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The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit accusing Yale University of racial discrimination in its application process.
The Justice Department claims the school discriminates against white and Asian applicants, a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
According to the lawsuit, Yale began “preferring certain races over others among applicants” around the 1970s by defining “racially-favored applicants as Black, Hispanic, American Indian, and Asian.”
Yale admissions documents from around 1986 indicate the school sought “minority students … to occupy a certain preset percentage of all available places” at Yale, according to the lawsuit. In the late 1980s, Yale apparently removed most Asian applicants from its “list of racially-favored groups.”
The Justice Department says Yale has “abandoned acknowledgement of such explicit ‘preset’ quotas,” but continues its racial discrimination during the admissions process.
“The U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly has struck down discriminatory admissions programs in higher education, and required such programs to be narrowly tailored and not unduly to burden innocent applicants in order to survive,” a Justice Department press release said. “Yale’s practices violate the law.”
In 2016, the Department of Justice received a complaint from 130 Asian-American organizations alleging racial discrimination at Yale, the lawsuit says.
The government notified Yale in April 2018 that it was beginning an investigation into racial discrimination at the school, according to the complaint. On Aug. 13, 2020, the U.S. notified the school it was in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Title VI prohibits “discrimination under any program … receiving Federal financial assistance,” according to the Justice Department’s press release.
“The United States offered Yale an opportunity for voluntary compliance without litigation,” the lawsuit states. “Yale declined the United States’ offer. The United States notified Yale of its determination that efforts to obtain voluntary compliance were unsuccessful.”
Yale’s application process involves multiple steps, and prospective undergraduate students must submit a completed application form, essays, high school transcripts and other documentation.
The application forms Yale uses ask applicants to identify their race, but if an applicant declines to do so, the school may “make its own determination of an applicant’s race” using any of the other submitted documents or from in-person interviews, the lawsuit alleges. But in any case, Yale tracks the applicants’ race.
The applicants then go through a “reader process” followed by a “committee process,” according to the lawsuit.
Yale allegedly instructs Area Committee members “to treat the race of a racially-favored applicant as a positive factor when voting on applicants,” and members follow this instruction.
Once the Area Committee makes its recommendation on whether to admit or reject an applicant, a Final Review Committee allegedly “uses race to admit racially-favored applicants to achieve a racially-balanced class.”
According to the lawsuit, from 2010 through 2017, the school “engaged in racial balancing of domestic admits by keeping the annual percentage of Asian admits within approximately 1.5 percentage points of the previous year’s admitted class in the IPEDS data.” Most years, the range was one percentage point or less.
“All persons who apply for admission to colleges and universities should expect and know that they will be judged by their character, talents, and achievements and not the color of their skin,” Eric Dreiband, assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, said in a statement, according to The Washington Post. “To do otherwise is to permit our institutions to foster stereotypes, bitterness, and division.”
The plaintiff demands a jury trial and asks the Court for a declaratory judgment that Yale’s alleged admissions procedures are in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for a permanent injunction to prohibit the school from using race as a factor when determining future Yale admissions, for an award of damages to the U.S. and injured applicants and for any other relief deemed just.
Yale president Peter Salovey released a statement Thursday saying the lawsuit is based on “inaccurate statistics and unfounded conclusions,” according to a New York Times report.
“I want to be clear: Yale does not discriminate against applicants of any race or ethnicity,” Salovey said. “Our admissions practices are completely fair and lawful. Yale’s admissions policies will not change as a result of the filing of this baseless lawsuit.”
Have you ever faced racial discrimination when applying for admission to a school or organization? Tell us about your experience in the comments.
The plaintiff is represented by John B. Hughes, Civil Chief with the U.S. Attorney’s Office; and Serajul F. Ali, Matthew J. Donnelly, Genevieve M. Kelly and Jeffrey G. Morrison, trial attorneys with the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Yale Applicant Racial Discrimination Lawsuit is U.S. v. Yale University, Case No. 3:20-cv-01534, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.
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