Harvard University, a school more selective than your childhood friend’s imaginary club, found itself once again explaining its admissions process in court this week as the Department of Justice lent its support to a group accusing the Ivy League institution of discriminating against Asian American applicants. The elite institution, famed for churning out Nobel laureates, U.S. presidents and the occasional social network founder with a questionable moral compass, claims its admissions process is holistic — a word which, in this case, could be interpreted as “subject to creative interpretation.”
The lawsuit, originally brought by Students for Fair Admissions, suggests that Harvard’s allegedly holistic approach includes scoring Asian American applicants lower on personality traits like likability and courage, qualities one can only assume are accurately assessed in the half-hour it takes to read an application while sipping kombucha. Harvard has responded with firm denials and a mountain of data apparently taller than Widener Library, asserting that race is only one of many factors. Presumably one squeezed in somewhere between whether a student founded five nonprofits and whether they have legacy status dating back to a great-great-grandparent who once underwrote a dormitory.
Enter the Department of Justice, which filed what is known in legal circles as an amici curiae brief — Latin for “we’re not officially involved but we’ve brought popcorn.” With great solemnity, the DOJ agreed that there’s evidence Harvard engages in what might be diplomatically dubbed “racial balancing,” which seemingly ignores the Supreme Court’s prior direction to please not do that. Harvard, meanwhile, clings tightly to its argument that diverse student bodies make for better educational outcomes, a sentiment that is hard to refute unless one is on the losing end of the personality scorecard.
If the plaintiffs prevail, the ruling could drastically change how colleges consider race in admissions, potentially compelling universities to come up with new, creative reasons to reject thousands of extremely talented applicants. After all, tradition must be preserved.
At Harvard, getting in is still harder than getting the password to the secret society meeting in the library basement, but at least now we know who’s guarding the door.