UNC admissions lawsuit brings another attack on affirmative action

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill weighs race so heavily in its admissions process that it is the predominant factor in determining whether many black and Hispanic students get in, according to court papers filed Friday by an anti-affirmative action group that is also suing Harvard.

The group, Students for Fair Admissions, says the university is excluding white and Asian applicants in favor of less qualified black and Hispanic students.

The plaintiffs accuse UNC, a public flagship university, of using race “at every stage” of the admissions process, in violation of the law, “even when the application gives no indication that race affected the student’s life in any way.”

“This is wrong,” the university said in a brief in its defense, also filed Friday. An applicant’s race does not provide an automatic boost or guarantee admission, the university said. Rather, “This factor, like all others, is always considered in the context of everything else known about a candidate and in light of the range of contributions the candidate might make to the University.”

The case has many similarities to a deeply divisive lawsuit that Students for Fair Admissions brought against Harvard, leading to a hard-fought trial last fall and a national conversation over the role of race in college admissions.

But unlike the Harvard case, which focused on whether the university was particularly unfair to one minority group, Asian-Americans, the UNC case is more akin to high-profile affirmative action lawsuits of the past, which accused schools of favoring black and Hispanic students over others.

The cases are also somewhat different in legal approaches. The plaintiffs accuse Harvard of violating federal civil rights law, and UNC of violating civil rights law and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Both lawsuits were tailored to reach the Supreme Court, and they amount to a two-pronged attack that maximizes the chances for a hearing.

Originally filed in 2014, both lawsuits were engineered by Edward Blum, a conservative activist who opposes racial preferences. At this point it is a tossup which of the cases will reach the high court first. It is possible that if one gets there first, the Supreme Court could decide to call up the other as well, lawyers said.

Both sides in the UNC lawsuit asked a federal court judge to rule immediately in their favor, rather than allowing the case to go to trial.

The filings cap a stressful week for UNC, whose chancellor, Carol Folt, ordered the removal of the last remnants of a Confederate monument on campus that had become a focus of racial tension, and then announced her resignation.

In an email to the UNC community Friday, Folt portrayed the lawsuit as part of a coordinated campaign against race-conscious admissions policies at three leading universities, UNC, Harvard and the University of Texas. (Students for Fair Admissions filed a similar admissions lawsuit against the University of Texas in state court in 2017.)

She sought to reassure students that no one on campus was underqualified. “We are proud of the contributions our students make in our community, and we want each of you to know that you rightfully earned your place here,” she said.

Like the Harvard lawsuit, the UNC case rests heavily on dueling statistical analyses, one for Students for Fair Admissions by Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke economist who is also the plaintiffs’ expert in the Harvard case, and one for UNC by Caroline Hoxby, a well-known economist and educational theorist at Stanford University.

Arcidiacono found that racial preferences accounted for nearly a quarter of admissions for in-state Hispanic applicants and nearly 42 percent of admissions for in-state African-American applicants. Hoxby, however, found that race affected just a tiny share — 0.8 to 5.6 percent — of admissions decisions.

UNC, a public flagship university, admits about 9,500 for a class of 4,000, of which 82 percent must be North Carolinians.

The plaintiffs argue that UNC could achieve the racial and ethnic diversity it wants by focusing more heavily on socioeconomic and geographic factors in admissions. UNC argued, echoing Harvard in its case, that such an approach would reduce both the diversity and educational excellence of the class. The UNC brief said that black and Hispanic students already feel marginalized and that the approach proposed by the plaintiffs would leave them even more so.

“University professors observe a lack of minorities in certain classes, fields or areas of campus,” the UNC brief says. “In turn, underrepresented minority students report feelings of isolation and unfair pressure to represent their race or ethnicity — effects that further impede education.”

In the Harvard case, the plaintiffs are arguing that Harvard suppresses the number of Asian-American students admitted by holding them to a higher standard on grades and test scores, and by reaching for racial stereotypes to downgrade their applications. Harvard has said that it does not discriminate and that the case is built on a flawed and hypothetical statistical model that does not reflect reality.

The judge in the Harvard case has asked for new closing arguments in February, and lawyers say that she may not rule until June.