On March 31, 2021, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (LDB) and the Silicon Valley Chinese Association Foundation (SVCAF) filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Students for Fair Admissions’ (SFFA) petition for certiorari in the case of Students For Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. SFFA filed the underlying lawsuit on behalf of Asian American students to challenge Harvard’s admissions system, which they contend imposes higher standards on Asian American applicants on the basis of their race in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The LDB-SVCAF brief contains eye-opening historical information concerning the profound anti-Jewish attitudes at early twentieth-century Harvard, which have continued to shape key components of American higher education admissions at selective institutions. The LDB-SVCAF brief argues that Harvard developed much of its long-standing admissions program over a century ago with the specific purpose of limiting the enrollment of Jewish students, and that same plan has the continuing effect, to this day, of limiting Asian American enrollment. LDB and SVCAF argue in their brief that Harvard is discriminating against Asian American applicants today using the same methods the school devised and used to discriminate against Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s: reducing the percentage of Asian American applicants “based on subjective factors that are examined through the lens of prejudicial assumptions and stereotypes,” as the brief explains. In 1920, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell began a process of intentionally altering the admissions selectivity system to address what Lowell termed the “Jew problem” at Harvard—which consisted of Jewish students reaching more than twenty percent of the population of admitted classes. Concerned that the increasing Jewish population on campus would deter wealthy Protestants from attending Harvard over comparable institutions, Harvard implemented a de facto quota on Jewish enrollment. But “[r]ather than announce an explicit quota on the admission of Jews to reduce Jewish enrollment,” President Lowell devised a plan whereby Harvard could instead “decline admission to a certain number of Jewish applicants who possessed the stereotypical characteristics of Jews.” Harvard did this by utilizing subjective admissions criteria so that only applicants who passed a “character and fitness” analysis were admitted—Jews were routinely deemed to lack the necessary qualities. Thus, as the brief explains, the subjective criterion of “character and fitness” was used “as a pretext for excluding applicants with stereotypical characteristics of Jews.” For decades, Harvard successfully implemented this method to reduce the percentage of Jews in each freshman class to fifteen percent. These same discriminatory practices and policies that targeted Jewish applicants remain in full force, only now targeting Asian Americans. As Asian American applications to Harvard began to rise over the last four decades, the school took action to artificially control and reduce the number of successful Asian American applicants to ensure racial balancing on campus. Just as Jews were regularly excised from the application pool for lacking acceptable “character and fitness,” today Asian American applicants are rejected based on the personal ratings portion of the admissions process, which measures subjective qualities like “leadership,” “likeability,” and “self-confidence.” Harvard admissions officers regularly conclude that while Asian American applicants excel academically, they fail on the personality metrics, frequently describing Asian American students in prejudicial and stereotypical terms—for example, “science/math oriented, quiet, shy, reserved, self-contained, and soft spoken.” Based on their personal ratings, many qualified Asian American students are denied admission. As the brief contends: “Just as Harvard used methods in the 1920s and 1930s to identify applicants of sufficient ‘character and fitness’ as a pretext to discriminate against Jews, Harvard’s current use of the ‘personal rating’ to pursue student-body diversity is a pretext to discriminate against Asian Americans.” A hundred years later, Harvard continues to utilize the same discriminatory admissions policies that it devised to clandestinely limit Jewish enrollment to now limit the enrollment of Asian Americans. As LDB and SVCAF state in our brief: “Different time period. Different ethnic/racial group. Same discrimination. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now.” Jonathan Vogel of Vogel LLC, who served as the Deputy General Counsel for Higher Education and Regulatory Services, drafted the brief on behalf of SVCAF, a nonprofit that promotes the integration of Chinese communities in Silicon Valley and its neighboring areas, and LDB, an independent, non-partisan institution for public interest advocacy that focuses on the problem of anti-Semitism and discrimination in higher education. You can read the LDB-SVCAF amicus brief here.