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      Columbia president assailed at highly charged antisemitism Congress hearing

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      The head of a prestigious US university clashed with members of Congress today in highly charged hearings over a reported upsurge in antisemitism on campus in the wake of Israel’s war in Gaza.Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, appeared beleaguered and uncertain as one Congress member after another assailed her over her institution’s supposed inaction to stop it becoming what one called “a hotbed of antisemitism and hatred”.Wednesday’s hearing follows months of rising tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the Columbia campus, amid disputes over what constitutes antisemitism and controversy about whether it should encompass anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel as a Jewish state.The hearing of the House of Representatives’ education and workforce committee is being staged under the emotive title of “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Anti-Semitism.” A group of Jewish academics at the university have denounced the hearing in advance as heralding “a new McCarthyism”.At the hearing Shafik was repeatedly asked to explain the continued presence of one faculty member, Joseph Massad, after he had reportedly praised Hamas’s attack last October that left around 1,200 Israelis dead.In one particularly aggressive line of questioning, Elise Stefanik pushed Shafik to commit to removing Massad as chair of an academic review committee.Stefanik also pressed a harried Shafik, who became Columbia’s president last July, into changing her testimony after she earlier told the Democratic representative Ilhan Omar that she was not aware of any anti-Jewish demonstrations at the university.Pressing relentlessly, Stefanik effectively drove a wedge between Shafik and her three fellow senior Columbia colleagues, David Schizer, Claire Shipman, and David Greenwald – all members of the university’s antisemitism taskforce – by leading them to testify that there had in fact been aggressive and threatening antisemitic statements in campus demonstrations.Earlier, Shafik – trying to straddle between condemning antisemitism and permitting statements that some defined as free speech – struggled when confronted by Lisa McClain, the Republican representative from Michigan over the slogan “from the river to the sea” and support for a Palestinian intifada (uprising).“Are mobs shouting from the River to the Sea Palestine will be free or long live the infitada [sic] …antisemitic comments?” McClain asked.“When I hear those terms, I find them very upsetting,” Shafik responded.“That’s a great answer to a question I didn’t ask, so let me repeat the question,” McClain persisted. Shafik answered: “I hear them as such. Some people don’t.”“Why is it so tough?” McClain pressed. In answer, Shafik said: “Because it’s a difficult issue because some hear it as antisemitic others do not.”She eventually appeared to fold under pressure, answering “yes” and laughing nervously after McClain posed the same question to the president’s fellow Columbia staff, all of whom agreed that it was antisemitic.The hearing was something of a reprise of the committee’s previous cross-examination of the heads of three other elite universities, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, last December.That hearing led to the resignation of the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill, after she gave what were deemed to be over-legalistic answers to pointed questions from Stefanik over whether her institution’s rules on free speech permitted slogans that supporters of Israel interpret as calling for genocide.It also intensified the pressure on Harvard’s then president, Claudine Gay, whose responses to Stefanik were similarly criticised. Gay survived the immediate outcry over the hearing but stepped down weeks later over plagiarism allegations.Columbia has set up a taskforce on antisemitism but its members have declined to establish a firm definition.Rightwingers have painted the university as a hotbed of antisemitism, while opponents have accused the institution’s authorities of disproportionately punishing pro-Palestinian students who criticise Israel. The university last year suspended two groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, over their protest activities.Shafik – an Egyptian-born, British-American economist and former deputy governor of the Bank of England – had reportedly prepared assiduously for Wednesday’s event in an effort to avoid the pitfalls of her fellow university heads.Writing in the Wall Street Journal on the eve of the hearing, Shafik said legitimate expression should occur “within specific parameters”.“Most of the people protesting do so from a place of genuine political disagreement, not from personal hatred or bias or support for terrorism,” she wrote.“Their passion, as long as it doesn’t cross the line into threats, discrimination or harassment, should be protected speech on our campus.“Calling for the genocide of a people – whether they are Israelis or Palestinians, Jews, Muslims or anyone else – has no place in a university community. Such words are outside the bounds of legitimate debate and unimaginably harmful,” the op-ed continued.Her remarks appeared aimed at avoiding the criticism drawn by Magill and Gay over their appearance before the committee, when both responded to Stefanik’s questions about theoretical calls for genocide by referring to context.In an effort to bolster Shafik, 23 Jewish faculty members wrote an open letter published in the campus newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, criticising the premise of the hearing.“Based on the committee’s previous hearings, we are gravely concerned about the false narratives that frame these proceedings to entrap witnesses,” they wrote. “We urge you, as the university president, to defend our shared commitment to universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production against this new McCarthyism.”The academics also questioned the credentials of Stefanik – an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump – on antisemitism, saying she had a history of “espousing white nationalist policies”.As Shafik and her colleagues testified, the unrest that has characterized university life over the past six months was on display on Columbia’s campus, where students set up approximately 60 tents on the campus’s south lawn in the early hours of Wednesday. The tents, many of which were covered in signs that read “Liberated Zone” and “Israel bombs, Columbia pays”, were set up to urge the university to divest its ties from Israel.The university perimeters were lined with metal barricades and a heavy police presence, and the campus, which is usually accessible to the public, was restricted to Columbia ID holders.Members of the media were prohibited from entering the university, instead restricted to a barricaded pen near a bus stop outside the campus as student chants could be heard from inside the grounds. “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” some students chanted, according to the Columbia Spectator. A handful of protesters also crowded around the university’s main gates, with many shouting: “We say no to genocide!”
      This article was amended on 17 April 2024 to correctly identify the school where Elizabeth Magill resigned as president last year. The school was the University of Pennsylvania, not Pennsylvania University. More

