The third week of the Harvard discrimination trial kicked off with testimony from students and alumni who support Harvard's use of race in its admissions process. Their supporters, donning light blue #DefendDiversity shirts, packed the gallery.
A group called Students for Fair Admissions is suing Harvard, charging the school treats Asian-American applicants unfairly and holds them to higher standards than other groups.
In a break from the data-heavy testimony of the previous week, eight representatives of pro-diversity organizations that filed briefs in support of Harvard's admissions process talked about their backgrounds and own stories.
In each testimony, a common theme emerged: Not including race in the application process would mean not getting a full picture of who the prospective students are.
Itzel Libertad Vasquez-Rodriguez, a Mexican-American who graduated from Harvard College cum laude in 2017, said she chose to write her application essay about growing up as a Chicana in southern California.
Vasquez-Rodriguez said her identity has impacted every decision that she's made, so not sharing her background would make it impossible to express herself and her goals.
"All of my life’s ambitions revolve around communities of color and my ethno-racial identity," she said on the witness stand.
Sarah Francis Cole graduated from Harvard College in 2016 and received a master's from the Graduate School of Education in 2017.
She recalled being involved with the Black Students Association at Harvard during the Black Lives Matter movement and the sense of community that helped create for her and her classmates during a turbulent time.
Cole said she wouldn't have even been able to apply to Harvard if its admissions were race blind.
“Race-blind admissions is an act of erasure," she testified. "To try to not see my race is to try to not see me.”
Thang Diep, whose application was brought up earlier in the trial, drew a standing room only audience as he recalled coming to the United States with his parents from Vietnam and the challenges they faced.
In his application, he wrote about his Vietnamese identity, which he remembers shying away from when he was younger because he was bullied for not being able to speak English properly.
"If I didn’t write about this experience, I don’t know what I would have written about," Diep said.
After testimony that got sometimes emotional for the Harvard senior as he talked about his journey to embrace his culture, supporters in the gallery gave him a standing ovation as he left the stand.
Lawyers for Students for Fair Admissions were mostly silent during the day's proceedings, questioning only Diep and Margaret Chin, a member of Harvard's Class of 1984 and a sociologist at Hunter College.
SFFA asked Diep a number of questions, including whether Harvard could do more to increase socioeconomic diversity and whether Asian-Americans encounter bias. He endorsed diversity in all forms and said Asian-Americans do face bias as students of color.
The lawyers asked Chin about a 1983 paper she helped author as a student called "Admissions: Impossible," which explored the challenges Asian-Americans face in admissions and advocated they be included in diversity efforts.
SFFA lawyers asked Chin if Asian-American applicants still face some of the problems the paper identified, including subjective personal ratings the paper called "the downfall of many Asian-American applicants."
Chin indicated much has changed about the presence of Asian-American students on college campuses since the paper was published.
Ed Blum, the president of SFFA, had been in court everyday since the trial started, sitting directly behind his organization's lawyers. But today he was notably absent for most of the testimony.
Harvard is expected to begin presenting its defense tomorrow. Ruth Simmons, former president of Brown University and the first black president of an Ivy League school, will take the stand.
