“Harvard’s failure to provide meaningful criteria to cabin its voluntary use of race, its use of a personal rating that significantly harms Asian-American applicants’ chances of admission and may be infected with racial bias, and the substantial evidence that Harvard is engaging in outright racial balancing each warrant denial” of Harvard’s request, the department said.





The department is separately investigating Harvard’s admissions policies.





There was no immediate comment on the move from the Education Department.





The filing follows a July decision by the those departments to abandon Obama-era guidelines that instructed universities to consider race in their admissions process to make the student body more diverse. Democrats said the Trump administration was taking away protections for minorities.





The Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank, cited Harvard’s own analysis of its admissions data and said it “demonstrates that being African American, Native American, or Hispanic was a ‘plus’ factor in the competition for admission, but being Asian American proved to be a ‘minus.'”





But Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, criticized the Justice Department for “signaling abandonment of the agency’s long-standing historical mission of working to address racial discrimination and promote diversity.”





She said the department’s filing “ignores the well-documented racial bias embedded in grades and standardized test scores.”





Shaun Harper, head of the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California, said that grades and test scores alone should not be the only factors when deciding whether to admit a student.





“Is the DOJ saying that it is in favor of Harvard being 100 percent Asian-American because if we are looking just at GPAs and test scores, it could very well be that those with the absolute higher scores would be Asian-Americans,” Harper said. “Is this what the DOJ is saying it wants?





Several other groups also filed court documents siding with Harvard.





More than 500 scholars who study college access and Asian-American studies asserted that the suit has failed to present any evidence of racial discrimination.





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