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      Claudine Gay’s resignation had nothing to do with plagiarism | Moira Donegan

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      Any political observer who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that the resignation of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University who was driven from her job this week, had nothing to do with plagiarism.There are all sorts of factors that make this obvious: there is the reality that Gay’s field, political science, is a data-driven discipline in which abstracts from one paper are not-infrequently copied as parts of a literature review in another, and that the borrowed phrases and summaries that account for Gay’s “plagiarism” are not crimes of theft but of sloppiness, with little bearing on the originality of her work.There is the fact that Gay’s “plagiarism” scandal arose belatedly, brought up in tenuous relation to a similarly fatuous and opportunistic false claim by the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik that Gay had abetted antisemitism at Harvard. (The same accusation also led to the ouster, last month, of the University of Pennsylvania president, M Elizabeth Magill).There is the fact that rightwing propagandists, prominently the anti-education crusader Christopher Rufo, openly admitted the pretextual nature of their plagiarism smear against Gay, and frankly spoke of their intention to manipulate the national media into creating a baseless controversy that would drive Gay, Harvard’s first Black president and only the second woman to lead the university, out of her job.But recounting all of this is tedious, and cedes the terms of the debate to the authors of this false controversy–fighting on their territory, arguing the questions they pose, giving good-faith rebuttals to allegations they do not pretend to believe even as they make them. As the sociologist Victor Ray put it, “Accepting the bad-faith framing is a choice to ally oneself with the bad-faith actors.”But this is what much of the mainstream media, over the past weeks of the so-called “controversy” over Gay’s tenure at Harvard, has been doing with unnerving enthusiasm. Between her congressional testimony in December and her resignation on Tuesday, the New York Times alone published more than 60 items about Gay, breathlessly covering alleged plagiarism in her 25-year-old dissertation; CNN joined in, granting credulous coverage to claims that Gay had plagiarized in graduate school and granting airtime to claims made by the likes of Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard donor who openly stated that he hoped to dislodge Gay because of his disdain for “DEI”, – the corporate euphemism for racial integration efforts.The flurry of coverage resulted in not so much a clear articulation of alleged misconduct by Gay as a vague fog of ill will that carried stench of scandal. The media seemed assured that Gay had done something wrong: maybe it was about academic integrity, or maybe it was about the supposed antisemitism on campus; maybe it was the racist subtext, all but declared by Gay’s rightwing critics, that a Black woman who attained a position of superlative prestige and authority could necessarily not have done so by merit. The media followed all this as if any of it was real, as if any of it mattered, proving themselves willing to serve as outlets for a rightwing propaganda effort that is wildly cynical, demonstrably sadistic, and avowedly indifferent to the truth.In reality, it is not just that Gay’s ouster has nothing to do with plagiarism: it is that it has nothing to do with Claudine Gay. Her resignation is merely the latest episode in the rightwing’s assault on education – a project that has increased in its virulence and success in recent years, but which has been decades in the making. Republicans hate education, and they have demonstrated this hate in both their policymaking and in the public theater of their cultural grievance.They defund and privatize public schools, and they attempt to make public enemies of teachers; they ban books, and force educators into the closet, and impose abstinence-only sex education. They manipulate Title IX to make universities hostile to women and deferential to rapists; they impose bizarre, invasive and lascivious rules that would compel period tracking and genital inspections for student athletes. They take over colleges and gut departments that might lead students to think critically about social hierarchies; through their partisans on the supreme court, they have now banned affirmative action in admissions. They dox student activists, harass and intimidate professors, and, now, purge administrators. This is the story that the media has been studiously ignoring, preferring to miss the forest of a coordinated anti-education effort for the trees of a flimsy, pretextual citation scandal. One has to ask: what are they so afraid of?It may be that Republicans are hostile to education because they believe that the world they want to usher in – one in which hierarchies of race and gender are entrenched, naturalized and given the force of law – is not possible to impose except on a population that has been kept ignorant. But the fact is that if the university system were as strong an incubator of pro-equality, pro-democracy social forces as the Republican machine seems to think it is, then it would not be so vulnerable to such transparently bad-faith attacks.In reality, the American university is weakened – low on public funding, reliant on underpaid, contingent and dissatisfied academic labor, and subject to the whims of very wealthy donors. In such conditions of precarity and scarcity, true freedom of thought has long been something of an fiction for academics and students alike, who know well, for instance, that they cannot report sexual harassment or openly support Palestinian freedom without inviting harassment or risking their careers.Universities, at their best, remain sites of robust debate and challenging inquiry. But at their worst, they are sites of vampiric labor exploitation, of malign incentives for scholars, and, increasingly, of meddling by ambitious Republican operatives or politically appointed trustees. Gay can be forced to resign for transparently dishonest reasons because universities like Harvard are dependent on bad-faith actors who wanted her gone to pursue their own agendas – and because they lack the will to break this dependence.Something similar might be said of the mainstream media. Many news outlets – much like universities – have been weakened by declines in revenue, and have largely failed to adapt to the rise of an anti-intellectual and anti-democratic right wing that is indifferent to the truth. Instead of covering the malfeasance of these actors, they have anxiously tried to maintain the appearance of neutrality – sometimes at the expense of frankly telling the truth. They, too, are dependent on the good will of the right – in the form of subscribers and sources alike. And they, too, have been manipulated in this dependence, becoming willing to use their platforms and prestige to lend legitimacy to faux controversies that otherwise would have not have any.None of this is to say that Claudine Gay is an especially innocent or admirable figure. It is to say that her character does not much matter: no institution, no social movement, and no profession can survive if its survival depends on the moral perfection of all its main actors. Both the media and the American university system had an opportunity to see the attacks on her in the context of Republicans’ broader anti-education crusade – to treat the right wing’s bad faith for what it really was, and to treat Gay’s missteps for what they really were. They failed.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘Racist, vicious’: academics decry rightwing attacks on Claudine Gay

