Washington.- Two organizations defending the rights of the Latino community denounced this Monday Harvard University, which they accuse of giving priority access to the children of former students, who are mostly white.
The lawsuit was filed just a few days after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against positive discrimination on racial grounds that until now universities such as Harvard applied to favor the diversity of their students.
The groups Chica Project and the Great Boston Latino Network (GBLN) ask the Department of Justice to “open an investigation into Harvard’s use of Donor and Bequest Preferences and their disparate and unjustified impact.”
They also ask the office to declare that this policy, which gives preference in the admissions process to candidates whose immediate family was educated at the same institution or who have donated large amounts of money to the university, is discriminatory.
The complaint was filed with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, and also has the support of an advocacy group for African-Americans.
According to the whistleblowers, about 70% of the candidates eligible for this policy are white, and they generally have a much better chance of being admitted than normal candidates.
The groups also recall that institutions such as Johns Hopkins University or Amherst College have eliminated this practice.
“There is no birthright to go to Harvard,” said in a statement the executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR), Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, who was the group in charge of filing the complaint with the Department of Education.
Last Thursday, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court ended racial affirmative action at universities by ruling that both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, two of the longest-running institutions in the country, violated the Constitution by giving preference to some candidates based on their race.
The ruling was criticized by the White House and condemned by former first lady Michelle Obama, who pointed to the hypocrisy of maintaining family legacy admissions while eliminating diversity requirements in schools.
