Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College et al

Filing 419

DECLARATION re 417 MOTION for Summary Judgment by President and Fellows of Harvard College. (Attachments: # 1 Exhibit 1, # 2 Exhibit 2, # 3 Exhibit 3, # 4 Exhibit 4, # 5 Exhibit 5, # 6 Exhibit 6, # 7 Exhibit 7, # 8 Exhibit 8, # 9 Exhibit 9, # 10 Exhibit 10, # 11 Exhibit 11, # 12 Exhibit 12, # 13 Exhibit 13, # 14 Exhibit 14, # 15 Exhibit 15, # 16 Exhibit 16, # 17 Exhibit 17, # 18 Exhibit 18, # 19 Exhibit 19, # 20 Exhibit 20, # 21 Exhibit 21, # 22 Exhibit 22, # 23 Exhibit 23, # 24 Exhibit 24, # 25 Exhibit 25, # 26 Exhibit 26, # 27 Exhibit 27, # 28 Exhibit 28, # 29 Exhibit 29, # 30 Exhibit 30, # 31 Exhibit 31, # 32 Exhibit 32, # 33 Exhibit 33, # 34 Exhibit 34, # 35 Exhibit 35, # 36 Exhibit 36, # 37 Exhibit 37, # 38 Exhibit 38, # 39 Exhibit 39, # 40 Exhibit 40, # 41 Exhibit 41, # 42 Exhibit 42, # 43 Exhibit 43, # 44 Exhibit 44, # 45 Exhibit 45, # 46 Exhibit 46, # 47 Exhibit 47, # 48 Exhibit 48, # 49 Exhibit 49, # 50 Exhibit 50, # 51 Exhibit 51, # 52 Exhibit 52, # 53 Exhibit 53, # 54 Exhibit 54, # 55 Exhibit 55, # 56 Exhibit 56, # 57 Exhibit 57, # 58 Exhibit 58, # 59 Exhibit 59, # 60 Exhibit 60, # 61 Exhibit 61, # 62 Exhibit 62, # 63 Exhibit 63, # 64 Exhibit 64, # 65 Exhibit 65, # 66 Exhibit 66, # 67 Exhibit 67, # 68 Exhibit 68, # 69 Exhibit 69, # 70 Exhibit 70, # 71 Exhibit 71, # 72 Exhibit 72, # 73 Exhibit 73, # 74 Exhibit 74, # 75 Exhibit 75, # 76 Exhibit 76, # 77 Exhibit 77, # 78 Exhibit 78, # 79 Exhibit 79, # 80 Exhibit 80, # 81 Exhibit 81, # 82 Exhibit 82, # 83 Exhibit 83, # 84 Exhibit 84, # 85 Exhibit 85, # 86 Exhibit 86, # 87 Exhibit 87, # 88 Exhibit 88, # 89 Exhibit 89, # 90 Exhibit 90, # 91 Exhibit 91, # 92 Exhibit 92, # 93 Exhibit 93, # 94 Exhibit 94, # 95 Exhibit 95, # 96 Exhibit 96, # 97 Exhibit 97)(Ellsworth, Felicia)

EXHIBIT 71

Support for a diverse student body – Harvard Gazette

Support for a
diverse student
body

A report on diversity at Harvard found that the University's commitment to student diversity is not a new development.
“Diversity and excellence go hand in hand. That’s something the College has known for a long time,” said Rakesh Khurana,
the dean of Harvard College. File photo by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/support-for-a-diverse-student-body/

Support for a diverse student body – Harvard Gazette

diverse student body is at the core of Harvard’s
academic mission, providing irreplaceable experiences
for students who will work in an ever-more-diverse
world, and enriching both in-class and extracurricular experiences
in innumerable ways, a faculty report on campus diversity has
found.
The report — which was commissioned in January 2015 by
President Drew Faust and Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of
Arts and Sciences (FAS) Michael D. Smith, and was drafted by a
committee led by Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana — found
that Harvard’s commitment to student diversity is not a new
development, though the idea of a diverse campus community has
evolved over time, but rather a long-held belief in the power of
being exposed to ideas, beliefs, cultures, and people different from
those with which students may be comfortable.
“Diversity and excellence go hand in hand. That’s something the
College has known for a long time,” Khurana said. “Diversity is at
the heart of the mission of the College and has been a critical
element of it [since] modern Harvard emerged in the 19th
century.”
Approved Tuesday by the FAS faculty at a University Hall meeting,
the report focuses on undergraduate student life and highlights
numerous ways that the College has actively fostered a diverse
campus community, in both the past and present. The vote, which
approved the report as a statement of the values embraced by the
faculty, comes amid a vigorous re-examination of diversity in its
many guises across U.S. society.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/support-for-a-diverse-student-body/

Support for a diverse student body – Harvard Gazette

Khurana said though past reports have similarly found a diverse
campus community to be key to the College’s educational mission,
it’s important for each generation to re-examine the issue and its
place in campus life.
“It’s important for us to reaffirm these values in a way that makes
sense for the current generation,” Khurana said.
The committee, which also included Henry Ford II Professor of
Human Evolution David Pilbeam, McLean Professor of Ancient
and Modern History and of the Classics Emma Dench, Richard
Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics Mahzarin Banaji, Professor
of History of Art and Architecture Yukio Lippit, and Plummer
Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial
Church Jonathan Walton, met regularly through last fall.
Committee members reviewed several types of documents,
including Harvard President Neil Rudenstine’s 1996 report on the
subject, along with amicus briefs in past affirmative-action court

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/support-for-a-diverse-student-body/

Support for a diverse student body – Harvard Gazette

cases, and student surveys. The committee also benefited from
the views of members of the Harvard community.
The report is divided into sections examining the impact of
diversity on facets of campus life. It looks at the importance of a
diverse campus community to the College’s mission, the role it
plays in student intellectual transformation, its influence on
personal and social development, and its importance once
students leave campus.
“Diversity is important academically and intellectually for the
University, but also as important as we consider what our
graduates go on to do,” Pilbeam said. “The world is more diverse
than ever.”