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      On Tuesday afternoon, Claudine Gay resigned from her post as president of Harvard University, making her six-month tenure the shortest in university history. In the aftermath of her departure from the position, many argued that the aggressive nature of the campaign against her was motivated not by questions about her academic integrity or about her response to campus controversy, but by her race.Pressure on Gay to resign grew following her 5 December congressional testimony, where she, along with the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, answered questions regarding allegations of on-campus antisemitism related to the Israel-Gaza war. Shortly thereafter, plagiarism allegations published on conservative website the Washington Free Beacon mounted against Gay, ultimately leading to her resignation.Janai Nelson, the president and direct-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “Attacks against Claudine Gay have been unrelenting & the biases unmasked. Her resignation on the heels of [UPenn president] Liz Magill’s set dangerous precedent in the academy for political witch hunts. The project isn’t to thwart hate but to foment it thru vicious takedowns. This protects no one.”Ibram X Kendi, the founder of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, wrote: “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism. What these racist mobs are doing should be obvious to any reporter who cares about truth or justice as opposed to conflicts and clicks.”In her resignation letter, Gay acknowledged the racism she experienced following her congressional testimony. And though she issued additional citations to her doctoral dissertation and other papers following the backlash, she also used the letter to defend the integrity of her work. “It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor – two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am – and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” she wrote.The Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, issued a statement in support of Gay, condemning the racist vitriol she experienced.“While President Gay has acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them, it is also true that she has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks,” the statement reads. “While some of this has played out in the public domain, much of it has taken the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls. We condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms.”The attacks against Gay and the open admission by some rightwing pundits and activists to execute similar plans across higher education could have larger implications. Roopika Risam, an associate professor at Dartmouth, wrote: “While no one owes Harvard pity, we’d be remiss to not see this as an attack on higher ed, like ones in states like Florida and South Dakota (and and and…), laying the groundwork for ongoing dismantling higher ed – especially public higher ed, where states hold the purse strings.”Risam may have been referencing the efforts of people like Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who led the campaign against Gay. Last month, Rufo posted on X: “We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFollowing Gay’s resignation, Rufo posted: “Today, we celebrate victory. Tomorrow, we get back to the fight. We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America.”Elise M Stefanik, a representative from New York and Harvard alum, led one of the most aggressive lines of questioning during the congressional hearing. On 2 January, Stefanik posted on X: “TWO DOWN,” a reference to the resignations of both Gay and the University of Pennsylvania president, Elizabeth Magill.Gay will remain on the Harvard faculty following her resignation. But conservative lawmakers and pundits have indicated that the academic purge that began with efforts to overturn diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and swept up both Gay and Magill, will continue. More

