administration has not responded to university requests to issue clear guidance on the admission of first-time international students. If the Trump administration expressed a keen interest in facilitating the entry of international students, analysts note, it could have put forward more flexible policies and worked closely with universities and international students. That has not been the case. As a result, new international students will not be coming to Harvard or, it appears, many other U.S. universities this fall

Source: No New International Students At Harvard Due To Immigration Rules

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Harvard paper blasted for seeking immigration agency comment

2019/10/26 Leave a comment

Silly. Normal journalist practice, even if one does not like the policies of the Trump administration or government agency:

For student and professional journalists alike, it’s a matter of ethical standards: The Harvard Crimson student newspaper, in its coverage of a campus protest against a federal immigration agency, reached out to the agency to ask for comment.

To student activists, the request showed a disregard for students living in the country illegally. Student groups circulated a petition demanding an apology and some, including the Harvard College Democrats, said they would refuse to speak to the publication.

The Crimson said this week it was standing by the decision despite the criticism in the latest example of heightened political sensitivity on college campuses that many say reveals an intolerance for different — often conservative — points of view. On several campuses, invitations to conservative speakers have been rescinded, and debates have raged over how to protect free speech.

At the Sept. 12 rally in Harvard Yard, representatives of several campus organizations called for the abolition of the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agency. In its article on the demonstration, the Crimson said the agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment. That kind of line is typical in news reports to demonstrate that reporters have attempted to get someone’s side of the story but have not yet heard back.

But the 11 student groups behind the petition charged that the effort was tantamount to calling the agency on the students. They wrote that the correspondence with ICE jeopardized students on campus who are living in the country illegally.

“We are extremely disappointed in the cultural insensitivity displayed by The Crimson’s policy to reach out to ICE, a government agency with a long history of surveilling and retaliating against those who speak out against them,” the petition says. “In this political climate, a request for comment is virtually the same as tipping them off, regardless of how they are contacted.”

The groups, including the college Democrats, Act on a Dream and Divest Harvard, called on the student newspaper to apologize and agree not to contact the agency for future stories. As a student publication, they said, the Crimson must prioritize students’ safety.

In a note to readers this week, Crimson leaders Kristine Guillaume and Angela Fu noted the reporters contacted the agency after the protest and did not share the names of anybody in attendance. They also defended the application of journalistic standards.

“At stake here, we believe, is one of the core tenets that defines America’s free and independent press: the right — and prerogative — of reporters to contact any person or organization relevant to a story to seek that entity’s comment and view of what transpired,” they wrote.

A spokesman for the immigration agency, Bryan Cox, said claims that the agency targets protesters for arrest are false and needlessly spread fear.

“Should the Harvard community wish to have a fact-based discussion as to what ICE does and does not do we would be happy to take part in that conversation,” he said.

Campuses across the country have been roiled by protests over controversial speakers and questions about political intolerance — a reflection, some say, of the hardening divide between the left and the right in American discourse. Where some see an effort to shelter students from any objectionable ideas, others see efforts to be more respectful of students’ varied backgrounds experiences.

In one case, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the student government moved to strip the campus newspaper of funding in 2015 after some students objected to an opinion piece published critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. At Middlebury College in Vermont in 2017, hundreds of students protested a lecture by Charles Murray, a writer who critics say uses pseudoscience to link intelligence and race, forcing the college to move his talk to an undisclosed location from which it was live-streamed.

Some political demonstrations have turned violent, including a 2017 riot at the University of California, Berkeley, over an appearance planned by conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos that was canceled.

Student journalists and their advisers across the country regularly report efforts by students and school administrators to influence their coverage decisions, according to Chris Evans, president of the College Media Association. But he said it is rare to see efforts as blatant as those at Harvard.

“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with protesting,” Evans said. “The thing that can’t happen is that the student newspaper backs down. Let people debate whether certain voices should be heard. But it’s not the journalist’s job, with some exceptions, to decide what can and cannot be heard.”

Source: Harvard paper blasted for seeking immigration agency comment

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Harvard Accused Of ‘Racial Balancing’: Lawsuit Says Asian- Americans Treated Unfairly

2018/06/18 Leave a comment

Ongoing issue and debate in the US, which provokes the usual spill over in Canada:

In an intense legal battle over the role of race in Harvard University’s admissions policies, a group that is suing the school says Harvard lowers the rankings of Asian-American applicants in a way that is unconstitutional.

Harvard says that its admissions process is legal — and it notes that the plaintiff group, the Students for Fair Admissions, is backed by the same activist who previously challenged the University of Texas’ affirmative action policy.

The SFFA says Harvard uses “racial balancing” as part of its formula for admitting students and that the practice is illegal. In response, Harvard says the group is misinterpreting data that the highly competitive school shared about how it chooses students.

Citing a 2013 analysis by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research, the SFFA said in a federal court filing on Friday that if academics were the only criterion, Asian-American students would have made up more than 43 percent of students who were admitted, rather than the actual 18.7 percent.

Even if other criteria — such as legacy students, athletic recruiting and extracurricular and personal attributes — are included, the plaintiffs say, the number of Asian-Americans at Harvard would still have risen to more than 26 percent.

