Harvard’s legacy admissions come under fire in civil rights complaint in wake of Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action

A Boston civil rights firm charged in a complaint on Monday that Harvard University’s preferential treatment of the children of alumni violates federal law, putting pressure on the Education Department to crack down on so-called legacy admissions at elite U.S. universities.

The filing, submitted to the Education Department’s Civil Rights Office, arrived four days after the Supreme Court rejected the use of race in admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina and banned affirmative action nationwide, reversing a half-century of precedent.

Responding to the earthquake ruling on Friday, President Biden said he was directing his Education Department to analyze “legacy admissions and other systems that expand privilege instead of opportunity.”

The Monday complaint pushed the Education Department to move aggressively. And it could mark an early step toward court challenges to the unpopular practice of legacy admissions, which are said to boost school spirit and line university coffers but seem fundamentally unfair to many observers.

Legacy admissions, like race-conscious admissions, drew skepticism from the Supreme Court in the affirmative action case.

Some 70% of legacy applicants to Harvard are white, and legacy applicants are about six times more likely to be admitted to the school than non-legacy applicants, according to the Monday complaint, filed by Lawyers for Civil Rights on behalf of three Boston-area advocacy groups.

“At the same time that Donor and Legacy Preferences disproportionately advantage white applicants, they systematically disadvantage students of color,” said the 31-page complaint. “This preferential treatment violates federal law.”

The filing said legacy admissions run afoul of protections enshrined in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” the complaint concluded, quoting Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in the affirmative action case.

A spokeswoman for Harvard, Nicole Rura, said in an email that the school “will not comment on the complaint.”

But she added that the school remained committed to the idea that “transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.”

Rura’s email did not address Harvard’s use of legacy admissions. But she said the university would determine how to maintain its values without violating the Supreme Court decision.

Legacy admissions, like race-conscious admissions, appear broadly unpopular in the U.S. A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 75% of voters did not think legacy considerations should play into admissions decisions.

Colorado banned legacy admissions in public universities in 2021, but the Rocky Mountain state is a solitary outlier. Last year, state lawmakers in New York lawmakers proposed a bill banning the practice in public and private schools, but the legislation foundered.

New York State, home to elite universities including Cornell and Columbia, was among the 41 states that allowed affirmative action before the Supreme Court ruling last week.

“If SCOTUS was serious about their ludicrous ‘colorblindness’ claims, they would have abolished legacy admissions,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bronx-Queens progressive, tweeted last week.

“SCOTUS didn’t touch that — which would have impacted them and their patrons,” she added, using an acronym for the Supreme Court.

Four members of the nine-member Supreme Court attended Harvard Law School, and another four attended Yale Law School. The ninth, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, attended Notre Dame Law School, another institution with highly selective admissions.

In a concurring opinion in the affirmative action case, Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative and a graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law School, expressed enmity toward admissions policies that benefit children of alumni and donors.

“While race-neutral on their face,” Gorsuch wrote, “these preferences undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants the most.”