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      US university presidents to testify before Congress over claims of antisemitic protests on campuses

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      The presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, three of the country’s most prestigious universities, are set to testify before a congressional committee next week on claims that antisemitic protests have taken place on their campuses, marking the latest window into ongoing tensions sparked by the Israel-Hamas war.Next Tuesday, Harvard’s Claudine Gay, Penn’s Liz Magill and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth will stand before the House education and workforce committee, a body chaired by Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina.“Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen countless examples of antisemitic demonstrations on college campuses. Meanwhile, college administrators have largely stood by, allowing horrific rhetoric to fester and grow,” said Foxx in a statement introducing the hearing, which is titled Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.Foxx said college and university presidents have a responsibility to foster and uphold a safe learning environment for both students and staff.“Now is not a time for indecision or milquetoast statements,” she added. “By holding this hearing, we are shining the spotlight on these campus leaders and demanding they take the appropriate action to stand strong against antisemitism.”Earlier this month, the US Department of Education’s office for civil rights opened investigations into possible ancestry or ethnic discrimination at several universities, including Cornell, Penn, Wellesley College, Cooper Union, Lafayette College, the University of Tampa and Columbia.Of those, at least five allege antisemitic harassment, and two allege anti-Muslim harassment. The office for civil rights said the investigations are part of “efforts to take aggressive action to address the alarming nationwide rise in reports of antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and other forms of discrimination”.But finding a line between legitimate protest and discrimination or hate speech has proven difficult for US university leaders, who are bidden to uphold academic and political speech freedoms in their charters.Harvard’s statement of rights and responsibilities, for instance, maintains that “a diverse and inclusive community depends upon freedom of expression; we are not truly inclusive if some perspectives can be voiced and heard while others cannot”.But notably, a recent poll found that more than half of Jewish US college students said they felt unsafe. Muslim students at universities across the country have said the same.Harvard has come under attack from alumni, including Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, for not doing enough to keep Jewish students safe. Some donors have also said they will stop funding the university.Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, a former student, has called university administrators to discipline protesters who violate rules because without disciplining they will take “more aggressive, disruptive and antisemitic actions”.Earlier this month Gay, Harvard’s president, wrote to alumni saying the institution rejects “all forms of hate, and we are committed to addressing them”, adding that the school had “started the process of examining how antisemitism manifests within our community”.While the House hearing is focused on antisemitism, there are also numerous claims of Islamophobia. Earlier this month, a professor at the university of Southern California allegedly walked on a list of names meant to memorialize the more than 11,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza since 7 October and remarked: “Everyone should be killed, and I hope they all are.”In a statement Hussam Ayloush, CAIR-LA’s executive director, said: “Anti-Palestinian rhetoric has been at an all-time high these last few weeks – especially at schools and universities – and wrongly conflating Palestinians and those who are in solidarity with the innocent people of Gaza with Hamas is only adding fuel to the flames of hate.”University officials, he added, “must also take action to provide protective measures and resources for Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab students as well as any others who are targeted by hate and bigotry”.Earlier this month, New York’s Columbia University saw around 400 students gathered to criticize university leaders for suspending two pro-Palestinian student groups, Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), after forming a task force on antisemitism.The university said the groups had repeatedly violated policies related to holding campus events including one that “included threatening rhetoric and intimidation”. More

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      Harvard billboard accusing students of antisemitism linked to rightwing funder

