Now Civil Rights Groups Are Suing Harvard About Its Dumb Idiot Mediocre White Legacies

Poor Harvard can't catch a break.

After the US Supreme Court struck down the use of race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions last week, three civil rights groups filed a complaint Monday with the US Department of Education saying Harvard University's practice of preferential admissions for children of alumni and big donors illegally discriminates against minority applicants. The complaint said that Harvard's policy gives an unfair advantage to less-qualified students like every spoiled rich child who ever told a first-year writing instructor to give them an A because their family's name is on the building in which the class is held.

PREVIOUSLY! Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action For Everyone But Rich White People 

(Mind you, I heard the same line from spoiled rich kids in the state schools where I've taught, only it was democratized with the explanation that their parents are taxpayers who paid my salary.)

 In a statement, Lawyers for Civil Rights, which is representing the groups, observed that some 70 percent of legacy and donor-related applicants are white, and are far more likely to win admission than applicants who lack such remunerative suction:

Donor-related applicants are nearly 7 times more likely to be admitted than non-donor-related applicants, and legacies are nearly 6 times more likely to be admitted.

For the Class of 2019, about 28% of the class were legacies with a parent or other relative who went to Harvard. Qualified and highly deserving applicants of color are harmed as a result, as admissions slots are given instead to the overwhelmingly white applicants who benefit from Harvard’s legacy and donor preferences.

Echoing the sort of invective that's more frequently flung at minority students who are very well qualified but might go unnoticed in the scrum of applications to elite institutions, the press release adds that such "preferential treatment has nothing to do with an applicant’s merit," and is instead an "unfair and unearned benefit" based solely on the applicants being lucky enough to be born to rich people.

Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, said in the press release, not without some heavy rhetorical underlining,

There’s no birthright to Harvard. As the Supreme Court recently noted, ‘eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’ There should be no way to identify who your parents are in the college application process. Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations? Your family’s last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.

We'll assume that Espinoza-Madrigal then theatrically coughed "Ahem" and glared intently at Harvard over the tops of his glasses, if he wears any. He may even have brought some for the occasion. The civil rights groups, all based in the Boston area, are the Chica Project, African Community Economic Development of New England, and the Greater Boston Latino Network.

The complaint is timed well to call attention to the unfair admissions advantage enjoyed by many wealthy families at elite schools. In her dissent to the majority opinion last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that affirmative action is only fair, considering the legacy preferences that "disfavor underrepresented racial minorities." And even Neil Goddamn Gorsuch, in his concurring opinion, wrote that preferences for kids of donors and alumni

are no help to applicants who cannot boast of their parents’ good fortune or trips to the alumni tent all their lives. While race-neutral on their face, too, these preferences undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants the most.

Between this and his recognition that structural racism is real when it affects Native Americans, we might even hope that Gorsuch may someday reject the "color blind" nonsense he keeps voting to uphold. Probably after he retires in 30 years.

 The New York Times reports that the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights may already be moving to investigate legacy admissions.

In a statement after the Supreme Court decision, President Biden said he would ask the department to examine “practices like legacy admissions and other systems that expand privilege instead of opportunity.”

That said, the Times also notes that Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono, who determined that legacy applicants have a much better chance of being admitted, also found that eliminating legacy and donor-related advantages still wouldn't make up for the loss of diversity that would result from ending race-conscious affirmative action. But hell, it would still get rid of an unfair advantage for the filthy rich, who probably would still find a way to remain both.

Also, in a move that no one could possibly see coming if they were in another galaxy, Republicans in state legislatures are so excited by the Supreme Court decision that they're now moving to eliminate scholarships and grants aimed at recruiting and retaining minority students, because what about the whites, will no one think of the whites?

[ CNN / Lawyers for Civil Rights / NYT / MSNBC/ Photo (cropped) by 'Ingfbruno,' Creative CommonsLicense 3.0 ]

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