By Ann Wang

The legal defense group Project on Fair Representation, led by Edward Blum, is suing Harvard University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for “employing racially and ethnically discriminatory policies.”

The Harvard lawsuit alleges that the university is discriminating by limiting the number of Asian Americans admitted each year and engaging in racial balancing. The complaint highlights data and analysis “that strongly suggests that white, African American, and Hispanic applicants are given racial preferences over better qualified Asian-Americans applying for admission to Harvard.” A quote from the group’s Students for Fair Admissions website states, “Additionally, the complaint demonstrates that Harvard is not in compliance with the new ‘strict scrutiny’ standards articulated in 2013 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. The Fisher opinion unambiguously requires schools to implement race-neutral means to achieve student body diversity before turning to racial classifications and preferences.”

Likewise, the UNC-Chapel Hill lawsuit claims that the University does not follow the Fisher strict scrutiny requirements.

While UNC spokesman Rick White said their school “stands by its current admissions policy and process,” Harvard’s General Counsel Robert Luliano said that the university’s admissions policies “remain fully compliant with all legal requirements.”

Mr. Blum noted that UNC had admitted to finding that racial balancing practices do not necessarily maximize racial minority diversity in a previous study. “The unique thing about UNC is that they did a study in which they concluded that if they dropped race-based affirmative action and instead implemented a top-ten-percent plan like Texas, the number of minorities on their campus would go up, not down,” he said. “So, for them to continue using race-based preferences is not fair. It’s actually limiting the number of minorities that can attend that school, and we believe the court will find that it’s unconstitutional.”
In addition, the Students for Fair Admissions website states, “The discrimination against Asian-Americans at Harvard and both schools’ blatant failure to comply with recent Supreme Court directives with regard to race preferences are emblematic of the behavior of the vast majority of competitive colleges throughout the country. Because of this, Students for Fair Admissions asserts in its complaints that racial classifications and preferences in college admissions are inadministrable; a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and federal civil rights laws; and must be ended as a matter of policy and law.”

Officials at the Project on Fair Representation say that they are looking for students at other schools to come forward to provide evidence for future suits, with the ultimate goal of removing all race-based admission policies of schools.

By: Saman Hasan

Admittedly, the world is feeling a bit of déjà vu right now. We find ourselves confronted with yet another menacing force at work in the Middle East, using the mantle of Islam as their propaganda. The United States is, as one would guess, heavily involved in this conflict, with recent drone attacks and airstrikes in Iraq against the sinister group that is the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria”, or ISIS.  With all this chaos and turmoil, people are overlooking a very real and serious issue playing out in the United States right now. Anti-Muslim sentiment, or Islamophobia, is on the rise once more, and it’s as ugly as ever.

The first question we must ask is this: has there truly been a resurgence in discriminatory sentiment against Muslims? The answer is undoubtedly yes.  Statistics from the NYPD tell us that anti-Muslim hate crimes have been up 143%, and steadily on the rise. As of September 18, there have been a total of 17 hate crimes in New York City, compared to a total of seven in the previous year. In one particular instance, a man allegedly pushed and spat on a 15 year old Muslim girl aboard a bus, calling her a terrorist because she was wearing a headscarf. What’s worse? Not one bystander helped her. When asked to comment on these crimes, Jerome Hauer, commissioner of the New York State Division of Homeland Security, said “As time goes on, [threats] to both the Jewish community and the Muslim community are going to be more organized. I think they’re going to be more targeted.”

These crimes are coupled with increased anti-Muslim sentiment in the media. The most outrageously blatant and horrifyingly racist example can be made of Bill Maher, whose recent panel regarding ISIS and Islam went viral on the web. On his show, Maher made the claim that Muslims will kill you for leaving their religion, backing up his statement by spewing out statistics that were laughably wrong. He went on a tirade about Islam being “the mother lode of bad ideas” and made another incorrect claim that jihadists made up 20% of the religion. His segment may be amusing in a shaking-your-head way for some people, but the sad truth still remains: Bill Maher’s audience was cheering him on.

So why is Islamophobia on the rise? The root of the problem is ISIS, but it is not the only answer.

