A group of Harvard alumni, students and applicants, including seven of Asian heritage, backed the school’s admission practices and said that the number of minority students would drop dramatically if race were no longer a factor.
Nicole Ochi, an Asian Americans Advancing Justice lawyer working on the group’s behalf, said in a call with reporters that there are too many applicants with perfect test scores and grade-point-averages to consider only academic merit.
"Test scores, grades -- they’re not objective," she said in a press call. "The consideration of race in Harvard’s admission process benefits everyone."
‘Narrowly Tailored’
The American Council on Education, along with three dozen other higher-education groups, also asked the judge not to interfere with any university’s “narrowly tailored” use of race.
"Each university’s unique mission and context may call for the need to evaluate differently certain characteristics, experiences and backgrounds of various prospective students in order to achieve the university’s educational mission,” the groups wrote.
But attorneys for a group of conservative academics in the National Association of Scholars cited “uncanny parallels” between Harvard’s handling of Asian-American applicants and its use of a quota system to exclude Jews in the 1920s.
"This record is replete with evidence of a de facto Asian quota startlingly similar to the one that Harvard once imposed on Jews; of impermissible racial proportionality, or ‘balancing,’ in admissions; and of biased views about the personal characteristics of Asian applicants,” said the association, which is based in New York.
The case is Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 14-cv-14176, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts (Boston).
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.