For Immediate Release
October 30, 2019
Livingston, New Jersey: On October 25, 2019, the Daily Caller published a robust analysis on Judge Allison Burroughs’ ruling in the SFFA v. Harvard case, by Dr. Wenyuan Wu, AACE’s Director of Administration. This investigative opinion piece examines the 130-page long federal court findings in detail, criticizing the ruling on reasonable grounds of political motivations, logical inconsistencies, and moral prejudices. (Read the Chinese translation here).
By exposing the mistruths in the court ruling, Wu’s article seeks to challenge the “righteous” thinking of the American cultural bourgeoise and invigorates a virtuous public discourse on equal education rights. First, she argues that the Burroughs ruling has failed to escape selection biases and personal limitations. There is an unbalanced treatment of pertinent evidence in the present case by taking Harvard’s various arguments at face value while over-scrutinizing SFFA’s findings. Not only does the ruling draws false comparisons between Asian-American and white applicants as a smokescreen, it also faults the plaintiff’s various statistical models for statistical biases and assumes Harvard models’ superiority without critical analysis.
Second, Wu’s piece pinpoints Judge Burroughs’s alliance with Harvard’s discriminatory behavior based on political correctness and elitist righteousness. The court findings explicitly affirms Harvard’s race-conscious admissions by ambiguously quoting the generic benefits of racial diversity, Harvard’s presumed application of strict scrutiny, and the social necessity of “penalizing the groups that are not being advantaged by the process”. In a disappointingly classless manner, she even taunts the plaintiff for not presenting any single student victim at trial, in spite of certifying SFFA’s legal standing.The ruling further explains away Harvard’s anti-Asian discrimination (in low personal ratings, higher standards in the sparse country list and overall qualities targeting Asian-American students) as insignificant and thus excusable.
In conclusion, Wu draws the analysis to a broader perspective of Asian Americans’ fights for equal education rights in recent years. She writes, “In this prolonged David-and-Goliath fight, an encouraging truth emerges amidst the pro-Harvard ruling: if one takes a long-term and rational perspective on the Harvard case, the singular fact that many Asian-American grassroot organizations nationwide have united in this pursuit of holding Harvard accountable for discriminatory admissions still stands strong. As a disheartening roadblock, Judge Burroughs’s ruling is a powerful nod to race-based affirmative action. But it is not a decisive critical juncture. Politics shift, cultures change, and our discourse on relevant matters is constantly evolving. Considering recent developments that Harvard issued guidelines last July tackling implicit bias or racial stereotypes against Asian Americans and the school has admitted more qualified Asian-American applicants in the last two years, our fight for equal education rights continues in an upward trajectory.”
Asian American Coalition for Education
MEDIA CONTACT:
Dr. Wenyuan Wu, telephone: (786) 393-8028, email: admin@asianamericanforeducation.org.
Ms. Swann Lee, telephone: (617) 829-3559, email: swanleeca@gmail.com.
About the AACE: www.asianamericanforeducation.org
Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE) is a non-political, nonprofit, grassroots national organization, the proven leader in fighting for Asian-American children’s equal educational rights. On May 15, 2015, the founders of AACE united 64 Asian-American organizations and jointly filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Education (DOE) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to request that they conduct investigations into Harvard University’s discriminatory admissions practices against Asian-American applicants. As the largest joint action taken by Asian-American communities over the last few decades, this complaint is now being investigated by the Justice Department. Over the years, we have advanced the cause of equal education rights for the Asian-American community.