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      The organization that placed a billboard at Harvard University accusing some students of antisemitism amid the fight between Israel and Hamas is part of a network of rightwing media organizations being funded by a major conservative donor via a shadowy new foundation.The single largest identified donor last year to Accuracy in Media (AIM), which placed the billboard, is the Informing America Foundation (IAF), formed in 2021, which has already dished out at least $8m to rightwing nonprofit and for-profit organizations, according to IRS filings.In turn, the IAF’s biggest donor is the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, a longstanding funder of rightwing causes whose founder and namesake sits on the IAF’s board.Last Wednesday, AIM parked a truck with a billboard affixed to it on Harvard’s campus, and the organization’s president Adam Guillette went on X, formerly Twitter, to brag about the action.The billboard featured photographs of students who are members of student groups that had signed a statement after Hamas’s attacks on Israel with a caption describing them as “Harvard’s biggest antisemites”. The organization also set up a page at a special URL, harvardhatesjews.com, to fundraise off the action.The statement drew criticism for saying it held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”. University leadership then came under fire from a former president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, for not denouncing the student statement and for failing to make a stronger condemnation of Hamas.The billboard action was just the latest billboard stunt from AIM under Guillette, who has taken the 55-year old organization in a more confrontational direction.In recent months the organization has also mounted billboard campaigns against pro-Democrat social media influencer, Harry Sisson, and targeted lawmakers in Loudon, Virginia, who subsequently accused the group of harassment.AIM also publishes media criticism of outlets it considers progressive, and its columnists exhibit a preoccupation with outlets such as video news outlet Now This, Vice News and Teen Vogue.According to AIM and IAF tax filings, IAF donated $166,666 in contributions to AIM in 2022, more than 18% of the $908,474 in contributions and grants AIM declared for that year. Tax filings from the Vanguard Charitable Foundation indicate a separate contribution of $300,000 to AIM but the contributor is not identified, leaving IAF as the most significant identified donor. (Donor-advised funds are not required to disclose the identity of donors in tax filings and have thus been criticized as vectors of “dark money” to political nonprofits).But the Guardian can reveal that AIM is just one node in a network of rightwing media and activist organizations IAF is bankrolling, according to its filings.According to the publicly available tax returns, the organization has submitted since its founding in 2021, IAF has handed out more than $8m to rightwing for-profit and nonprofit organizations.In 2022, according to its tax documents, IAF donated $900,000 to Empower Oversight (formerly Empower Whistleblower Center), a nonprofit founded in 2021 to assist whistleblowers and run by three former staffers of Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley. That organization’s mission statement says it is a “nonpartisan educational organization dedicated to enhancing independent oversight of government and corporate wrongdoing”.The Guardian emailed Empower Oversight for comment. In response, a spokesperson wrote that the organization was “a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization” that “works with whistleblowers regardless of their political affiliations” and holds accountable “officials from both major political parties”, pointing out that the Biden administration had appointed Empower president Tristan Leavitt to the Merit Systems Protection Board before he joined the organization in 2023.Other organizations on IAF’s donor list have a far more ideological edge, however. They include Star News Digital Media, a for-profit company that operates a network of so-called “pink slime” news sites that present themselves as local media outlets, but mostly recycle slanted stories and rightwing talking points across the network.The network was founded by three former Tea Party activists in 2017, and its outlets across 15 states have been called “Baby Breitbarts”.Real Clear Foundation, a news nonprofit, received $250,000 from the IAF in 2022. Like Empower Oversight, the 501(c)(3) organization presents itself as a nonprofit, but most of the aggregated news and original investigations on the foundation’s site at the time of reporting were directed at Democrats and specifically Joe Biden.A New York Times investigation in 2020 detailed how coverage in sites run by the Real Clear Foundation swung right during the Trump era, fueled by donations from rightwing foundations and dark money.The Guardian emailed a Real Clear Foundation spokesperson for comment but received no response.The IAF’s largest donation was to Bentley Media Group, which operates a rightwing media site called Just The News. According to Washington DC company records, Bentley Media Group’s directors include John Beck, also listed as chief operating officer of Just The News, and John Solomon, a former Washington Times, the Hill and AP reporter who is also listed as Just The News’s editor-in-chief.Beyond funding Bentley Media and Just The News, IAF’s otherwise bare-bones website highlights years-old stories from the website, and lists the two organizations together in the footer of the site.The precise relationship between the for-profit Bentley Media Group and the IAF was not clear on the site or in filings from the organizations.The IAF supported 12 rightwing media and activist organizations in 2022 according to its filings; the average donation was around $425,000.IAF chief executive Debbie Myers has a long history in the entertainment industry, with stints at a CBS affiliate and the Discovery Channel. More recently, according to her LinkedIn and contemporaneous reporting, Myers was president and chief executive of Gingrich 360, a media company founded by the Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista.The IAF itself has benefited from remarkable donor largesse in the short time since it was founded, receiving $14.3m in just two years, per its tax filings.Those filings indicate that its largest single donor is the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation (DDSF), whose founder, executive chairman and namesake Diana Davis Spencer also sits on the IAF’s board.The DDSF gave the IAF $1.5m in 2021, according to its tax filing for that year, the most recent one that is publicly available.The DDSF was reportedly instrumental in funding a network of voter suppression groups in the wake of the 2020 election and is a successor organization to foundations founded by Spencer’s parents, who were also sponsors of rightwing organizations.Spencer’s father, Shelby Cullom Davis, was an investment banker who served as the US ambassador to Switzerland under the Ford and Nixon administrations and was later chairman of the board of the rightwing Heritage Foundation from 1985 to 1992. More

