Wall Street Journal, Melissa Korn, 10-29-18
Three weeks into a trial gauging whether Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American applicants, eight current and former students came to the school’s defense. They extolled the value of a diverse campus in enriching their college experiences and said they supported the university’s consideration of race in admissions decisions.
“It’s my story and I should be able to tell it,” said Catherine Ho, a Vietnamese-American sophomore and co-president of the Harvard Asian American Women’s Association. “Race has played such a big part in my life. I don’t know how I could stop talking about it.”
Students for Fair Admissions, the nonprofit suing Harvard and alleging the school intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans, didn’t call any students or applicants to testify. Harvard didn’t ask students to testify on its behalf, citing respect for their privacy.
Harvard’s admissions process has always been shrouded in secrecy, but a recent lawsuit is allowing the veil to be lifted. The WSJ’s Nicole Hong and Melissa Korn examined court documents to dig into some of the new findings. Photo: Getty Images.
Rather, a coalition of 25 student and alumni groups filed a friend-of-the-court brief this summer and received court approval to testify in support of diversity at the university. Members of those groups, and others who testified Monday, were represented by lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
The students and graduates—who identify as Chicana, Latina, Vietnamese-American, black and Chinese-American—reinforced the potential impact of the judge’s ruling.
Harvard said in a court filing that eliminating affirmative action would give the biggest boost to white students, increasing their share in a recent admitted class to 48% from 40%. The share of Asian-Americans would rise to 27% from 24%, while African-Americans would drop to 6% from 14%, and Hispanics to 9% from 14%.
A significant decline in black and Latinx enrollment would be “catastrophic for a student like me,” said Itzel Vasquez-Rodriguez, a Mexican-American woman who graduated from Harvard in 2017. Latinx is the nongendered term for the Latino and Latina community, and was the preferred descriptor for many of Monday’s witnesses.
She said there was “absolutely not” adequate representation of students of color on campus, and a further drop would be “really detrimental” both to those in need of a support network and others who could stand to learn from minority populations.
“It would really rob students of that critical Harvard education where you learn from…people who are different from you,” said Sally Chen, a Chinese-American Harvard senior. She said the fact that her San Francisco high school had a large concentration of Asian-American students was “detrimental” to her educational experience.
The courtroom was packed Monday, with dozens of Harvard students and graduates—Asian, white, black, Latinx and others—donning light blue T-shirts reading, #DefendDiversity. They came to support friends and classmates, even breaking into applause at the end of one student’s testimony.
On the stand, students discussed how they thought race-blind admissions would have affected their applications. Most said they couldn’t have expressed their whole selves without mentioning race and wouldn’t want to be at a school that didn’t clearly value diversity.
Ms. Vasquez-Rodriguez spoke in court of being called a “coconut,” brown on the outside and white inside, when she used advanced vocabulary growing up, and her battle against the perception of “being Latina and being smart as mutually exclusive.”
Thang Diep said that even if he hadn’t discussed his Vietnamese-American identity in his application, it would have been obvious from his name, birthplace and parents’ birthplace.
He chose to write about it, focusing his personal statement on rejecting his Vietnamese roots after being bullied as a new immigrant who arrived to the U.S. at age 8 not knowing English, and then ultimately embracing them. Mr. Diep, now a college senior, said he chose to focus on that topic because “I was really tired of erasing my identity for so long.”
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-students-alumni-defend-value-of-diversity-on-campus-1540853178 via UCOP Daily News Clips, 10-30-18.
Note: There was no testimony reported from students who applied but didn't get into Harvard, a group which includes the trial judge.
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