AAST Affiliate Faculty and Minor Students Featured in DBK Article on Reactions to Supreme Court Affirmative Action Cases

On February 12, 2022, AAST affiliate faculty member, Dr. Julie J. Park, and minor students, Amanda Vu and Jackie Liu, were featured in The Diamondback’s article, “UMD students, faculty react to Supreme Court affirmative action cases”.

Dr. Julie Park, an associate professor in the college of education at this university who consulted for the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case on the side of Harvard, said that these cases were a concerted effort by Blum to eliminate the use of affirmative action.

This university considers diversity in its admissions selections, one of many factors in the process.

The focus on Asian American applicants and the review of programs from two different institutions is new, Park said.

Community health and psychology sophomore Amanda Vu said Blum’s argument perpetuates the model minority myth, the stereotype that Asian people are innately smart and hard-working.

Vu serves as the co-vice president of external affairs for the Asian American Student Union. She said the idea that affirmative action was created to disadvantage high-achieving Asian students is harmful.

“A lot of people were trying to pit Asian Americans against other minority groups, and that’s really harmful,” Vu said.

While applying to colleges, senior biology and women’s studies major Jackie Liu said she initially worried she would be a target of affirmative action discrimination against Asians.

After some self reflection, the AASU co-vice president of advocacy changed her perspective.

“I realized that affirmative action is a crucial and necessary law that is needed to ensure that we kind of fix the decades and hundreds of years of racial discrimination that this country has been built upon, particularly when it comes to higher education,” Liu said.

She said affirmative action needs to be discussed more in Asian American communities.

“In order for us to reach out across the aisle to other minoritized communities, we need to do the work to try and unpack the biases that we already have,” Liu said.

In 2019, a college admissions scandal came to light with Operation Varsity Blues, in which parents conspired with a private admissions counselor to fake their children’s credentials so they could attend prestigious universities.

“These kinds of backdoors used by privileged, socioeconomically advantaged, usually white, people are like an example of why affirmative action is totally completely necessary,” Vu said.

Read the full article.