A conservative legal group is saying the University of Wisconsin could be the next to face legal battles over its holistic admissions process.
The Project on Fair Representation, which targeted UW along with several other schools this past April for using race-based affirmative action policies, is again asserting that UW should be sued.
“UW-Madison is not in compliance with the Supreme Court’s new strict-scrutiny requirements and is in danger of being sued,” director Edward Blum said.
This warning comes after the Project on Fair Representation—based in Washington, D.C. and funded by Project Liberty, a non-profit conservative legal group—filed lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina last week.
In its campaign this spring, the group sought applications from potential plaintiffs claiming that UW and other universities denied their admission based on their race.
UW defended its admissions policies in April, and Provost Paul DeLuca issued a statement on the matter. The statement said UW uses a holistic admissions approach and that academic credentials, while being the most important, are not the only factor taken into consideration.
“GPA, class rank, and test scores do not always predict classroom success,” DeLuca said in the statement. “For this reason, the university performs a comprehensive review of an applicant’s entire record.”
Blum said for UW to avoid litigation, it needs to end race-based admissions and implement race-neutral policies in order to maintain fairness and diversity. He said schools should “lower the bar” for all students who come from disadvantaged households, high schools that send few students to college or who are first-generation college students—or factors which he called “essentially everything except for race.”
“It’s not like the University of Wisconsin will become an all-white and all-Asian institution by following these commands,” Blum said. “We and other educational experts and scholars anticipate that University of Wisconsin will be able to maintain its current level of diversity.”
At this time, nobody has taken legal action against UW.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article was incorrectly published and has been updated.
