A civil rights legal group is challenging legacy admissions at Harvard University, calling it racial discrimination.
Legacy adminissions is just basicly The Good Old Boy network
Same concept as being ‘grandfathered in’ based on their grandfather being eligible to vote from the Jim Crow Era.
the practice of giving admissions priority to the children of alumni
I didnt know this was even a thing that was allowed? That seems unfair, it’s like nepotism isnt it? I hope this doesn’t happen where I live :/
It is similar to nepotism and is extremely common, if not universal, in private higher education in the US which is the context for this lawsuit.
I doubt it is limited to the US since we tend to copy practices from other countries that help the wealthy stay in power.
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Is this that slippery slope we’re always talking about? Let a fake case get ruled on so others can pile on with real cases using that as precedent?
It baffles me how a fake case can even have any legitimacy with the court. Yet here we are…SCOTUS is even more a joke now. It’s just so tragic their bad faith & buffoonery affects so many people .
I wonder if the “plaintiff” can sue the lawyers who brought the case for some kind of False Representation.
Republicans wining about “woke anti-legacy agenda” admissions in 3, 2, 1…
I don’t really see the constituonal basis here. Racial discrimination is explicitly prohibited by the Constitution, so there’s an obvious angle for calling affirmative action unconditional. That doesn’t really exist with legacy admissions.
It’s still stupid and shouldn’t be a thing, but it’s not the job of the Courts to ensure an optimal college admissions system. Saying that it’s de facto racial discrimination is a pretty big stretch.
The argument is that legacy admissions are a criterion being used in lieu of race to achieve racial discrimination. Similar systems were an aggressive part of the Jim Crowe South to prevent blacks from voting when they couldn’t make skin color-specific rules anymore, where you would have to prove literacy or your grandfather’s ability to vote to get a vote in since they knew that no black person could pass those tests.
It’s not the strongest case, but it isn’t unreasonable and it has a rational basis. I’m skeptical that even a disinterested court would accept the logic on its face and know that the current court will just wallow in its hypocrisy, but I at least understand the principle.
The defense to it is that these elite universities actively desire diversity, so clearly they are not using legacy admits as a proxy for racial discrimination. There’s plenty of evidence that there is a different, corrupt-but-legal purpose for these legacy systems that is not racially motivated.
edit: On the flip-side, if indirectly discriminatory policies like these ARE allowed, it gives the universities a clear path forward to continuations of their AA policies. They just need to replace the race of their applicants with proxies for race that are allowed. Theoretically, this logic could force a standoff – either policies that indirectly have discriminatory outcomes (defined by who?) are illegal or they aren’t. Or else you’d have to somehow prove intention to discriminate before you could find a policy illegal, which is another very complex can of worms that the elite universities could probably get around.
And so, like with everything around this case, it likely won’t change any real behavior from the elite universities but will seriously fuck with less affluent ones.
Good.
This is absolutely hilarious.
Is there discovery process here? I gotta imagine there are some damaging emails about legacy students.
Harvard degrees are ridiculously overvalued. I know a couple of legacy admission students. Neither of them were especially smart either before or after going to Harvard. Since then I realized that there are lots of below average people running around with Harvard degrees. Same thing is probably true for other Ivy schools.
Crickets from the anti AA crowd
