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BOSTON — Harvard casts a large shadow over the Federal District Court in Boston, and not just because the college’s admissions system is on trial in one of the courtrooms here.
Day after day, Harvard graduates fill the witness box and gallery at the trial of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Among those testifying on Monday was Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who graduated from Harvard in 1985 and received a law degree there in 1989. Taking the stand later was Rakesh Khurana, the dean of Harvard College, who received two graduate degrees from Harvard in 1998.
Also involved in the case are those who tried but failed to get into Harvard, like the Asian-American plaintiffs who are accusing Harvard of running an unfair selection process that favors the offspring of alumni, especially those who make big donations to the school in Cambridge, Mass.
And then there is the judge who will decide the case, who it turns out has a Harvard connection of her own.
Judge Allison D. Burroughs, the daughter of a Harvard graduate, sought to be a Harvard graduate herself, but did not get in.
Her rejection suddenly became an issue in the trial on Monday, when someone going by the name “Veritas in Diversitas” sent a mass email to the reporters covering the trial suggesting that Judge Burroughs was biased against Harvard because the college had not accepted her.
“Federal Judge Hides Her Own Painful History of Harvard Rejection,” was the title of the email.
As soon as the court opened for business Monday morning, Judge Burroughs summoned the lawyers to the front of the room for a whispered sidebar on “an email that you all had shared.” The sidebar was off the record, but there was considerable debate, along with a few chuckles.
Even before the email was sent, Judge Burroughs had disclosed in pretrial proceedings that she had applied to Harvard and been rejected.
She instead went to Middlebury College, from where she has said she happily graduated in 1983.
Her father, Warren Burroughs, was a member of Harvard’s Class of 1945, but graduated in 1947, according to Harvard records and news reports. It was common for World War II-era students to graduate late. He went on to work in the insurance business and died in 2014.
Whether Judge Burroughs’s rejection, as the email writer said, was deeply painful to her was not something she was willing to address on Monday.
Under questioning from reporters about the email, both sides in the trial were quick to say that they did not want Judge Burroughs to recuse herself. She has been working on the case for four years, since it was filed in November 2014, and a recusal would be a significant disruption. (The Harvard side is represented by a lawyer from, you guessed it, Harvard. The plaintiffs’ lead lawyer, Adam Mortara, said he got into Harvard Law School, but chose the University of Chicago instead.)
Besides, finding a judge who did not go to Harvard would be a tall order. It turns out that nine of the 13 judges in the Boston courthouse went to Harvard, records show, not including three judges in Springfield and Worcester or the magistrate judges.
In court on Monday, Mr. Kahlenberg, who was testifying for the plaintiffs, offered his analysis of how Harvard could use socioeconomic factors rather than race to achieve the diversity it seeks, a view Harvard heartily contests.
Mr. Khurana countered that Harvard would find it impossible to create a class of such excellence if it did not include race as one of many factors.
“We’re not trying to mirror the socioeconomic or income distribution of the United States,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is identify talent.”
Judge Burroughs, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014, has been open about her efforts to make tough decisions fairly.
“I spend a lot of time thinking about how to do it right — in terms of correctly applying law to facts, but also in making sure that I treat litigants and their lawyers with respect and in trying to ensure that people, win or lose, feel like they were heard and their views fairly considered,” she said in a 2016 article in the Boston Bar Journal.
In perhaps her best-known decision, Judge Burroughs halted President Trump’s travel ban for seven days in 2017, turning Boston’s Logan International Airport into a refuge for immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries.
In the Harvard trial, she has asked piercing questions about unconscious bias, wondering if the university’s admissions officers might be unwittingly putting Asian-Americans at a disadvantage.
The writer of the email responded to a reply email on Sunday by saying that he (or she) was busy with a work deadline and could not speak. The email echoed the motto written on blue T-shirts worn by several alumni supporting Harvard during the first few days of the trial. Their shirts said “Diversitas,” a play on Harvard’s motto “Veritas,” which means truth.
But they said they had nothing to do with the email.
“Oh gosh, no,” said Jeannie Park, one of the Harvard graduates. “It was absolutely not our group.”
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