Harvard and Princeton Lawsuits

choi

Today's news first.

(1) Melissa Korn and Nicole Hong, Harvard Faces over Admission Policy. Wall Street Journal, Nov 22, 2017 (frontr page).
(Department of Justice, under Title VI of Civil Rights Act of 1964; based on complaint filed by the civil action below in (2) )

(2) Anemona Hartocollism A One-Man Kegak factory Fights Harvard over Affirmative Action. New York Times, Nov 20, 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/ ... ction-lawsuits.html

Quote:

(a) Edward "Blum is not a lawyer. But he is a one-man legal factory with a growing record of finding plaintiffs who match his causes, winning big victories and trying above all to erase racial preferences from American life.  Mr Blum, 65 [and Jewish], has orchestrated more than two dozen lawsuits challenging affirmative action practices and voting rights laws across the country.

"Now, in his most high-profile cause of the moment, he has asserted that Harvard University’s affirmative action policies amount to an illegal quota system that denies high-achieving Asian-American students admission in numbers commensurate with their qualifications. He has already forced Harvard to turn over, under court seal, years of highly sensitive data about demographics, test scores and even some personal essays, and he now has a powerful ally in the Justice Department, which is looking into a similar complaint.

"Mr Blum said he was acting on a pure principle — that people should never be judged by the color of their skin.

(b) "He is a matchmaker bringing together two forces: [plaintiffs he recruits], and conservative donors who finance his work and that [work] of the high-powered, establishment Republican lawyers who take the cases to court.

(c) "In most of his cases, Mr Blum either sues under the name of his own organizations, or he recruits plaintiffs * * * Although he claims to have 22,000 members in his group Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in lawsuits against Harvard and other colleges, Harvard says in court papers that he is a gadfly whose organization is nothing but his 'alter ego.'

(d) "For much of the year, Mr Blum works out of a gray-shingle house in South Thomaston, Me, overlooking Penobscot Bay, in a stark landscape famously painted by Andrew Wyeth. He has a consulting business analyzing esoteric municipal bonds for a handful of wealthy families.

(e) "The DonorsTrust, which distributes money from conservative and libertarian contributors to various causes * * * gave almost $2.9 million to support Mr Blum’s work from 2010 to 2015, said Lawson R. Bader, the trust’s president, citing the most recent publicly available figures.

"Most of that money came from the Searle Freedom Trust, according to tax records and Kimberly O. Dennis, the president and chief executive of the trust, which was founded by Daniel C. Searle of the Searle pharmaceutical company.

My comment:
(a) The report is lengthy. There is no need to read the rest.

(b) "His [Blum's] first lawsuit was a product of personal experience. Mr Blum (pronounced Bloom) ran for Congress in Houston as a Republican in 1992, and lost. * * * He filed a case claiming racial gerrymandering and nursed it to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in 1996."
(i) In 1992, Blum ran against Democratic incumbent Craig Anthony Washington (1944- ; black; US House Representative from Texas's 18th congressional district 1989-1995)  en,wikipedia.org
(ii) Bush v Vera
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Vera

This Bush is George W Bush, then Texas governor. Bush did not necessarily support gerrymandering, but someone needed to be a defendant.
(c) About quotation (d).
(i) South Thomaston, Maine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Thomaston,_Maine
(a town; population was 1,558 at the 2010 census.)
(ii) Penobscot Bay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penobscot_Bay
(at "mouth of Maine's Penobscot River"/ Both Bay and River "are named for the Penobscot Indian Nation, which has continuously inhabited the area")

* Penobscot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penobscot
(section 1 Name)

The accent is in the second syllable.
(iii) Andrew Wyeth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wyeth
(1917 – 2009; his entire life was spent in "his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine"/ One of the best-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting Christina's World; section 2 Work. section 2.1 Christina Olson)

* Cushing, Maine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cushing,_Maine
(a town; population was 1,534 at the 2010 census; 1789, the town was incorporated and named for Thomas Cushing, statesman and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts; section 2 Geography: South Thomaston to the east)

Not contiguous, Maine had been part of Massachusetts. With the consent of Massachusetts, Maine seceded in 1820.