ISIS has been wreaking havoc in the Middle East, and their level of violence and chaos has stirred a great amount of fear in the world. They identify as Muslims as a group, even though in reality they violate the very pillars on which Islam is based. Unfortunately, the association with other Muslims has already been made and the damage is done. With this mayhem comes the fear. Hauer said, “The more that happens in the mid-East, the more that the U.S. commits to try and go after ISIS, the greater the threat will grow here.” From the videotaped executions of American citizens by ISIS to U.S. involvement in Gaza, the fear of war grows.  Fear is a motivator, driving a person to help combat the fear in whatever way they can. It is human nature to place blame when something is going wrong, because people need an outlet to channel their fear and anger. Thus, the correlation of ISIS with Islam leads to the inevitable: the entirety of the Muslim population becomes the scapegoat of this crisis. Muslims somehow become accountable for crimes perpetrated by these extremists, even though these terrorists do not properly represent Islam. Spencer Ackerman, a senior correspondent at

Wired.com, said, “I’m an American Jew, and I have never had to explain or defend actions of Jewish people around the world. I realize I am in a privileged position. So why do American Muslims have to explain themselves or defend other Muslims’ actions?” It’s a staggering double standard, but a sad truth of American society nonetheless.

In all honesty, the media is the prime instigator of these sentiments. A person’s perception of the world is based heavily on how the media portrays it. The coverage of this crisis in Gaza has played a huge role in these skewed sentiments, because it gives the argument emotional support. NYPD deputy chief Michael Osgood said, “The Gaza Strip becomes a major news story and stays consistent in the media through July and August, every single day, every single morning, front page of the New York Times, front page of the Wall Street Journal. […]…the group ISIS becomes a major news story and they stay consistent in the news media, [and] that creates what I call an emotional surge.” The news about ISIS is often very charged, an example being the executions of the American citizens, and this generates a swell of emotion in the viewer. As Osgood said, “A person, who would normally not offend, now offends. He’s moved by the emotions.” Thus, these emotional stories lead to emotional people, who commit hate crimes in order to channel their feelings.

Politicians across the country, including President Obama, have gone on record to state that we are “not at war with Islam”. If this is true, then why do I have to cringe while watching supposedly liberal shows like Real Time with Bill Maher, where Islam is spoken of in the same way one might talk about a disease like Ebola? If this is true, then why is the death toll of innocent Muslims in the Middle East higher than the death toll for terrorists? If this is true, if we’re simply combating extremism, then why is there such blatant discrimination against Muslims in nearly every aspect of society?

What we need is a deeper understanding. We need awareness. Lack of exposure to the real Islam, the peaceful, loving, and beautiful religion that is Islam, is what lends towards the fear and hate. “Most Americans don’t travel, [they] only assume,” said Ackerman, who encourages the need for Americans to broaden their horizons and understand other people and cultures. Americans are poorly informed, and this in part is due to poor media coverage and politicians who propagate this fear and hatred. Knowledge is the only way to combat these perceptions, and everyone—people, politicians, and the media—needs to come together and be a more impactful force to counter this negativity. Whether or not Islamophobia decreases in the coming years is on us.

By Maxine Riter

The morning of February 9, 2014, California Institute of the Arts freshman Regina (who asked to be identified only by her first name) woke up alone with her clothes half off, a splitting headache, bruises on her thighs and neck, and a sharp pain in her bladder. Though she had been intoxicated and in and out of consciousness the previous night at an off ­campus party, she could recall a classmate of hers taking her into a dark bathroom, choking her so that she struggled to breathe, and then raping her on the floor as she fought against it and repeatedly told him to stop.

An article by Al Jazeera news broadcaster reveals that Regina reported the incident to the school and they took action in an investigation, which all federally ­funded colleges are legally mandated to do in reports of sexual assault. However, the investigation, instead of focusing on the rapist and the events that occurred that night, was centered largely around attempts to blame Regina for the crime that she had been the victim of. She was bombarded with questions from the school administration regarding her drinking habits, how often she partied, the length of her dress, whether she physically enjoyed herself, and other questions that were completely irrelevant to the case.

A woman’s attire, conduct, history, and other such factors never, under any circumstance, give permission or even partially justify a man to violate her and commit rape. A woman has basic rights to her body, and if a man makes the decision to violate those rights, there is no one to be held responsible but him. But, like in many other cases across the globe, the investigators were more focused on victim ­blaming than on prosecuting the criminal.

Regina is one of millions who are affected by rape. According to a 2014 Center for Disease Control and Prevention study published in Time magazine, approximately one in five women in the U.S. is raped in their lifetime. One in five. Look around you. Look at all the women in your life: classmates, friends, family, anyone at all. Now imagine that for every five of those women, one of that group has become or will become a victim of rape. It’s almost unfathomable how common it is. And yet this isn’t just some issue off in another third world country, far away from us privileged Americans. Rape is here, and it affects an incredibly high percentage of our female population.

So do these women deserve to be raped? Do these women deserve to be forcibly subjected to the physical and mental anguish of sexual abuse? One of the biggest problems regarding rape cases

picked apart in an effort to find some way that she had provoked the rapist and place at least partial blame onto her.

