Does one of the nation’s most prestigious universities really have a racially biased admissions process, or are the organizers behind such a claim merely pushing a larger, more controversial agenda?

Those were the questions prompted by a federal complaint filed last week with the Departments of Justice and Education by more than 60 Asian-American organizations who say Harvard University uses racial quotas and other illegal practices to discriminate against Asian-American applicants....

It’s not the first time Harvard has been accused of capping the number of Asian-American students in its incoming classes. A November 2014 lawsuit by a group called Students for Fair Admissions made the same claim. That suit compared the school’s alleged Asian-American policies to its treatment of Jewish applicants nearly nine decades ago, when Harvard expanded its admissions criteria beyond academic achievement, essentially as a means of cracking down on the growing percentage of Jewish freshmen that then-president A. Lawrence Lowell feared would “ruin the college.”

But critics — many within the Asian-American community — have questioned the real motive behind these cases, charging that both may be using the alleged racial discrimination against Asian-Americans as a wedge issue to promote a much larger agenda: the dismantling of affirmative action.