Saying that the admission rate for whites outpaced that of Asian-Americans over a 10-year period — despite outperforming them in only the “personal” ratings — the plaintiffs allege that “being Asian American actually decreases the chances of admissions.”

In a statement, Harvard said on Friday that a full analysis of the data shows the school “does not discriminate against applicants from any group, including Asian-Americans, whose rate of admission has grown 29 percent over the last decade.”

Harvard says the OIR analysis was preliminary and that it will defend its approach to achieving a diverse school body and campus community.

Harvard told the court in Boston that the plaintiffs’ analysis paints “a dangerously inaccurate picture of Harvard College’s whole-person admissions process by omitting critical data and information factors, such as personal essays and teacher recommendations.”

The competing accusations are the latest salvos in more than 400 legal filings over the case, which pits Harvard against plaintiffs backed by Edward Blum, a former investment broker who has for decades challenged how institutions and governments incorporate race into their decision-making processes.

“We allege that Harvard has a hard, fast quota limiting the number of Asians it will admit,” Blum told NPR in 2014, when he first sued the school. “In addition to that, Harvard has a racial balancing policy that balances the percentages of African-Americans, Hispanics, whites and Asians.”

On Friday, the two sides put out a flurry of motions, memoranda and declarations, seeking summary judgments and showing how they intend to argue the case — which goes to trial in mid-October.

Citing “the undisputed evidence,” the SFFA said that Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans and “engages in racial balancing.”

It also said, “Harvard neither gave serious, good faith consideration to nor took advantage of workable race-neutral alternatives.”

The university’s filings stated, “Harvard’s admissions process reviews each applicant as a whole person, using race flexibly and as only one factor among many.”

The school also said Blum’s group lacks the standing to pursue its case, saying, “SFFA is not a true membership organization that can sue on behalf of its members; it is a litigation vehicle designed to further the ideological objectives” of its founder.

To find plaintiffs for his case against Harvard (and a separate suit against the University of North Carolina), Blum’s organization put up the HarvardNotFair website, which asked, “Were You Denied Admission to Harvard? It may be because you’re the wrong race.”

Spurred by the SFFA case, Harvard has also drawn the scrutiny of the U.S. Justice Department, which opened a probe into the role of race in its admissions policies last November. The federal agency said it wanted to ensure the school was complying with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In doing so, the Trump administration showed it was willing to explore a potential case over a complaint that the Obama administration had dismissed.

At least two of Blum’s earlier suits have reached the Supreme Court, including the Texas admissions case (which was referred back to lower courts) and a challenge to part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (which successfully argued that the law’s coverage formula was outdated).

Source: Harvard Accused Of ‘Racial Balancing’: Lawsuit Says Asian- Americans Treated Unfairly

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Stephen Gordon: Canada doesn’t have a Harvard, and that’s a good thing

2017/01/18 Leave a comment

Stephen Gordon on the weakness of the US elite college system in terms of social mobility:

It’s hard to tell which theory is correct: human capital models and signalling models both make the same basic prediction about the salaries of university graduates. Researchers are obliged to leverage information from natural experiments to distinguish between the two theories, and it’s usually the case that evidence that seems to support one side can be re-interpreted as supporting the other as well. A reasonable conclusion is that both stories have support in the data, and that each may play stronger roles in different contexts.

This brings us back to Harvard. The lengths to which people will go in order to obtain a Harvard degree are easier to understand if you think if a Harvard degree as a signal, and not a measure of human capital. To be sure, Harvard’s faculty deserves its reputation, but to the extent that teaching assistants and contract lecturers are responsible for much of the teaching at the undergraduate level (as is the case at so many other universities), the amount of human capital on offer at Harvard is unlikely to justify the prestige a Harvard degree conveys.

A more plausible story is that a Harvard degree conveys a signal: it shows that you have what it takes to get into Harvard in the first place. And indeed, the signalling story would also explain the trend to grade inflation at Harvard and other Ivy League universities. The grade most frequently awarded at Harvard is an A, and the median grade is A-. If students (and their parents) are paying for a signal, elite universities are going to be expected to provide it.

Signalling — and the wasted effort that goes with it — is much less pervasive in the Canadian university system. While some universities and some programs may have relatively higher entrance standards, getting into a “top” Canadian university is nowhere near as difficult as entering an elite U.S. college: the entire undergraduate population of the Ivy League is roughly equivalent to that of the University of Toronto. Moreover, the consequences of not getting into a top Canadian school are relatively minor: those who graduate from a Canadian undergraduate program are on a much more equal footing than they are in the U.S.

The U.S. has a rigid hierarchy of universities: the fact that they have a certain number of high-prestige schools has to be set against the fact that access to them is extremely limited, and that those who don’t make it into the top are at a permanent disadvantage. And since children from high-income families have greater access (elite universities typically offer “legacy” admissions to children of alumni), post-secondary education in the U.S. is at best a weak force for social mobility.

If — as available evidence suggests — Canadian social mobility is significantly greater than it is in the U.S., then much of the credit goes to the fact that there is no Canadian university that plays the prestige-signalling game that Harvard does. A “Harvard of Canada” is the last thing we need.

Source: Stephen Gordon: Canada doesn’t have a Harvard, and that’s a good thing | National Post

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