IN 1978 the Supreme Court, in the Bakke case, struck down racial quotas in higher education. Summing up, Justice Lewis Powell called the undergraduate admissions policy at Harvard University an “illuminating example” of a better approach. The elite Ivy League institution did not reserve a specific number of places for poor minority candidates. Instead, it sought to promote campus diversity by considering race as one of several “plus” factors in a student’s file. Thirty-six years later, Harvard’s method of reviewing candidates is being challenged in a federal district court in Boston. The plaintiffs claim its admissions policy is a quota system in disguise that discriminates against Asian-Americans. This is the latest legal challenge to affirmative action—and the first to target a private university—hatched by Edward Blum, an activist bent on dismantling Bakke. Mr Blum’s organisation, the Project on Fair Representation, recruits students who believe they have been unfairly rejected from universities that use racial preferences. In 2008 he helped launch the case of Abigail Fisher, a white woman with a 3.59 grade-point average (out of 4) who was rejected by the University of Texas at Austin. Ms Fisher lost her case. She appealed to the Supreme Court, which ordered the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider her case in 2013; Ms Fisher lost again last summer, and is petitioning the justices for yet another hearing. In the meantime, Mr Blum is taking a bolder tack by confronting the very university the Supreme Court has cited as a model of permissible affirmative action.

The complaint against Harvard comes from Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a new vehicle for Mr Blum’s campaign. The SFFA has an impressive poster-child: an unnamed offspring of Chinese immigrants with perfect scores on three college admissions tests who graduated first in his (or her) class at a competitive high school, captained the tennis team and volunteered as a “fundraiser for National Public Radio”. The student was rejected by Harvard, the complaint alleges, because the university seeks to limit the number of Asian-Americans on campus.

This may be hard to prove. Harvard rejects thousands of valedictorians and students with superlative SAT scores every year. The complaint makes much of quotas against Jewish students at Harvard from the 1920s to the 1950s, but draws no direct link to discrimination against Asian-Americans decades later. And a table in the SFFA’s own brief shows that between 2007 and 2013 Asian-American enrolment at Harvard went from 15% to 18%, a 20% increase that is difficult to reconcile with charges of a silent quota.

Mr Blum maintains, however, that Harvard’s admissions policy is “a figleaf to hide, dissemble and obfuscate racial balancing and quotas”. While Asian-Americans made up over 27% of the applicant pool at the three most selective Ivy League colleges from 2008 to 2012, they comprised only 17-20% of the students admitted. This, the SFFA contends, constitutes “intentional discrimination” in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Mr Blum has high hopes for this legal battle. “If the case goes to the Supreme Court, he says, “we will argue that the use of race in college admissions must end.” The Harvard case may not get that far. Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, regards the complaint as a “garden-variety intentional-discrimination case” that “breaks no new legal ground” and is an unlikely candidate for Supreme Court review. Yet if the plaintiffs manage to prove that Harvard sets “a cap on the number of Asians who get in”, Mr Primus says, the university will lose and “admissions at elite colleges will probably change in substantial ways”.

Clarification: An earlier version of this article said that Harvard “rejects thousands of students with perfect SAT scores every year”. We meant that it rejects thousands who score perfect marks on at least one of the SAT papers, not all three.