3 Key Passages From the Harvard Decision

In a long-awaited decision issued on Tuesday, Allison D. Burroughs, a U.S. district-court judge, ruled that Harvard University’s race-conscious admissions process does not discriminate against Asian American students. Here are three key passages from the ruling.

There was no “systemic reliance on racial stereotypes.”

During last fall’s trial, Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in the case, introduced evidence of what it called bias and stereotyping. That evidence included instances in which Harvard’s admissions officers referred to Asian American applicants as “quiet,” a “hard worker,” and “bright” as well as “bland,” “flat,” and “not exciting.”

Harvard on Trial

Detailed background on the lawsuit over the university’s race-conscious admissions policy, the case’s implications for selective colleges, and coverage of the trial as it unfolded, in a federal court in Boston.

• Harvard Doesn’t Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants, U.S. Appeals Court Rules
• 3 Takeaways From the Appeal of the Harvard Admissions Lawsuit
• A Judge Advised Harvard to Give Its Admissions Officers Training to Stop Bias. Will That Help?

In her decision Burroughs wrote: “SFFA has not shown that any applicant was referred to by these types of descriptors because of their race or that there was any sort of systemic reliance on racial stereotypes. The docket binder that contains notes to the effect that several Asian American applicants were ‘quiet’ or ‘flat’ also includes notes for white, African American, and Hispanic students who were also described as ‘quiet,’ ‘shy,’ or ‘understated.’ In the absence of a pattern or a more pervasive use of stereotypes, the court accepts that there are Asian American applicants who were ‘quiet’ and that the use of this word … would be truthful and accurate rather than reflective of impermissible stereotyping.”

During the trial, Harvard’s lawyers repeatedly noted that SFFA did not call a single applicant as a witness.

The court found no evidence of “an individual applicant whom it can determine was discriminated against or intentionally stereotyped by an admissions officer, including by the use of the words ‘standard strong,’” a term admissions officers used to describe some applicants.

Admissions decisions can’t be reduced to numbers.

During the trial, two prominent economists presented dueling statistical analyses. Each was meant to answer the same question: Does Harvard discriminate against Asian American applicants? The question loomed over discussions of Harvard’s personal ratings for applicants.

The two star witnesses arrived at very different conclusions. SFFA’s expert found evidence of intentional discrimination; Harvard’s found none. Essentially, those experts canceled each other out. Although Burroughs found Harvard’s statistical analysis to be more convincing, she also made a crucial point about the limits of such numbers.

“The statistics themselves are not enough,” she wrote. “Even assuming that there is a statistically significant difference between how Asian American and white applicants score on the personal rating, the data does not clearly say what accounts for the difference. In other words, although the statistics perhaps tell ‘what,’ they do not tell ‘why,’ and here the ‘why’ is critically important. Further, by its very nature, the personal score includes, and should include, aspects of an applicant and his or her application that are not easily quantifiable and therefore cannot be fully captured by statistical data.”

But Burroughs also wrote that data analyses can reveal “imperceptible statistical anomalies” that colleges should consider: “These sorts of statistics should be used as a check on the process and as a way to recognize when implicit bias might be affecting outcomes.”

Stories matter.

In a trial dominated by statistical analyses, personal stories seemed to matter a lot, too. In a footnote, Burroughs noted the testimony of Ruth J. Simmons, president of Prairie View A&M University and, as a former president of Brown, the first African American president of an Ivy League university. Simmons’s father was a janitor and her mother was a maid, yet she got her master’s and doctorate from Harvard.

Burroughs wrote that the benefit to students of a diverse campus is “they get a better education, a deeper education, and a truer education to deal with what they’re going to have to deal with in life.”

Burroughs called that testimony “perhaps the most cogent and compelling testimony presented at this trial.” In her conclusion, the judge linked the benefits of diversity to Harvard’s selection process. “The eloquent testimony captures what is important about diversity in education,” she wrote. “For purposes of this case, at least for now, ensuring diversity at Harvard relies, in part, on race-conscious admissions.”

Eric Hoover writes about the challenges of getting to, and through, college. Follow him on Twitter @erichoov, or email him, at eric.hoover@chronicle.com.