Anemona Hartocollis

Sen. Elizabeth Warren this week laid out one of the most ambitious plans yet, promising free public college and debt clearance for the majority of student loan holders. Cost: $1.25 trillion over 10 years, billed to the ultrawealthy.

The announcement from Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who is running for president, had many students and former students cheering. It also raised long-simmering questions about the cost and quality of higher education, and who should pay for it.

Warren’s plan would offer a one-time clearance of student debt for 75 percent of borrowers, and at least some relief for 42 million Americans. It would cancel $640 billion of the $1.5 trillion in outstanding student debt.

For Samantha Morgan and her husband, Justin, the plan would be life-changing. He works as a laboratory manager, and she works part time for a nonprofit. They said they had accrued about $70,000 in student loan debt between them and are making payments on an income-based repayment plan.

“Your monthly payment is so low that you’re not paying your loans because interest accrues so fast,” Samantha Morgan, 30, said. “My loan has actually gotten bigger.”

If they faithfully make their payments for 20 years, the loans would be forgiven. The couple, who have a 3-year-old son, said they could not afford to buy a house and were reluctant to have another child, in part because of their debt burden.

The Morgans are precisely the kind of people that Warren’s proposal is meant to help. But one criticism of the plan, and of other candidates’ ideas to eliminate college tuition or student debt, is that it would benefit some on the road to becoming doctors, lawyers and other well-paid professionals.

The Warren campaign said that the plan was designed both to capture a wide swath of borrowers and to target those who need it most. Its payouts are progressive, canceling up to $50,000 for every person with a household income under $100,000, but gradually declining for households with incomes up to $250,000. Those who make more than $250,000 would get nothing.

Still, to Sandy Baum, an expert on college affordability at the Urban Institute, $50,000 in debt clearance was too much. Forgiving $10,000 in loans would eliminate debt for a third of borrowers, she said.

“That is virtually all the borrowers who are low-income, who don’t have a bachelor’s degree, who dropped out of college, who are struggling most,” as opposed to those who are in a better position to pay off their loans, Baum said. The average federal student loan debt is $32,000, according to federal data.

An Urban Institute analysis found that the loan cancellation plan would benefit black students — who on average borrow more for college — more than other racial and ethnic groups. Warren campaign officials said the plan was meant to address the fact that black students tend to have fewer family assets to draw on.

The plan got a positive reception from several students at New York University who were enjoying a sunny spring day this week. Some spoke of benefits beyond a financial boon.

Andrew O’Connor, 25, a second-year law student, said loan cancellation could liberate him and his classmates from the pressure of going into corporate law, rather than public interest law.

Another law student, Catherine Larsen, 26, said she had taken out loans just to pay her living expenses, and she expected to go into government service. “It’s kind of scary,” she said. “What if I follow this low-paid path and end up kind of screwed?”

While a federal public service loan forgiveness program exists, questions continue to swirl about eligibility and whether the government will hold up its end of the bargain. Under the Warren plan, federal debt would be cleared “automatically” using available data about income and outstanding debt, meaning borrowers would not have to apply. Eligible private debt would be bought out and canceled by the government.

Supporters of Warren’s plan said it would help people in jobs that require high levels of education but do not command top salaries, like teachers. Warren also presented the plan as a middle-class stimulus package that would put money back into the economy.

Paul Hankins, an English teacher in Sellersburg, Indiana, said that in the next couple of years, his two children would be going to college, and everyone in his family would end up with student debt.

Hankins, 49, returned to school at 30 to become a teacher. He and his wife, a nurse practitioner, had taken on loans willingly to do what they loved, he said, and still owe almost $40,000 combined.

But “it’s a bill that we pay every month,” he said. “And the way you pay them, they hang on for so long. You’re like, ‘Wait, when was the last time that I actually sat in a classroom when I was doing this?’ I could put more money into my classroom if I weren’t putting money back into my education.”

