Harvard’s Next Shoe

The next shoe to drop in the federal government’s battle to reform the country’s institutions of higher education will be universities’ compliance with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-conscious admissions practices. That’s the scoop from Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who, during a conversation Monday with the Manhattan Institute’s Reihan Salam, predicted that it is “the next shoe to drop.” Ms. Stefanik, promoting her new book on what she calls the moral rot at America’s elite universities, “Poisoned Ivies,” mentioned the Supreme Court ruling in the context of a recent report on Harvard’s dwindling Jewish enrollment. It found that the Ivy League school’s undergraduate Jewish population — currently seven percent — has dropped to its lowest recorded level since before World War II and half of what it was a decade ago. The report, constrained by limited data, stopped short of offering a definitive explanation for the decline. It suggested, however, that admissions officers may be systematically scoring Jewish applicants lower on personal ratings, as courts found to be the case with Asian American applicants. Those students took Harvard’s admissions practices to the Supreme Court with the help of legal strategist Edward Blum and his non-profit, Students for Fair Admissions.The Court sided with the plaintiffs six to three, holding that Harvard’s race conscious admissions program, while boosting black enrollment, discriminated against Asian American applicants and violated their civil rights. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, stressed that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” requires that “an individual’s race may never be used against him in the admissions process.” In the years since, a number of elite schools have seen enrollment shifts, with Asian American enrollment rising while black and Hispanic enrollment declining, albeit marginally. Yet reports alleging racial discrimination in admissions — including at medical and law schools — have persisted. Meanwhile, some universities, including Harvard, have withheld admissions data from the federal government that would prove their compliance. The federal government is already on the case, as Ms. Stefanik noted Monday. In February, the Department of Justice filed suit against Harvard alleging the school had “slow-walked” federal efforts to review its civil rights compliance by withholding applicants’ racial data, test scores, and grades. A month later, the Department of Education followed up with a civil rights probe, citing Harvard’s failure to fulfill its requests.“Harvard University should know better,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has said in response to the March probe. “Its name will always be tied to the landmark Supreme Court case that found sweeping racial discrimination in admissions and the campus has been in the spotlight for tolerating egregious antisemitic harassment for years now.” Added Ms. McMahon: “No one — not even Harvard — is above the law.” This is the context in which Ms. Stefanik speaks of a new push by the federal government to investigate malfeasance on the part of the nation’s elite institutions of higher learning, including Harvard, which she decries as “Poisoned Ivies.” Failure by these universities to abide by a high court ruling, or, as Ms. Stefankik cautions, efforts to “circumvent” a ruling, could prove a serious legal issue. As the congresswoman asked Monday, “are schools abiding by U.S. law?”

Harvard’s Next Shoe

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