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      ‘Affirmative action for the privileged’: why Democrats are fighting legacy admissions

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      In the aftermath of the supreme court’s decision to strike down race-conscious admissions at universities in June, progressive Democrats have turned their outrage into motivation. They are now using their fury to power an impassioned campaign against a different admissions practice that they consider unjust and outdated: legacy admissions.The century-old practice gives an advantage to the family members of universities’ alumni, a group that tends to be whiter and wealthier than the general pool of college applicants. Critics argue that legacy applicants already enjoy an unfair leg up in the admissions process and that university’s preference toward those students exacerbates existing inequalities in higher education.As the country adapts to a post-affirmative action world, progressives are ramping up the political and legal pressure on universities to scrap their use of legacy admissions. A Democratic bill, introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Congressman Jamaal Bowman of New York, and a civil rights inquiry at the Department of Education could represent a serious threat to legacy admissions.“Though the supreme court gutted race-conscious college admissions, make no mistake, affirmative action is still alive and well for children of alumni and major donors, and taxpayers shouldn’t be funding it,” Merkley told the Guardian.The origins of legacy admissions policies date back to the 1920s, when Jewish and immigrant students began attending America’s elite universities in larger numbers. Concerned over this growing trend, college leaders implemented a range of admissions preferences, such as legacy status, designed to benefit the white Protestant applicants who had populated university classrooms for centuries.Despite the ignominious roots of legacy admissions, the practice persists at many of the country’s most prestigious universities, including every member of the Ivy League. Colleges defend the practice as beneficial for building strong alumni communities across generations and encouraging financial contributions, even though one analysis found “no statistically significant evidence that legacy preferences impact total alumni giving”.Progressives have mocked legacy admissions as “affirmative action for the privileged”, and the supreme court’s decision against race-conscious admissions has reinvigorated their efforts to end the widely unpopular practice altogether. According to one Pew Research Center survey conducted last year found, 75% of Americans believe alumni relations should not be considered in the admissions process.“Many of the legacy kids simply would not have gotten in had they not had legacy [preference],” said Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice group Color of Change. “This is the result of a system that was designed to operate exactly the way it’s operating.”Last month, Merkley and Bowman reintroduced their bill, the Fair College Admissions for Students Act, to prohibit universities participating in federal student aid programs from giving an admissions advantage to the relatives of alumni or donors. Noting the financial advantages legacy students often enjoy in the college admissions process, Merkley suggested those applicants do not require additional assistance to gain entry to elite universities.“As the first in my family to go to college, I know the struggles facing students whose parents have never been through the process,” Merkley said.According to an analysis conducted by the Harvard research group Opportunity Insights, legacy students were only slightly more qualified than the average applicant to elite private colleges, but were nearly four times more likely to be admitted than those with the same test scores. The boost appears to disproportionately harm students of color, as one study found that white students account for 40% of Harvard’s total applicant pool but nearly 70% of the university’s legacy applicants. Opportunity Insights’ research also concluded that legacy applicants are more likely to come from wealthy families, giving them more access to resources like private education and preparation courses for standardized tests.“Children of donors and alumni may be excellent students, but they are the last people who should get reserved seats, enabling them to gain admission over more qualified students from more challenging backgrounds,” Merkley said.The battle over legacy admissions has now also attracted the attention of the Department of Education. Last month, the department opened a civil rights investigation into Harvard’s use of legacy admissions following a complaint filed by the group Lawyers for Civil Rights on behalf of three racial justice organizations. The complaint accused Harvard of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by giving an admissions edge to the children of donors and wealthy alumni.“We know that schools like [Harvard] set students up for success – and for great success – and introduce them to new innovative ideas and a great network,” said Michael Kippins, a litigation fellow with Lawyers for Civil Rights. “They should reflect the type of diversity that we see in our communities the same way that we would want fair access for anything else.”Olatunde Johnson, a professor at Columbia Law School, viewed lawsuits against colleges’ legacy admissions policies as somewhat inevitable after the supreme court’s decision on affirmative action.“The supreme court opened the door to that challenge by leaving legacy and donor preferences untouched while it got rid of race-conscious affirmative action, so it made it kind of an easy target,” Johnson said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe predicted other universities would be closely watching the outcome of the civil rights inquiry into Harvard as they reconsider their own legacy admissions policies.“People might wait to see how this challenge is resolved because some of the broad contours of this complaint are going to mirror what people would do in future cases,” Johnson said. “Whatever kind of ruling there is, it’s going to have implications more broadly for other institutions, even without separate complaints or lawsuits.”Some colleges aren’t waiting on the federal government to make the change. The liberal arts college Wesleyan University announced last month that it would scrap its legacy admissions policy, joining other private institutions like Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University. The practice is already prohibited at a number of public colleges, including all schools in the University of California and the California State University systems.The trend of abandoning legacy admissions policies may accelerate in the face of mounting criticism from political leaders, including some Republicans. After the supreme court’s decision in June, South Carolina senator and Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott praised the ruling and simultaneously suggested universities needed to revisit their legacy preferences.“I think the question is, how do you continue to create a culture where education is the goal for every single part of our community?” Scott told Fox News. “One of the things that Harvard could do to make that even better is to eliminate any legacy programs.”Robinson is somewhat skeptical that a bipartisan coalition will materialize to meaningfully challenge legacy admissions, and the Republicans in control of the House have so far shown little appetite to take up Merkley and Bowman’s bill.But even if legacy preferences do come to an end, Robinson believes much more will need to be done to build a truly just college admissions process. After all, he said, the practice of legacy admissions is only one piece of a much broader system that disadvantages students of color.“Racism is like water pouring over a floor with holes in it. It will always find the cracks. So, yes, we should deal with legacy admissions. But I want to make sure that we don’t think that this is some sort of silver bullet,” Robinson said.“We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that those who are working every day to shut the doors of opportunity and access to those who have been excluded are not going to find other ways to to hold the side door open for people who look like them.” More