Some critics questioned the value of such a huge investment in tuition and loan cancellation, and whether bailing out people with college degrees was the best way to spend nearly half the proceeds of Warren’s proposed wealth tax, which she estimates would bring in $2.75 trillion over 10 years. (Warren also proposes other uses for the increased tax revenue, like universal child care.)

“I think it’s a hard sell,” said Beth Akers, an economist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, though she did give the Warren campaign credit for trying to make the plan progressive by tying it to income.

Others felt a one-time clearance of debt would not address the root causes of the nation’s student debt crisis. Matthew Chingos, director of the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute, suggested that the plan was not forward-looking enough.

“The plan aims to wipe out a lot of debt, but that could end up being a bit of a Band-Aid, and we’d start marching back to where we are,” Chingos said.

Warren campaign officials argued that overall student debt would shrink because many students would opt for free public college. They added that competition would then drive down the price of private school tuition.

Luke Stuntz, an undergraduate student in environmental studies, was skeptical that people would flock to public colleges if they became tuition free. He said he had chosen to take out loans to go to NYU when he could have gone to a good state school in his home state of Massachusetts for much less.

“I kind of know what I’m getting into,” Stuntz, 19, said. “A lot of kids go into debt not knowing what they want to do.”

In a post on Medium announcing the plan Monday, Warren talked about how she, as an aspiring young teacher, had paid just $50 in tuition a semester at the University of Houston. “I could afford it on a part-time waitressing salary,” she said.

Those days, of course, are long gone. Over the past 20 years, average tuition and fees at private four-year colleges rose 58 percent, after accounting for inflation, while tuition at four-year public colleges increased even more, by more than 100 percent, according to research from the College Board.

Resentment over a potential windfall for others has played no small part in the debate over Warren’s plan. That millions of Americans, in one fell swoop, would be relieved of the punishing burdens that many have scrimped and saved for decades to pay off did not sit well with Warren’s critics.

In some ways, the drive for free tuition reflects the growing public anxiety about the value of college, said Akers of the Manhattan Institute.

“People are going to college without a lot of information about what their degrees are going to be worth,” she said. “Prices for college have to come more into line with the value they’re providing. That is the core issue these policymakers are trying to address.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/us/warren-student-loans-college.html" id="6c62ea75-8eea-344a-ab0f-337fb82be615">The New York Times</a>.

It has become a rallying cry of the left: College should be free, or, at the very least, should not come with mountains of debt.

Elizabeth Warren Wants to Cancel Student Loans. Critics Wonder if That's the Right Solution.

Some of their children gave statements at the sentencing hearing, saying they were haunted by the abuse they suffered, but also saying in some cases that they had forgiven and still loved their parents. One of their daughters told a packed courtroom that the suffering “may have been bad, but it made me strong.”

“My parents took my whole life from me, but now I’m taking my life back,” said the young woman, who is now in college. She added, “I’m a fighter. I’m strong.”

The couple, David and Louise Turpin, cried and trembled as four of their children made statements, two of them through intermediaries, in Riverside County Superior Court.

One of the children, a young man who is studying software engineering at college, said that he had learned to ride a bike since being rescued. “Sometimes I just go on long rides because I enjoy it so much,” he said.

The children were rescued in January 2018 after one of the girls worked up the courage to escape by jumping from a window of the suburban Los Angeles home where they had been kept prisoner. She called 911 from a cellphone she had grabbed from the house, and in a calm, clear voice described the years of abuse to a police dispatcher.

“I’ve never been out. I don’t go out much,” the girl told the dispatcher. She was 17, but her voice sounded like that of a much younger child, because, prosecutors said, her growth had been stunted by the abuse. The abuse left two of her sisters unable to bear children, authorities said.

Now, in a reversal of fate, the parents, who pleaded guilty to multiple counts of torture and abuse, are likely to spend the rest of their lives locked up. They will be eligible for parole after 25 years, prosecutors said, but unless a parole board decides otherwise, they will probably remain in prison for life.

The children ranged from 2 to 29 years old when they were found. Some were emaciated and appeared to have cognitive deficiencies from the abuse. Only the toddler did not appear to have been abused, authorities said.

