Livingston, New Jersey: On December 7, 2023, the Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE), a national organization that advocates for equal rights and opportunities in education, sent a letter to Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, urging the school to stop illegal use of race in admissions and its summer programs.
AACE recently received a complaint that alleges that in the Allen School’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access Five-year Strategic Plan published in Fall 2021 (currently on its website https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/www-cse-public/publications/Allen-School-DEIA-Strategic-Plan-2021-accessible-final.pdf), as part of Goal O.1, the Allen School stated it would: “[m]easure the percentage of domestic Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native, Hawaiian/Pacific Islander undergraduates and, by year 5, evaluate whether the percentage is at least 15% (the UW-Seattle average).” Further, a series of tactics were enumerated to achieve this goal. Additionally, one of the stated tactics, O.1.5, was to “[c]reate and retarget summer programs for students who are underrepresented in computing.”
The Allen School’s five-year DEIA plan contains at least two provisions that are blatantly unconstitutional and in violation with the Supreme Court’s recent decisions of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the University of North Carolina. As a result, AACE demands Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering to conduct a comprehensive legal review of its DEIA Plan and immediately stop using race as a factor in your admissions system.
AACE President Yukong Mike Zhao said: “While AACE sympathizes with the intent of improving racial diversity in college campuses, we vehemently oppose the use of race as a factor in admissions and summer programs. We believe that such actions are illegal and undermine equal education rights for all Americans. The root cause of a lack of racial diversity is not meritocracy, but rather the failing K-12 education in too many black and Hispanic communities. American societies should hold the politicians who manage these communities accountable for improving K-12 education, instead of continuing to use race to discriminate against Asian or other racial groups.”
Link: AACE’s letter to Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington: https://asianamericanforeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/AACE-letter-to-Allen-School-UWash12072023.pdf
Asian American Coalition for Education www.asianamericanforeducation.org
MEDIA CONTACTS:
- Swann Lee, Phone: 617-651-1328, Email: swanleeca@gmail.com.
About the AACE: www.asianamericanforeducation.org
Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE) is a non-political, nonprofit, grassroots national alliance with over 300 partnering organizations nationwide. Since 2015, AACE have been mobilizing Asian communities to stand firmly behind SFFA and exposed the Ivy League college’s anti-Asian discrimination on the national stage. Over the last eight years, AACE teamed up with over 360 Asian American organizations, organized the Boston Rally in 2018 and “Equal Education for All” rally in 2022, encouraged Asian American students to join SFFA’s lawsuits, and filed five amicus briefs. Besides supporting SFFA, we have advanced the cause of equal education rights for the Asian-American community in many other areas, including federal adoption of AACE policy recommendation on college admissions in July 2018, federal lawsuit against Yale University in 2020, support to Asian Americans’ fights for equal education rights in Maryland, New York, Washington, California, Massachusetts and other states. AACE is the proven leader in fighting for Asian-American children’s equal educational rights.