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      What was affirmative action designed to do – and what has it achieved?

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      The US supreme court banned the use of affirmative action policies in college admissions on Thursday. The court ruled that race-conscious admissions violate the equal-protection clause under the US constitution.Envisioned as a tool to help remedy historical discrimination and create more diverse student bodies, affirmative action policies have permitted hundreds of colleges and universities to factor in students’ racial backgrounds during the admissions process. That consideration is supplementary, and taken in tandem with other factors such as applicants’ test scores, grades and extracurricular activities.Even with race-conscious admissions, however, many selective public and private colleges and universities struggle to enroll diverse student populations that accurately reflect society. At the University of North Carolina, for example, in a state where 21% of people are Black, just 8% of the school’s undergraduates are Black.Opponents of affirmative action, such as the advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, argue that considering race as a factor in the admissions process amounts to racial discrimination – particularly against Asian Americans. SFA has brought cases against Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private university, and UNC, the nation’s first public university, to challenge their affirmative action policies, which the group contends favors Black and Latino students. Ultimately, it hopes that race considerations will be nixed from the admissions process entirely, and replaced by race-neutral or “color-blind” policies.What was affirmative action designed to do?The concept of affirmative action originated in 1961 when President John F Kennedy issued an executive order directing government agencies to ensure that all Americans get an equal opportunity in employment. President Lyndon Johnson took it one step further in 1965, barring public and private organizations that had a federal contract from discriminating based on race, color, religion and national origin. The prohibition was added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.In 1969, President Richard Nixon’s assistant labor secretary, Arthur Fletcher, who would eventually be known as the “father of affirmative action”, pushed for requiring employers to set “goals and timetables” to hire more Black workers. That effort, known as the Revised Philadelphia Plan, would later influence how many schools approached their own race-conscious admissions programs.The practice was challenged when Allan Bakke, a white man who was twice denied entry to the medical school at the University of California at Davis, sued the university, arguing that its policies, which included allocating seats for “qualified” students of color, discriminated against him. In 1978, the supreme court narrowly rejected the use of “racial quotas”, but noted that colleges and universities could use race as a factor in the admissions process. Justice Lewis Powell noted that achieving diversity represented a “compelling government interest”.What has affirmative action in college admissions actually achieved?After generations of near total exclusion of Black students and other students of color, colleges and universities began admitting more diverse groups in the 1960s and 70s, and soon thereafter incorporated race-consciousness into their admissions policies.Data shows that the rise of affirmative action policies in higher education has bolstered diversity on college campuses. In 1965, Black students accounted for roughly 5% of all undergraduates. And between 1965 and 2001, the percentage of Black undergraduates doubled. The number of Latino undergraduates also rose during that time. Still, the practice of factoring race into the admissions process faced repeated attacks. In 1998, during an era of conservatism, California voters approved Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in any state or government agency, including its university system. Since then, eight more states have eliminated such race-conscious policies.What could happen next?The end of affirmative action at those state levels shows just how impactful the consideration of race in admissions has been: a UC Berkeley study found that after the ban in California, the number of applicants of color in the UC system “sharply shifted away from UC’s most selective Berkeley and UCLA campuses, causing a cascade of students to enroll at lower-quality public institutions and some private universities”. Specifically, the number of Black freshmen admitted to UC Berkeley dropped to 3.6% between 2006 and 2010 – almost half of its population before the ban.In an amicus brief in the Harvard case, attorneys for the University of Michigan, which had to stop considering race in admissions in 2006, argued that despite “persistent, vigorous and varied efforts” to achieve diversity, it has struggled to do so without race-consciousness. The number of Black and Native American students has “dramatically” dropped since the end of affirmative action in the state.Though students of color remain underrepresented at selective colleges and universities today, institutions argue that their presence helps shape students’ on-campus experiences. The removal of race consideration from college admissions could set a precedent for a less diverse school system, which stands in stark contrast to an increasingly diverse world. More

