Nearly a century ago, Harvard College moved away from admitting students based solely on measures of academic performance. In the nineteen-twenties, the concept of diversity in admissions arose in response to the fear of being overrun by Jewish students, who were considered strong on academic metrics but lacking in qualities of character and personality. As the proportion of Jews threatened to exceed a quarter of each class, Harvard’s president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, proposed limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body. Other Harvard officials balked at such overt discrimination, believing it to be inconsistent with Harvard’s liberal tradition, and, instead, formulated a new, inclusive “policy of equal opportunity” that would lead to the same outcome as Lowell’s proposal. It introduced the consideration of qualitative factors such as personality and background, including “geographical diversity,” as part of the admissions process. Representing the diversity of the country meant recruiting and admitting more Midwestern and Southern students, who counterbalanced the droves of Jewish applicants from the Northeast. By the class of 1930, as a result of the new plan, Jewish students made up only ten per cent of Harvard’s undergraduates.

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That Harvard plan developed into a holistic admissions process, which has, for decades, expanded the notion of diversity beyond geography. The aspiration to assemble a class that is diverse in myriad ways, and the practice of considering many factors alongside academic accomplishment, among them personal qualities and racial background, became influential at many institutions that saw themselves as responsible for socially engineering the American élite. The Supreme Court, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in 1978, hailed the Harvard admissions program as an exemplar of legally permissible affirmative action, in which race is one factor among many taken into consideration in college admissions. According to Harvard’s amicus brief, quoted extensively in Bakke, “the race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases. A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”

Last week, a lawsuit challenging Harvard’s admissions process as discriminatory toward Asian-Americans, organized by the affirmative-action opponent Edward Blum, went to trial in the Boston federal courthouse. Among the revelations of the trial’s first week was that, to this day, Harvard makes a special effort to recruit students from twenty states that it calls Sparse Country. In his testimony, William Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions, who has worked in the admissions office since before Bakke, reminisced about his Harvard roommate in the nineteen-sixties, who was “a great ambassador” for South Dakota. He also testified about the letters Harvard sends to high-school students in Sparse Country who have P.S.A.T. scores of at least 1310, encouraging them to apply. The only Sparse Country students with such scores who do not get the letter are Asians; to receive it, an Asian male must score at least 1380. An attorney for the plaintiff asked why a white boy in, say, immigrant-rich Las Vegas with a score of 1310 would get the letter, while his Asian classmate with a 1370 would not. Fitzsimmons responded with generalities about the need to recruit from a broad array of states to achieve diversity.

When asked whether Harvard “put a thumb on the scale for white students” from Sparse Country, Fitzsimmons contrasted students who “have only lived in the Sparse Country state for a year or two” with those who “have lived there for their entire lives under very different settings.” Perhaps he meant that whites are more likely to be “farm boys” or “great ambassadors,” like his South Dakotan roommate. Or perhaps he meant that Asians are more likely than whites to apply to Harvard, less likely to be accepted, and more likely to enroll if accepted, so Harvard saves itself postage costs by reducing its recruiting of Asians. But the exchange highlighted a key question of the trial: whether the Harvard admissions process treats white racial identity as an asset, relative to Asian identity (or treats Asian identity as a drawback, relative to white identity). By pointing to the higher numerical cutoff for Asians as a group at the recruitment stage, before any holistic review of individual applicants could have occurred, the plaintiff apparently was suggesting that race is not used as one factor among many but, rather, as the determinative factor, in Harvard’s alleged effort to shape its class to be more white and less Asian. The twentieth-century history of reaching out to regions where Jews were sparse cast something of a pall over the revelation of explicit differential treatment of Asian and white students in Sparse Country. The plaintiff’s lawyer asked Fitzsimmons if he was aware of this history and he responded that he was not there for it but “I’ve certainly heard the charges.”

The plaintiff’s attorneys repeatedly emphasized the lack of written instructions to admissions officers on how to use race permissibly and not impermissibly in evaluating an applicant, in order to argue that Harvard allows implicit racial bias and stereotypes to infect the process. The plaintiff zeroed in on the “personal” rating—which assesses qualities such as likability, maturity, integrity, courage, kindness, even “effervescence,” based on admissions officers’ review of alumni interviews, student essays, and high-school recommendations—as an area where Harvard may let conscious or unconscious bias against Asians tilt decisions. Fitzsimmons’s testimony confirmed that admissions officers gave Asian applicants higher ratings than white applicants in the academic and extracurricular categories, but that Asians’ admissions rates were pulled down because of their lower personal ratings, despite having alumni-interview scores comparable to or higher than those of whites. While Fitzsimmons rejected the notion that Asian-Americans have worse personal qualities than whites, he speculated that their lower personal ratings reflected the fact that high-school teachers and guidance counsellors’ support in recommendations is stronger for whites than for Asians. In other words, if there was indeed bias against Asians, it originated outside of Harvard. If that is so, though, it is curious that the holistic review process, which is designed to take account of various disadvantages in a student’s minority background, would not attempt to correct for it.

When Fitzsimmons was asked whether he thinks “it’s impossible to abuse a holistic review process like Harvard’s,” he replied, “I do.” As the trial continues this week, the question that is taking shape is whether Harvard has abused the legally permissible holistic review process to allow implicit discrimination against Asians to express itself. To succeed under the standard of Bakke and subsequent Supreme Court cases, Harvard must satisfy “strict scrutiny” by showing that its treatment of Asians was narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling interest (here, student-body diversity). Ironically, the first time the Supreme Court applied a “strict scrutiny” standard to race discrimination (and to Asians) was in Korematsu v. United States, in 1944, to hold that ordering internment camps for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War was permissible. Harvard can win at trial if the judge, Allison Burroughs, determines that any discriminatory effect on Asians was unintentional on Harvard’s part or that the disparities shown are not “gross” enough to infer Harvard’s discriminatory intent. While a “smoking gun” in a civil-rights case is not needed, proof of intentional discrimination is always a steep uphill climb. Much of the evidence at trial may not create a good look for Harvard, but it also may not be enough to meet the operative legal definitions of discrimination.

It is rather hard to imagine Harvard losing a case of such importance to its brand as social equalizer, especially in a courthouse in a town so palpably dominated by its footprint and its alumni. But even discrimination claims that fail in court can be resolved, in time, on social terms. The most likely trajectory, with or without court cases, is that the perception of Asians’ personal qualities of character and leadership—perhaps even “effervescence”—will, in a matter of decades, improve, in élite institutions and in American society. Apart from the issue of the legality of race-based affirmative action—which the judge already decided in Harvard’s favor before trial, and which will surely be revived on appeal in the coming year—one outcome of this month’s trial has been to heighten awareness of implicit racial biases. And, win or lose, Harvard’s Asian problem, recalling the experience of Jews, will be a piece of the social history of an American minority group on its way to eventual, if not always enthusiastic, acceptance.