Yale freshman Jian Li has filed a federal civil rights complaint against Princeton for rejecting his application for admission, claiming the University discriminated against him because he is Asian.</p>
<pre><code>The complaint, which was filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on Oct. 25, alleges that the University’s admissions procedures are biased because they advantage other minority groups, namely African-Americans and Hispanics, legacy applicants and athletes at the expense of Asian-American applicants.
“We’ve been notified of the complaint and asked to provide information to the Office of Civil Rights, and the University will provide the Office of Civil Rights with the information that it has requested,” University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt '96 said yesterday. “But I will say that we do not believe that the case has merit.”
The case, first reported this weekend by The Wall Street Journal, injects new life into a longstanding debate surrounding affirmative action and whether race can or should be a factor in college admissions. Li’s minority status adds a new twist to the story, however, since previous complaints about universities’ racial preference policies have been filed by white students alleging bias.
Li cites a recent study conducted by two Princeton professors as evidence for his case. The study, published in June 2005, concluded that removing consideration of race would have little effect on white students, but that Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in admitted classes that are currently taken by African-American or Hispanic students.
Current legal precedent on the question of racial preference grew out of two lawsuits filed in 2003 against the University of Michigan. In those cases, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges could use racial preferences benefiting underrepresented groups like African-Americans and Hispanics, but that quotas, points and other “mechanistic” policies are unconstitutional.
In Li’s case, however, “you have a minority candidate, but a minority candidate from a category that is not regarded by the [court] as an underrepresented category,” University politics professor and noted constitutional scholar Robert George said. "This is a minority candidate who is saying, ‘I don’t want my race to be counted for me or against me, but for my race not to be counted against me, it is important that no race be counted in any way that reduces my chances of admission.’ "
“So you have two different categories of minority whose interests are allegedly in conflict.”
The question now is whether a newly configured court — which now includes conservative justice Samuel Alito’72 — could reverse its earlier decision and deem all racial preferences in the college admissions process unconstitutional.
Li said in a phone interview yesterday that people have misconstrued his motives for filing the complaint. “I’m fine here,” he said of being at Yale. “I’m just doing this because I want to do something about the situation. I want to bring attention to it.”
Currently, Li said, colleges discriminate against Asian-Americans on the basis of their ethnicity or race. “I’m not saying that people with the highest SAT scores should be admitted to universities,” he said. “Lots of things should be considered beyond that, but I don’t think race should be one of them.”
Li, who has a perfect 2400 SAT score and near-perfect SAT II scores, was rejected this past year from five of the nine universities he applied to — Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania — and accepted to four: CalTech, Rutgers, Cooper Union and Yale.
Princeton maintains that its admission policies do not discriminate against Asian-American or members of any other race. “We treat each application individually and we do not discriminate on the base of race or national origin,” Cliatt said. “To the contrary, we seek to enroll and do enroll classes that are diverse by a multitude of measures.”
With thousands of excellent applicants competing for a little over 1,000 spots, the process of selecting a freshman class involves difficult decisions, Cliatt said. Only about half of the applicants with perfect SAT scores, for instance, were admitted last year, she said.