During the hearing Friday, the children revealed some disturbing details of their captivity. One of the daughters said that the children had been shackled because their parents were afraid they were consuming too much sugar and caffeine. But her parents continued buying bottles of soda, she said, because if their father did not have it, he might fall asleep while driving and get into an accident.

Some of the children described their household as a religious place where they believed what was happening to them was God’s will. One of them quoted a Bible verse about trusting in God.

Their words evoked the strange mix of terror and unreality that reigned in the household. The young woman who described herself as a fighter said, “I saw my dad change my mom. They almost changed me.”

Another daughter said her parents decided on home schooling because people criticized them for having so many children. “It worked out good at first,” especially after they moved from Texas to California, she said.

She said the family had passes to Disneyland and went to the Grand Canyon. She asked the judge for leniency. “I feel like 25 years is too long,” she said. “I believe with all my heart that our parents tried their best to raise all 13 of us. They wanted to give us a good life, and they did everything they could to protect us.”

To their neighbors, the family seemed normal, if reclusive. David Turpin, 57, had been an engineer for Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Louise Turpin, 50, apparently stayed home. They lived in a nondescript stucco home in the small working class city of Perris, about 70 miles east of Los Angeles. Neighbors rarely saw the children outside the home. It was neatly kept on the outside, and so did not arouse suspicion. But it reeked of human waste on the inside, where the children were often not released from their shackles to go to the bathroom.

“We live in filth,” the 17-year-old said in the 911 call. “Sometimes I wake up and I can’t breathe because of how dirty the house is.” She said she had not bathed for almost a year.

The children were forced to stay up at night and sleep during the day. They were given carefully rationed meals — generally only one meal, a combination of lunch and dinner — per day. The meals often consisted of bologna or peanut butter sandwiches.

Three of the children — all but the first to speak — said they still loved their parents. None of the children were identified by name. The young man said he still had nightmares about his siblings being chained up. “But that is the past, and this is now,” he said. “I love my parents and have forgiven them for a lot of the things they did to us.”

Their parents also addressed the court. “I never intended for any harm to come to my children,” David Turpin said. “I miss all of my children and will be praying for them.”

Louise Turpin said through tears that she wanted to hug her children and tell them how sorry she was. “I only want the best for them,” she said.

The judge, Bernard Schwartz, was unmoved. Children, the judge said, are “a gift,” but the parents had forfeited their right to raise them by their “selfish, cruel and inhuman treatment.”

“Their lives have been permanently altered,” he said, adding, “To the extent that they do thrive from today, it will be not be because of you both, but in spite of you both.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/us/turpin-family.html" id="c2f18b90-dc5d-3447-a852-8e31e1aca3bd">The New York Times</a>.

Couple Who Tortured 12 Children in Their California Home Are Sentenced to Life

A California couple who tortured 12 of their 13 children, starving and beating them, depriving them of sleep and sometimes shackling them to their beds with chains, were sentenced Friday to 25 years to life in prison.

“My parents took my whole life from me, but now I’m taking my life back,” one of the children, a young woman who is now in college, said in a statement she read to the court.

The children were rescued in January 2018 after one of the girls worked up the courage to escape by jumping from a window of the suburban Los Angeles home where they had been kept prisoner. She called 911 from a cellphone she had grabbed from the house and in a calm, clear voice described the years of abuse to a police dispatcher.

“I’ve never been out. I don’t go out much,” the girl told the dispatcher. She was 17, but her voice sounded like that of a much younger child, because, prosecutors said, her growth had been stunted by the abuse.

Now the parents, David and Louise Turpin, are likely to spend the rest of their lives locked up. The Turpins were sentenced after pleading guilty in February in Riverside County Superior Court to torture and other abuse and neglect so severe that it left two of their daughters unable to bear children.

The parents will be eligible for parole after the minimum time has elapsed, but Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin has said that unless a parole board decides otherwise, they will spend the rest of their lives in prison. After ruining the lives of their children, he said, it was fitting justice.

