Of those admitted to Harvard’s new freshman class, about 12 percent are Latino, 16 percent African-American and a record-high 23 percent Asian-American, according to the Cambridge, Massachusetts, college. The plaintiffs say the Asian percentage should be at least 40 percent. Asian-Americans make up about 5.6 percent of the U.S. population.

“Harvard’s brazenness is astonishing,” SFFA said in an Oct. 1 statement to Judge Burroughs, who issued a temporary restraining order against Trump’s travel ban last year and previously worked as a federal prosecutor handling drug-trafficking and organized crime. What the college “will not admit -- but what the record shows -- is that race is not only an important factor, it is the dominant consideration in admitting Hispanics and African-Americans,” it said. “An Asian-American applicant with a 25 percent chance of admission would have a 35 percent chance if he were white, a 75 percent chance if he were Hispanic and a 95 percent chance if he were African-American.”

Ivy Coalition
The Asian American Coalition for Education, which says it represents 156 Asian-American groups, has thrown its support behind the suit. Siding with Harvard -- the nation’s oldest and richest university, with an endowment of $39.2 billion through June 30 -- are the seven other members of the Ivy League, along with the NAACP and the ACLU. The Ivies, in turn, have joined nine other schools, including Duke, Johns Hopkins and MIT, in asking that Supreme Court precedents allowing race as one factor -- in both Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 and Fisher v. University of Texas in 2013 and 2016 -- be upheld.

Some see the case as a cynical vehicle for Blum to provoke a high court review that might end affirmative action at college altogether. Blum and his group twice took the Fisher case to the Supreme Court and lost both times, noted Boddie, of Rutgers. Now, she said, “they think with Justice Kavanaugh as the fifth vote they will overturn affirmative action.”

The lawsuit “poses a fundamental threat to opportunity for millions of young people seeking higher education,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under Obama. “The United States is becoming increasingly diverse, and universities and colleges should reflect that and have the freedom to create diverse campus communities.” She called Blum’s efforts “a mean-spirited attempt to eliminate any laws and policies that seek to address our nation’s legacy of racial discrimination.”

Others see it as a long-awaited chance to stop the abuse of race-conscious admissions.

“My hope is that eventually in this case, or some other case, the Supreme Court will reconsider its decision to leave the door ajar for universities to consider race and ethnicity in admission,” said Roger Clegg, president and general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Falls Church, Virginia, group opposed to racial preferences. He said colleges have shown “that if you allow them to use race at all, they’re going to weigh it in a very heavy, mechanical and unfair way.”

Kindness and Grit
Harvard, which admits only about 2,000 applicants a year, says it could fill each incoming class many times over with kids with perfect numbers. For the Class of 2022, it says, it got a record 42,749 applicants, of whom more than 8,000 domestic applicants had perfect grade point averages, more than 3,400 pristine SAT math scores and more than 2,700 impeccable verbal scores.

But it’s after more than that, the school says -- a varied student body of future leaders who have demonstrated values such as kindness, creativity and grit.

Thang Diep, 21, a neurobiology major from Los Angeles, is a Vietnamese-American who came to the U.S. as a refugee when he was 8 and wrote about it in his application essay. He is among eight current or former Harvard students who plan to testify for the college at the trial. If race-conscious admissions were struck down altogether, as the lawsuit asks, his experience might be excluded from consideration.