Harvard Tries to End Long-Running Lawsuit

Harvard University is looking to wrap up litigating the long-running Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University case. As our readers may recall, Harvard claimed a momentous victory at trial. The decision was then appealed by the anti-Affirmative Action group known as Students for Fair Admissions to the First Circuit court — and denied. And it seems Harvard doesn’t want to go a third round, arguing instead that the SFFA group hasn’t justified fighting on to the nation’s highest court.

As Law360 reports in a piece on a potential battle to the Supreme Court, “An anti-Affirmative Action group that has waged an unsuccessful war against Harvard University’s race-conscious admissions policy shouldn’t get a third bite at the apple, the elite Massachusetts school told the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, opposing a petition to hear the case. Harvard said the February petition by Students for Fair Admissions ‘thoroughly distorted’ the record and merely ‘recycles allegations’ that the district court and the First Circuit rejected. ‘SFFA is not entitled to battle out the facts a third time in this court,’ Harvard told the high court. ‘And it identifies no unsettled legal issue meriting review.”

And while we believe that Harvard and all highly selective universities are guilty of discriminating against Asian American applicants in the admissions process, this case — as we said from the start — was never the way to go and it was brought before the courts by a man, Edward Blum, who we have long believed was simply using Asian Americans as pawns in an effort to dismantle Affirmative Action, a practice that is not to blame for Asian American discrimination in elite college admissions. Change — real change — begins not in the courts but with the populace. It’s the very kind of change that’s happening right now across this nation as the #StopAsianHate movement continues to capture our nation’s zeitgeist.