Since being removed from the home, the children are healing and beginning to live more normal lives, authorities said. The seven adult children were living together and attending school in February, when their parents pleaded guilty.

To their neighbors, the family seemed normal, if reclusive. David Turpin, 57, had been an engineer for Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Louise Turpin, 50, apparently stayed home. They lived in a nondescript stucco home in a middle-class neighborhood of the city of Perris, about an hour’s drive southeast of Los Angeles. Neighbors rarely saw the children outside the home. It was neatly kept on the outside, and so did not arouse suspicion. But it reeked of human waste on the inside, where the children were often not released from their shackles to go to the bathroom.

During the 911 call, the girl said that some of her siblings were tied up, and the dispatcher asked how many of them were restrained. “Two of my sisters, one of my brothers,” the girl replied. The dispatcher asked if they were tied with rope. “With chains,” the girl said. “They’re chained up to their beds.”

A 29-year-old daughter weighed just 82 pounds, and a 12-year-old sibling was the size of a 7-year-old, authorities said. The children appeared to lack a basic knowledge of life, and many of them did not know what a police officer was when they were found.

The parents registered the residence as a private school, called Sandcastle Day School, and so were able to avoid questions about why their six school-aged children were not in school, authorities said. Before the children were rescued, neither law enforcement nor child protective services had had any contact with the Turpin family.

The apparent abuse of the home-schooling rules put state and local officials on the defensive about whether home-schooling families were adequately monitored. The state’s Department of Education said it had registered the school but had never been inside.

A California couple who tortured 12 of their 13 children, starving and beating them, depriving them of sleep and sometimes shackling them to their beds with chains, were sentenced to 25 years to life in prison Friday.

The children were rescued in January 2018 after one of the girls worked up the courage to escape by jumping from a window of the suburban Los Angeles home where they had been kept prisoner. She called 911 from a cellphone she had grabbed from the house and described the years of abuse to a police dispatcher.

Riddell, 36, was a key player in the college admissions cheating scandal that has swept up celebrities like Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, as well as business leaders and college athletic coaches. He was expected to plead guilty Friday to charges related to the case.

In the wake of a federal investigation, standardized testing officials are scrambling to fix weaknesses in the testing process that the scheme has exposed, focusing on the special-needs arrangements that allowed Riddell to do his work.

“The scheme took advantage of our efforts to accommodate students with disabilities,” said Peter Schwartz, chief risk officer and general counsel for the College Board, which administers the SAT. “We’ve never seen somebody try to weaponize that or turn that to their advantage to beat our security systems. So that’s new, and we’re addressing that specifically.”

Officials at the College Board said students who need double the time or more to take the test would now be required to take it at their home schools, with rare exceptions.

According to court papers in the admissions case, the mastermind of the cheating scandal, William Singer, knew that if students could secure double their testing time, they could also request testing sites of their choice, sometimes thousands of miles away, where Singer would arrange for Riddell to cheat on their behalf.

The College Board said it was now cracking down on such site arrangements.

“Going forward, in the very rare cases in which students request to receive school-based accommodations at a school other than their own, the College Board will require verifiable justification and implement additional enhanced security processes,” Jerome White, a spokesman for the testing company, said.

Guidelines for those exceptions were still being developed, White said.

The College Board downplayed the significance of the admissions scandal for the testing industry. Officials said it had involved a tiny number of cheating allegations over eight years, compared with the millions of SAT tests taken over the same time. Similarly, they said, it involved two corrupt proctors, according to court documents, out of tens of thousands around the world.

“Let’s be honest, this is not a kid looking over their shoulder at another kid’s answer sheet,” Schwartz said. “You’ve got to get a grown-up to jeopardize their job, their future and their freedom, because these are crimes that somebody’s going to jail for. That is really hard and really rare.”

In the admissions scheme, prosecutors say that Singer would advise wealthy clients to have their children certified as learning disabled, and ask for 100 percent extended time to take the SAT or the ACT.

