Sessions says DOJ to probe Harvard University on affirmative action

In a potentially crippling assault on affirmative action, Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday acknowledged the Department of Justice is taking aim at race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University, one of the nation's most exclusive institutions of higher education.

The news comes as the university continues to defend itself in a discrimination lawsuit that parallels the Department of Justice probe. At issue is whether stellar Asian students are being passed over so Harvard can admit less-qualified African American and Hispanic students for the sake of artificial diversity.

The lawsuit was filed in 2016 by Edward Blum -- the conservative activist who sued the University of Texas over its admissions policies, a case that led to a major Supreme Court decision upholding UT's narrowly tailored affirmative-action plan.

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Justice Samuel Alito, a staunch member of the court's conservative bloc, issued a scathing dissent to the court's majority opinion in that case. Blasting the outcome, Alito's eyebrow-raising opinion practically invited another Supreme Court challenge to college admissions formulas that consider a student's race when deciding who gets in.

That 5-3 decision, however, came before the court had a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia's eventual replacement, Justice Neil Gorsuch, is widely considered to be on the far right of the ideological spectrum.

The Justice Department's plans surfaced after American Oversight, a good-government watchdog group, filed a Freedom of Information Act, asking for any documents related to affirmative action investigations at two schools, including Harvard.

Kristin Clarke, executive director of Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who filed the FOIA request with Government Oversight, called the news "shameful" and "an unprecedented assault on efforts to promote racial diversity in higher education" and in a statement Thursday demanded a Senate investigation.

"This is further proof that Attorney General Sessions and the Trump administration will continue to invoke civil rights only to further their own political agenda – not to provide equal protections for all Americans," Austin Evers, Executive Director of American Oversight, said in a statement Thursday. "It speaks volumes that Jeff Sessions' Justice Department is prioritizing attacking affirmative action at a time when white nationalists are marching openly in the streets."

The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law's FOIA request covered all records related to a Justice Department investigation seeking instances of reverse discrimination against white students, according to The New York Times. In response, Justice Department said it was looking into an "administrative complaint filed by a coalition of 64 Asian-American associations in May 2015."

According to the complaint, "Many Asian-American students who have almost perfect SAT scores, top 1 percent GPAs, plus significant awards or leadership positions in various extracurricular activities have been rejected by Harvard University and other Ivy League Colleges while similarly situated applicants of other races have been admitted."

The complaint, however, mirrors the lawsuit Blum filed against Harvard in 2016, alleging that high-achieving Asian American students were denied admission while the school accepted lower-achieving African American and Hispanic students for the sake of campus diversity.

Blum, who is the director of the Project for Fair Representation, represented Abigail Fisher, a white student, in her anti-affirmative action lawsuit against the University of Texas. When the high court rejected the case, Blum decided that an Asian American student would be a more sympathetic plaintiff; he set up a recruiting website for students willing to go to court against Harvard and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the state's flagship public school.

Though he failed in the Fisher case, Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos both agree with Blum, and Alito has publicly declared that race-conscious admissions are unfair to Asian Americans.

Earlier this year, a federal judge rejected Harvard's request to dismiss Blum's lawsuit. Neither Harvard nor the Justice Department have commented on the issue.

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