For many in the Harvard community, an understanding and
comfort with diverse experiences has been enhanced — or even
developed entirely — at college. The college years are often the
first exposure people have to different racial, ethnic, and national

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/support-for-a-diverse-student-body/

Support for a diverse student body – Harvard Gazette

backgrounds, cultures, religions, and beliefs. Student surveys,
which committee members reviewed, showed that students aren’t
blind to the impact of the diverse community they find at
Harvard.
Large majorities of students said they have conversations with
others of different racial and ethnic backgrounds “very
frequently,” and 84 percent in one survey identified “the ability to
relate well to people of different races, nations, and religions” as
either “essential” or “very important,” according to the report. The
senior survey also gave a view of student development over four
years, with about two-thirds of graduating seniors saying their
ability to relate well to people of different races, nations, and
religions was “stronger” or “much stronger” than when they
arrived on campus.
“I think that being able to listen as tolerantly as possible to all
kinds of opinions and to interact as tolerantly as possible with all
kinds of people, and being as comfortable as possible doing that,”
Pilbeam said, “to me, that is the true measure of being not just an
educated person, but, in a non-elite sense, a cultured person.”
The Class of 2019 is made up of 11.6 percent African-Americans,
21.1 percent Asian-Americans, 13 percent Latinos or Hispanics, and
1.5 percent Native Americans or Pacific Islanders, according to
Admissions Office statistics. It also includes 11.6 percent
international students and a range of economic backgrounds, with
more than half of the class receiving financial aid. Of those
students receiving aid, the average annual cost to their families
was just $12,000 a year. As highlighted in the report, the University
goes to great lengths to encourage not just a diverse student body,
but one that interacts meaningfully. Those lengths include the
non-random assembling of diverse students into freshman

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/support-for-a-diverse-student-body/

Support for a diverse student body – Harvard Gazette

dormitory “entryways,” and the construction of and then
randomization of Harvard’s upperclass Houses.

Pilbeam said that over the last few decades, he has seen the
transformation in the classrooms of some of the world’s top
universities firsthand. He started teaching at Cambridge
University, and taught at Yale University for a time before coming
to Harvard.
“The faces one sees in the classroom are very different than when
I started in 1965,” Pilbeam said.
In their report, committee members described the College’s
commitment to student diversity as long-held, dating back to
Harvard’s founding dedication to “the education of the English
and Indian youth of this country,” but also as imperfect, as ideas of
diversity change over time. In the 19th century, Khurana said,
geographic and class diversity was embraced — though racial,
religious, and gender diversity was still to come — as the

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/support-for-a-diverse-student-body/

Support for a diverse student body – Harvard Gazette

institution’s leaders looked at Harvard as a place to educate not
just youth from Massachusetts and the Northeast, but from across
America as a way to strengthen the nation.
“The arc of it has been toward greater and greater inclusion,”
Khurana said. “Built into our DNA is continual questioning of this
notion of who we are.”
The House system was devised with building a diverse campus
community as part of its foundation, according to the report. At
the time, wealthier students lived and socialized apart from the
less-well-off, who were arriving in increasing numbers. Part of the
rationale for the Houses was to bring these groups together to
forge a single student body. By the 1990s, it had become apparent
that students had self-sorted into different Houses, which
prompted College leaders to begin randomization of House
assignments as a way to ensure the Houses themselves reflected
the College’s overall diverse campus community.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/support-for-a-diverse-student-body/

Support for a diverse student body – Harvard Gazette

Self-segregation — seeking out the comfort of things, people, and
ideas that are familiar to us — is something that everyone does,
Dench said. Despite living in an increasingly diverse society, easy
access to the Internet and an array of digital tools makes it easier
than ever to tailor communications, information sources, and
ideas to those that people may already agree with, shielding them
from people and ideas that are different. Yet it is the very
discomfort that results from being exposed to unfamiliar people,
situations, and ideas that provides the broadening experience
central to an undergraduate education, members of the
committee agreed.
“You have to constantly take measures and get people of different
backgrounds and experiences to talk to each other,” Dench said.
“We have got to equip people to talk and listen to different points
of view.”
Harvard’s financial aid policies also represent an effort by College
officials to diversify the student body. Admissions policies have
long been “need-blind,” assuring that students would be accepted
based on their qualifications, not their ability to pay. As financial
aid resources have increased, the College has worked to ensure
that students of any means would not only be accepted, but be
financially able to attend. Under current financial aid policies,
Harvard covers the full cost of tuition, room, board, and all
associated student fees for families making less than $65,000.
Students report the diverse backgrounds of classmates as being
important in everything from classroom learning to
extracurricular activities to athletics. Students are also encouraged
to engage in international experience while at Harvard. The
University’s Office of International Education runs about 250
study-abroad programs, and President Faust’s Innovation Fund for

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/support-for-a-diverse-student-body/

Support for a diverse student body – Harvard Gazette

International Experiences encourages faculty members to develop
creative and innovative international experiences for students.
“We’re nothing without the fact of diversity, without trying to
make mutual understanding better and putting it at the heart and
center of what we do,” Dench said.

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https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/support-for-a-diverse-student-body/