Updated (10/15/2018, 5:36 p.m.) with testimony from Harvard’s dean of admissions and other details of Monday’s proceedings.
Harvard University defended its race-conscious admissions policy in a crowded courtroom in Boston on Monday, pushing back against claims that it discriminates against Asian-American applicants. It was the first day of a trial that has come to represent that latest front in the country’s fight over affirmative action in college admissions.
The university was accused of balancing its undergraduate classes to ensure that it had admitted its desired share of students of each race and ethnicity. Adam K. Mortara, a lawyer representing Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff, also said Harvard penalized Asian-American applicants by systematically giving them lower scores on a metric admissions officers use to measure personality.
Mortara explained that Harvard gives applicants a numerical score in four categories: academic achievement, athletic ability, extracurriculars, and personality. He told the judge, Allison D. Burroughs of the Federal District Court, that if she agreed with him on one point, it should be that race influences the scores admissions officers give to applicants on the personality rating.
Students for Fair Admissions’ case against Harvard is not an attempt to do away with affirmative action, Mortara said, but an opportunity to take a close look at the private university’s once-secretive process and conclude that it is unfair. During his opening argument, he analyzed admissions data and explained why the judge should conclude that the data show that Asian-American applicants are admitted at lower rates despite their higher performance in the academic-achievement category.
“Diversity is not on trial here,” he said.
A Packed Courtroom
But Harvard’s lawyer, William F. Lee, disagreed. In his opening statement, he said that the university does consider race in its admissions process, but that applicants are not accepted or denied admission because of their race. Race is one factor of many in “a system full of checks and balances,” he said.
The numerical ratings students receive early in the admissions process are later used by admissions officers to evaluate some 40,000 applications. Those numbers “triage” the applicants, he said, and they are part of a long and complex process. In the end a committee of about 40 people discusses and votes on the applicants in an attempt to admit a class that is diverse in many ways.
The university “cannot achieve educational goals without considering race,” said Lee, who is a Harvard graduate. He closed with a story about his own experience as an Asian-American lawyer, recalling that early in his career he argued a case in a federal courthouse in Boston where only men were present and he was the only one who was not white.
He gestured to the courtroom behind him and said, “It could not look more different today.”
That’s because of the efforts of colleges across the country that have committed to admitting diverse classes, he said, concluding that there is still work to be done.
Barely a year after the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to issue its final word on this form of affirmative action, the issue is back, following a Justice Department memo that seemed to promise Trump-administration investigations of colleges. Here’s all of The Chronicle’s coverage.
Harvard students and representatives of alumni associations have also been allowed to testify in the trial. In their opening statements on Monday, lawyers for those groups stressed the importance of race-conscious admissions. They said that their clients’ racial identities could not be divorced from who they are as people and who they were as applicants to Harvard.
“A colorblind approach means that you close your eyes to the full lived experiences of applicants,” said Jennifer Holmes, a lawyer with the NAACP.
The courtroom was packed, with some observers in an overflow room. Current and former top officials at Harvard were in the audience, including Catherine G. (Drew) Faust, the immediate past president; William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions; and Rakesh Khurana, dean of Harvard College, the university’s undergraduate division. Edward J. Blum, the conservative activist who is president and founder of Students for Fair Admissions, was also there.
Heated Back-and-Forth
The first person to take the stand on Monday was Fitzsimmons, who has served as the admissions dean since 1986 and has worked at Harvard for much longer. He was asked by John M. Hughes, also a lawyer for Students for Fair Admissions, about letters that are sent to students across the country to encourage them to apply to Harvard. Admissions officers try to target high-school students who score high on the PSAT, Fitzsimmons testified, and those in areas that are less well-represented at Harvard, such as the Midwest.
The Harvard officials also know, in some cases, the ethnicity of those students. In a heated back-and-forth, Hughes asked Fitzsimmons whether students’ race affects the PSAT score they need to have earned in order to receive a recruitment letter from Harvard. White students from underrepresented areas need to achieve a lower score than do Asian students from the same areas in order to get a letter, Hughes argued.
“The only reason that Harvard doesn’t invite an Asian student with 1310” from a less well-represented area, Hughes said, “and does invite a white student with 1310 is race.”
Fitzsimmons repeatedly tried to add nuance to that line of argument, saying that the letters are a recruitment tool and do not determine who is admitted.
Reaching out to prospective students across the nation, or ‘race discrimination, plain and simple’?
“We are simply trying to reach out to people from all over the nation,” he said. Hughes called the practice “race discrimination, plain and simple.”
Fitzsimmons will continue to testify on Tuesday, and will be followed by other Harvard officials. Both sides are expected to call expert witnesses who have run statistical analyses of six years of Harvard admissions data.
If Monday was any indication, the trial is likely to include a lot of discussion about the best way to conduct such an analysis. Lawyers on both sides are already making different arguments about whether applicants who are the children of Harvard alumni and applicants who are recruited for sports teams should be included in that analysis. Harvard says all students should be included in the data.
Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.