This takes away women’s rights and freedoms. Regardless of her outfit, drink of choice, behavior, etc., rape is rape, and there is never an invitation to rape. Under no circumstance does any man ever have the right to strip a woman of her basic fundamental rights and degrade her in such a way. Many ­ twenty ­two to thirty ­four percent of individuals, according to the IMC study ­ argue that if a woman displays herself in a way which appears sexy and/or vulnerable, she is at least partially to blame for her own rape. Does this mean that men are uncontrollable savages who know not right from wrong and are permitted to do anything necessary to fulfill their sexual needs? Does this mean that men’s desires of the night are more important than a woman’s basic fundamental right of safety and the right to her own body? Their claim is ridiculous; no matter what she’s wearing, how she’s behaving, or how intoxicated she is, the only person who has the right to a woman’s body is her.

Not only do some people place blame on a woman for being raped, but some even go as far as to say that she wanted it or was “asking for it”. Rape specifically describes a nonconsensual sexual act inflicted upon an individual, so the idea of a raped woman having “wanted it” is completely contradictory. “She was asking for it with that outfit she was wearing.” She was asking for it? So if I see you walking down the street without a helmet on, does that give me the right to hit you on the head with a hammer? If I go by the same

reasoning used in the first statement, you were “asking for it” by not wearing something that could have possibly protected you. The claim that women “ask for it” by wearing certain clothing or behaving in a certain manner is completely absurd. No matter how vulnerable a victim, no one has the right to strip someone else of their rights.

Rape itself is such a traumatic ordeal. It can have tremendous physical and mental effects upon the victims and scar them for the rest of their lives. The issue of victim ­blaming only makes so much worse an already traumatic and embarrassing incident. Now, not only are they forced to deal with the effect of the rape on their minds and bodies, but they also have to endure the blame for a crime that they were not responsible for and the psychological problems and embarrassment that accompany that.

In 1990, FBI statistics showed a total of 102,560 reported forcible rapes (including attempted rapes). However, rape is statistically underreported. Published in “Violence Against Women” of The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History (1998), these 1990 FBI statistics were compared with statistics from studies of victims by the Justice Department, and it was estimated that in 1990, fifty­ four percent of rapes went under reported. That means that the 102,560 reported in the 1990 FBI study make up only about forty ­six percent of the actual rapes that occurred in the US that year. In her book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975), Susan Brownmiller estimated that between one in five and one in twenty rapes were actually reported. However outdated these estimates may seem, recent studies by the National Research Council and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in the Huffington Post confirm that the percentage of rapes reported has not drastically increased since then and rape still continues to go grossly underreported in the United States.

So why are rapes so underreported? Among a number of other reasons, we again see the issue of victim ­blaming. Many women who have been raped don’t report it out of embarrassment and fear that they will be blamed because of their outfit, alcohol consumption, or other similar factors that could partially “justify” their rape. They are not only subject to blame from the general public, but also from the legal system. Rape victims in court are often asked questions regarding their sexual history, behavior, alcohol consumption, attire, etc. that could be used by the court to direct part of the blame towards the victim. The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History’s “Violence Against Women” describes how, though there has technically been some legal reform regarding what can and can’t be asked in cases of rape in the past few decades, little has changed in practice. The legal system often treats rape the same way that it did before, although written laws have changed.

Several empirical studies have found that rape law reforms have made virtually no difference in the arrest, prosecution, or conviction or rapists. The lack of reform in rape cases regarding what can and can’t be asked to rape victims in a court of law is demonstrated in more recent studies, too. The Harvard Journal of Law and Gender published startling evidence demonstrating the judicial system’s violation of laws that prevent inappropriate interrogations of rape victims when lawyers were allowed to ask degrading, accusatory, and irrelevant questions such as: “Were you wearing a bra?”; “Were you wearing underwear?” The legal system continues to place blame on rape victims for the crimes committed against them in direct violation of laws created to prevent such injustice, contributing to the problem of victim blaming just as much as the public does.

Victim ­blaming is a serious issue faced by the victims of rape. It further torments them after they have already been through a scarring ordeal, and unjustly forces them to take responsibility for crimes that they did not commit. The common mindset that the victim can be held, for any reason, responsible for their own rape strips women of their fundamental right to safety and right to their own body. It instills the idea that men are more important than women and unjustly shifts the blame from the criminal to the victim. In order for victim ­blaming to stop, the general public must learn to respect women’s rights and recognize that rape is a one ­sided crime in which only the rapist is responsible.