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      in US Politics

      What is affirmative action designed to do – and what has it achieved?

      by

      The US supreme court could be poised to ban the use of affirmative action policies in college admissions as soon as Thursday. The court, which is expected to deliver its ruling either this week or next, will determine whether race-conscious admissions violate the equal-protection clause under the US constitution.Envisioned as a tool to help remedy historical discrimination and create more diverse student bodies, affirmative action policies have permitted hundreds of colleges and universities to factor in students’ racial backgrounds during the admissions process. That consideration is supplementary, and taken in tandem with other factors such as applicants’ test scores, grades and extracurricular activities.Even with race-conscious admissions, however, many selective public and private colleges and universities struggle to enroll diverse student populations that accurately reflect society. At the University of North Carolina, for example, in a state where 21% of people are Black, just 8% of the school’s undergraduates are Black.Opponents of affirmative action, such as the advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, argue that considering race as a factor in the admissions process amounts to racial discrimination – particularly against Asian Americans. SFA has brought cases against Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private university, and UNC, the nation’s first public university, to challenge their affirmative action policies, which the group contends favors Black and Latino students. Ultimately, it hopes that race considerations will be nixed from the admissions process entirely, and replaced by race-neutral or “color-blind” policies.What is affirmative action designed to do?The concept of affirmative action originated in 1961 when President John F Kennedy issued an executive order directing government agencies to ensure that all Americans get an equal opportunity in employment. President Lyndon Johnson took it one step further in 1965, barring public and private organizations that had a federal contract from discriminating based on race, color, religion and national origin. The prohibition was added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.In 1969, President Richard Nixon’s assistant labor secretary, Arthur Fletcher, who would eventually be known as the “father of affirmative action”, pushed for requiring employers to set “goals and timetables” to hire more Black workers. That effort, known as the Revised Philadelphia Plan, would later influence how many schools approached their own race-conscious admissions programs.The practice was challenged when Allan Bakke, a white man who was twice denied entry to the medical school at the University of California at Davis, sued the university, arguing that its policies, which included allocating seats for “qualified” students of color, discriminated against him. In 1978, the supreme court narrowly rejected the use of “racial quotas”, but noted that colleges and universities could use race as a factor in the admissions process. Justice Lewis Powell noted that achieving diversity represented a “compelling government interest”.What has affirmative action in college admissions actually achieved?After generations of near total exclusion of Black students and other students of color, colleges and universities began admitting more diverse groups in the 1960s and 70s, and soon thereafter incorporated race-consciousness into their admissions policies.Data shows that the rise of affirmative action policies in higher education has bolstered diversity on college campuses. In 1965, Black students accounted for roughly 5% of all undergraduates. And between 1965 and 2001, the percentage of Black undergraduates doubled. The number of Latino undergraduates also rose during that time. Still, the practice of factoring race into the admissions process faced repeated attacks. In 1998, during an era of conservatism, California voters approved Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in any state or government agency, including its university system. Since then, eight more states have eliminated such race-conscious policies.What could happen next?The end of affirmative action at those state levels shows just how impactful the consideration of race in admissions has been: a UC Berkeley study found that after the ban in California, the number of applicants of color in the UC system “sharply shifted away from UC’s most selective Berkeley and UCLA campuses, causing a cascade of students to enroll at lower-quality public institutions and some private universities”. Specifically, the number of Black freshmen admitted to UC Berkeley dropped to 3.6% between 2006 and 2010 – almost half of its population before the ban.In an amicus brief in the Harvard case, attorneys for the University of Michigan, which had to stop considering race in admissions in 2006, argued that despite “persistent, vigorous and varied efforts” to achieve diversity, it has struggled to do so without race-consciousness. The number of Black and Native American students has “dramatically” dropped since the end of affirmative action in the state.Though students of color remain underrepresented at selective colleges and universities today, institutions argue that their presence helps shape students’ on-campus experiences. The possible removal of race consideration from college admissions would set a precedent for a less diverse school system, which stands in stark contrast to an increasingly diverse world. More