Explained | How is U.S. tackling discrimination on campuses?

What is the new policy to shield against caste bias? Why do some groups disagree with the move?

The California Faculty Association (CFA) this month added caste criteria into its anti-discrimination policies, a move that was subsequently ratified by the Board of Trustees of the California State University system. The move by the CFA and the CSU comes after months of sustained campaigning by Dalit right activists, who brought evidence to the university authorities on the broad and deep impact of caste discrimination on U.S. college campuses. The inclusion of protection from caste discrimination in the CSU system was met by sharp criticism from the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), which disagreed on the need for protection from caste discrimination as a separate category.

Evidence provided by Dalit and other minority rights activists suggests that it is, and a growing number of U.S. universities have apparently found such evidence to be compelling enough to pass regulations to protect students and teachers from facing caste discrimination on campus. These include Harvard University, which became the first Ivy League university to recognise caste-based discrimination as an issue of concern, when it ratified, in December 2021, a four-year contract that includes a provision for the addition of caste as a “protected category” for all graduate and undergraduate student workers at the university. Similarly, in October 2021, the privately-run Colby College in Maine banned caste-based discrimination on its campus.

That followed action taken by Brandeis University, Massachusetts, in November 2019, when it said that even though caste is not an officially recognised “protected class” within U.S. federal law or state laws, “The university believes that caste identity is so inextricably intertwined with those legally recognised protected characteristics that discrimination based on one’s caste is effectively discrimination based on an amalgamation of legally protected characteristics. Therefore, the university prohibits discrimination and harassment based on caste, effective immediately.”