With the lawsuit against Harvard University making headlines, many questions have been brought up regarding affirmative action policies in America. What is it? What does this mean?

Affirmative action is the policy of promoting education and employment of members in groups who are known to have previously suffered from discrimination in the past, namely women and racial minorities. President John Kennedy introduced the idea of affirmative action in 1961  with Executive Order 10925 in an attempt to regress the social discrimination at the time. While it temporarily “leveled the playing field” and offered more opportunities for minorities, “reverse discrimination” became a problem in the 1970’s where underqualified members of minorities were favored over qualified members of majorities. The affirmative action debate has become murky over time;  the public has been interested in this policy, and even the Supreme Court has been divided multiple times over of the complexities of the case.

Harvard, one of the top universities in America, has come under fire for accusations of racial bias against Asian Americans. In 2013, a seemingly unrelated case of affirmative action against the University of Texas (UT) made its way to the Supreme Court: Abigail Fischer, a Caucasian woman, claimed the university had not accepted her because of her race. The Supreme Court didn’t make a definitive ruling on the case and referred it back to lower courts, but did state that all universities should “ensure that each applicant is evaluated as an individual and not in a way that makes an applicant’s race or ethnicity the defining feature of his or her application.”

With this in mind, the plaintiffs of the current Harvard lawsuit accuse the institution of limiting the number of Asian American students it admits by setting the bar higher for this specific demographic, possibly not following the Supreme Court’s instructions. For example, Asian American men in rural states need to score 60 points higher on the PSAT than rural white men to receive a recruitment letter. Harvard denies claims of racism, saying that it looks at potential students in a “holistic” way and that a student’s race could only help, never hurt them. It claims the data the plaintiffs presented is inaccurate and biased, considering Edward Blum, the same man who led the 2013 lawsuit against UT and over two dozen other affirmative action cases, is the leading head of this case. Recently, much of the university’s previously secretive admissions process has come to light and gives both sides of the lawsuit evidence to help their cases. AHS Social Science teacher Oliver Beckwith claims that the information presented is hard to analyze and the “trial is a good place to examine it.” Currently, Judge Allison Burroughs has the final say on this case and is expected to release her ruling in early 2019.

Affirmative action definitely raises some concerns, especially for high school students intending on applying to college. In the end, the affirmative action debate is currently being disputed in courts of law and we will have to wait and hear their verdicts.