Ivy League Schools Defend Harvard's Admissions Process

The rest of the Ivy League closed ranks behind Harvard on Monday, defending the practice of including the race of applicants in the admissions process in the face of a lawsuit aimed at striking down Harvard’s system.

In a joint brief, the seven other members of the Ivy League and nine private universities ranging from MIT to Emory to Stanford said that a ruling against Harvard’s admissions process would reverberate across academia and hurt efforts to open higher education to a diverse array of students.

The 16 schools in the amicus brief said they “speak with one voice to emphasize the profound importance of a diverse student body for their educational missions.”

But the colleges did not address the specific evidence that those challenging Harvard’s system have brought forth. Data that has been released as part of the lawsuit suggests that Asian-American students were held to a higher standard than students of other ethnicities. Harvard denies any discrimination in its admissions process.

The plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions, an organization representing some Asian-Americans rejected by Harvard, said in its original complaint filed in 2014 that the eight Ivys had remarkably similar proportions of Asian-American students year after year, suggesting that there was some kind of coordinated cap. Harvard has rejected the allegation of any such coordination.

There were a number of briefs supporting Harvard — including from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the American Council on Education and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

By Monday afternoon, there was only one brief supporting the plaintiff, from the National Association of Scholars, a group that opposes affirmative action. The group raised Harvard’s discrimination against Jews in the 1920s and said Asian-Americans are subjected to similar adverse treatment today. Harvard, in court papers, has argued that the historical record is irrelevant to the current case.

In another amicus brief on behalf of Harvard, Walter Dellinger, a former solicitor general in the Clinton administration, who was succeeded in that post by Seth Waxman, one of Harvard’s lawyers in the case, questioned the standing of Students for Fair Admissions to bring the case — even though the judge, Allison D. Burroughs of U.S. District Court in Boston, has already found that the plaintiff does have standing to sue.

Dellinger, in an apparent reference to Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, said that case law prohibited “kibitzers, bureaucrats, publicity seekers, and ‘cause’ mongers from wresting control of litigation from the people directly affected.”

Blum is a staunch opponent of affirmative action who formed Students for Fair Admissions for the express purpose of litigating university admissions cases. Among its members are more than a dozen Asian-American students who were denied admission to Harvard, he said. The group is also suing the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is representing 21 Harvard student and alumni organizations in its brief. It provided testimonials from people like Catherine Ho, 18, the co-president of the Harvard Asian-American Women’s Association. Ho said her parents were refugees from Vietnam who came to the United States because of war. But she said her organization decided to take a position in the lawsuit because it felt solidarity with other “communities of color.”

In the declaration she filed with the court, Ho did, however, express some concern about the allegations of discrimination. “We are frustrated and confused by the data released that suggests problems with how Harvard admissions officers have profiled and described Asian-American applicants,” she said.

But she said such problems did not mean that race-conscious admissions should be abandoned altogether. The potential for bias in the personal ratings that some Asian-Americans received in Harvard’s admissions review may stem “from ways that principals and teachers describe students,” she said in her court declaration.