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Written by Lawrence Hurley
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday asked President Joe Biden’s administration for its views on whether judges should hear an objection to Harvard’s study of race in undergraduate admissions.
If the court hears the case, it will give the court’s conservative majority a chance to end affirmative action policies used to increase the number of black and Latino students at American universities.
The court’s action indicates that at least some of the nine justices are interested in considering an appeal by a group called Students for Fair Admission, founded by anti-affirmative action activist Edward Bloom, to a lower court ruling that upheld the Harvard program. The lawsuit accused Harvard University of discriminating against Asian American applicants in violation of the 1964 Federal Civil Rights Act.
The Supreme Court has a 6-3 majority of conservatives.
In a statement, Bloom said his group “remains hopeful that regardless of the attorney general’s views (of the Biden administration), judges will agree to hear our case and terminate affirmative action on race in college admissions.”
Harvard declined to comment.
The use of affirmative action has withstood Supreme Court scrutiny for decades, including in a 2016 ruling on a white student supported by Bloom who challenged University of Texas policy, although judges have narrowed its scope.
The Boston-based US Court of First Appeals ruled in November that Harvard’s consideration of race was not “unpermissibly broad” and was “meaningful” because it prevented undergraduate racial diversity from collapsing. A federal judge also ruled in 2019 in favor of the Ivy League school after a three-week trial.
Harvard University, one of the world’s most prestigious schools, said the number of black and Latino students would be cut by nearly half if the affirmative action program was scrapped. Harvard lawyers said it considers race “only in a flexible and non-mechanical way” and does not automatically favor certain races in deciding which students it will accept.
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The Bloom Group filed a lawsuit in 2014, accusing Harvard of violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin under any program or activity that receives federal financial assistance. Harvard is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts that receives federal funding.
Fair Admissions students said its members include Asian American applicants who were rejected by Harvard University. The identities of these Asian Americans were withheld throughout the litigation. All of them had high test scores and participated in extracurricular activities in high school, Bloom said, and that Harvard attorneys questioned several of them during the litigation.
(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Additional reporting by Nate Raymond; Editing by Will Dunham)
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