Samuel Case, FISM News
The Justice Department has found Yale to be in violation of United States Civil Rights law, saying that the university discriminates against Asian and Caucasian applicants in their admission process. The DOJ says Yale’s receiving of taxpayer funding is conditioned on the college agreeing to Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights act. Yale has pushed back against the department saying that they do not discriminate and that they’ve been behaving in line “with decades of Supreme Court precedent” in their admission practices.
In an official statement, the DOJ says that “Yale discriminates based on race and national origin in its undergraduate admissions process, and that race is the determinative factor in hundreds of admissions decisions each year.” For the majority of applicants, Asian Americans and Caucasian people have only “one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials. Yale rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit.”
According to a statement given to and reported by NPR, Yale “categorically denies this allegation.” The statement argued that Yale looks “at the whole person when selecting whom to admit,” meaning that they take into consideration a multitude of factors, including their academic achievement, interests, demonstrated leadership, background, success in taking maximum advantage of their secondary school and community resources, and the likelihood that they will contribute to the Yale community and the world.”
The DOJ is demanding that “Yale agree not to use race or national origin in its upcoming 2020-2021 undergraduate admissions cycle” and if the university would like to consider race as an admission factor the school “must first submit to the Department of Justice a plan demonstrating its proposal is narrowly tailored as required by law, including by identifying a date for the end of race discrimination.”
Sourced from the U.S. Department of Justice and NPR