Harvard lawsuit seeks to harm, not help, Asians

“I Am Asian-American. I Have Dreams Too,” read a sign that was carried during a protest against Harvard’s allegedly biased admissions process.

The sign refers to the ongoing lawsuit in federal court against Harvard University in which Asian-American students are accusing the university of having an unfair bias towards other races in their admissions process.

The Asian-American community is split between opinions, as proven by a counter protester’s sign that said, “Asians Will Not Be Tools for Your White Supremacy.”

Some Asians are siding with the plaintiffs and want to end affirmative action, while others oppose the lawsuit and believe that the plaintiffs are only harming themselves since affirmative action is beneficial and important for racial minorities.

Affirmative action is a policy that provides jobs and education to minority groups that would not have the equal opportunity otherwise.

And this lawsuit has put affirmative action under threat, and the Trump administration is siding with the plaintiffs and investigating a possible bias in Harvard’s admissions process. And if the lawsuit reaches the now conservative Supreme court, Affirmative action could very likely come to an end.

The group suing the university, Students for Fair Admissions, is led by a man named Edward Blum, a right-wing conservative activist who has made many public stands against race-based quotas in college admissions. In his Washington Post article, he stated that racial quotas “punish better-qualified individuals and pit Americans against one another.”

For years he has tried to end affirmative action by suing universities that are race-conscious but his efforts have always failed.

One of the cases, Fisher v. The University of Texas, resulted in the ruling that universities can be race-conscious towards groups with fewer opportunities when it comes to their admissions process.

In the past, he has taken white students as plaintiffs, but this time he has taken Asian students in order to gain attention. And it’s working.

Obviously Blum is not Asian, so he has gone as far as to creating websites that feature distressed Asian teens where students can submit themselves to be plaintiffs.

Blum is baiting students that are newly rejected and gullible; he is enforcing his racist ideas on them and taking advantage of their vulnerability.

Blum does not care about Asians, he is pitting Asians against other races in order to achieve his goal to end affirmative action. With the end of affirmative action, many students will be at a loss, since affirmative action has worked in minorities’ favor, Asian Americans included. It has always helped racial minorities with less equal opportunities get a good education.

Blum argued that universities are holding unreasonably high standards against Asians, which prevents them from getting into their university of choice.

It is true, Asians do have higher SAT scores than people of any other race, as well as the highest GPA average than other races, so naturally, people like Blum and many other Asians would believe that colleges hold unrealistically high standards for Asians.

But it’s not news that Harvard is one of the most difficult institutions to get into, and the Harvard admitted Class of 2022 was 23 percent Asian, while Asians only make up 4.8 percent of America’s population. The statistics prove that an Ivy League college, that is incredibly difficult to get into, continues to admit a large number of Asians.

Blum is playing a clever game with this lawsuit, by appealing to students that might have gotten rejected from Harvard. He is encouraging them to use their race card in a complicated political situation in order to gain attention.

Blum made a statement on Fox News that Harvard has a quota against Asians: they only accept a certain amount of Asian students, and that the number never changes.

What he said was completely false, Harvard’s enrolled class in the Fall of 2004 was 12.3 percent and in their Class of 2022 is 23 percent Asian. So the numbers are going up, and more Asians are being enrolled.

At first, I was convinced by Blum’s words, but it hit me that I was tricked just like many other Asians that were told to believe affirmative action is harming them. I am finding it hard to believe that hundreds of people in the Asian-American community are harming themselves by being a part of this lawsuit, and they don’t even realize it.

Students must realize that by contributing to Blum’s attempts to end affirmative action, they are only harming themselves and only contributing to a racist agenda. The facts and numbers are out there for everyone to see and realize that this man is using Asian students as tools in order to harm racial minorities and benefit white people who do not need the benefits the same way minorities do.

With this lawsuit, education in the United States will get very restrictive and non-inclusive. With the new conservative government, international students aspiring to go to America find themselves in a tricky situation. Students at Woodstock find themselves perplexed since a large amount students apply to the United States and now racial minorities and Woodstock students alike are victims of the current political climate in America.