Harvard accused of racism against Asian applicants

Harvard University has been accused of racism against Asian students because of perceived negative personality traits, according to court documents filed on Friday.

The 388-year-old institution is being sued by Students for Fair Admissions, an action group, for discriminating against Asian applicants.

The group commissioned an analysis of more than 160,000 applicants who applied for admission from 2000 to 2015, which showed that Asians were given lower scores on “personality” traits - likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected”.

It argues that if admitted on academic merit alone, the intake of Asian students at the prestigious university would be much higher.

Ted Lieu, a congressman for California, blasted Harvard for appearing to "attribute personality traits based on race." He called the report “outrageous”, adding that “it feeds into historical damaging stereotypes about Asian-Americans.” 

Students for Fair Admissions likened the report's findings of alleged discrimination to antisemitism in the 20th century.  

“It turns out that the suspicions of Asian-American alumni, students and applicants were right all along,” the group said in a court document laying out the analysis.

“Harvard today engages in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping that it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s.”

In response, Harvard commissioned its own study, which described the report as “incomplete and misleading”.

The documents are a prelude to a trial scheduled for the autumn, and come at the same time as the US government’s justice department investigates Harvard’s admission policies for evidence of bias.

The filings, which run to hundreds of pages and rely on data for individual applicants to the classes that entered Harvard between 2010 and 2015, give the public the most detailed look ever at Harvard’s method for selecting its incoming undergraduate class.

Harvard, the oldest university in the US, remains its most selective. It admitted only 4.6 per cent of applicants this year, while Princeton and Columbia admitted 5.5 per cent, while Yale took 6.3 per cent of those wishing to attend.

Each Harvard applicant is given four component ratings - academic, extracurricular, athletic and personal - and an overall score that is assigned by taking all factors into account. Within each category, applicants are scored on a scale from one to six, with one being the best. Admissions decisions are made by a 40-person committee vote.

The plaintiffs found in their analysis that Asian-American applicants have higher academic and extracurricular scores than any other racial group.

However, Harvard’s admissions officers assign Asian-Americans the lowest score of any racial group on the personal rating, which includes a subjective assessment of character traits such as whether the student has a “positive personality,” the plaintiffs said.

“Asian-Americans are described as smart and hardworking yet uninteresting and indistinguishable from other Asian-American applicants,” the plaintiffs said, after reviewing a sample of documents provided by Harvard with admissions officers’ comments on applicants.