Breccan Thies writes for the Federalist about Harvard’s questionable response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the Ivy League school.
Despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023 that schools cannot use racial preferences in its admissions process, Harvard University’s medical school continues to discriminate against its applicants, according to a Wednesday complaint.
America First Legal (AFL) filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Justice detailing a “calculated effort” from Harvard Medical School to continue race-based admissions while appearing to comply with federal law. The complaint, which includes evidence of sex-based preferences as well, notes that Harvard continues to do this because of its dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology.
“This is not only illegal, it is unethical. By using new labels to sustain the same discriminatory system and elevating identity over individual merit, Harvard is turning the training of physicians into a vehicle for demographic engineering and social activism,” AFL counsel Megan Redshaw told The Federalist. “The American people deserve physicians chosen for skill and competency — not because they checked the right diversity box.”
AFL’s complaint states that Harvard is violating Title VI, Title IX, executive orders signed by President Donald Trump, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
The school uses “race proxies embedded within holistic review criteria and ideologically driven DEI frameworks — all designed to produce predetermined demographic outcomes,” the complaint states. “This is not a lawful adaptation. It is covert circumvention to achieve the very racial balancing the Supreme Court struck down as ‘patently unconstitutional.’”
The school uses a purportedly “holistic” method, which AFL says “utilizes diversity-based essay prompts structured to elicit racial and identity-based information about an applicant in ways that allow admissions officers to discern race and other protected characteristics.”
That is fully in-line with Harvard’s plan to find a loophole back in 2023 — a door opened by Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the Supreme Court opinion. …