Singer would then arrange sessions at one of two testing centers, a public high school in Houston, or a private college preparatory school in West Hollywood, California, where prosecutors say he bribed test administrators and enlisted Riddell’s services. He told parents to make up a reason their child had to travel so far, perhaps a wedding or a bar mitzvah.

With the collusion of test administrators, Riddell could secretly take the test or correct answers on the test. Prosecutors say he was paid $10,000 per test.

In court papers, prosecutors describe how in 2018, Singer planned to have a student travel to the Houston center to take the ACT, where Riddell would then correct his answers. The student became sick and could not go to Houston, so Riddell flew there from Tampa, Florida, the next day. Riddell took the test in his hotel room. He predicted that he would score 35 out of 36, and he did.

The College Board’s changes to its travel allowances came as testing companies have been strengthening security measures, even before the scandal broke. The College Board bans cellphones during testing and has increased random audits of test centers. In some places, tests are delivered in locked boxes that cannot be opened until test time.

The company has also been experimenting with scrambling the order of questions and answer sheets, so that a student cannot rely on copying the answers on a neighboring sheet. Students may also be given different parts of the test at different times.

But the aspects of testing to which the scandal has perhaps drawn the most scrutiny are special accommodations. Testing companies must follow federal guidelines under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Department of Justice, under President Barack Obama, issued guidance to testing companies in 2015 encouraging them to defer to documentation from qualified professionals attesting to a student’s learning disability, even if the student had not been granted formal testing accommodations by his or her school.

It is through assessments from private psychologists that many of the students in the admissions case were able to secure their special testing conditions. Some admissions experts and high school guidance counselors said they had noticed more students, typically from highly educated families, using paperwork from private psychologists to secure these allowances.

The number of students who take the SAT with special accommodations fluctuates but is generally about 4% of the total pool, according to the College Board.

Ed Colby, a spokesman for ACT, the company that administers the test of the same name, said that in recent years about 5% of test takers were granted extended time. Extra time is just one of the available accommodations, which range from Braille tests to being alone in the room with a proctor.

Colby said the company was reviewing its test security procedures “in an effort to improve the security of the ACT test,” but he declined to offer specifics. The company uses more than 5,000 test centers across the country, he said, and has had to shut down some with documented abuses — an occurrence he called “very rare.”

The court papers in the admissions case describe how Riddell engineered a huge jump in the test score of at least one student, and prosecutors marveled at his ability to calibrate test scores.

But College Board officials said Riddell’s skill was not that special and in fact demonstrated a positive side of the test. They said that a large score gain alone would not prompt a review for cheating, and that the company actively encouraged such jumps through its online test-prep service.

“What he demonstrates is that you don’t have to beat this test,” Schwartz said. “You can take it, you can study for it, you can get good at it. There are many, many people — legitimate, honest people — who work hard to prepare for it.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/us/college-admissions-scandal-testing.html" id="37c2a72e-6ebe-341c-a719-8083cbbcd718">The New York Times</a>.

Standardized Test Companies Scramble to Fix Weaknesses After College Admissions Scandal

The test whiz, Mark Riddell, would travel across the country to take ACT and SAT college entrance exams for the children of the rich and famous, federal prosecutors say. He was so good at them that he could calibrate a test score on demand.

While the New Haven, Connecticut, university presents itself as a campus where fraternities are not a major presence, the lawsuit states that few options besides fraternity parties exist for women who want to socialize and meet other students.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Connecticut, comes as universities across the country have been trying to crack down on bad behavior by fraternities, from binge drinking and sexual harassment to abusive hazing rituals that have led to several deaths. Aware that their image has been tarnished, fraternities have often been partners with universities in trying to change party culture.

Yale has often looked the other way, the plaintiffs claim, while parties rage and women from Yale and surrounding colleges are routinely sexually harassed and abused.

Joan Gilbride, a lawyer for the fraternities named in the lawsuit, said the accusations are “baseless and unfounded,” and that the fraternities and their national organizations would vigorously defend themselves against the claims.

A Yale spokesman, Thomas Conroy, said he could not immediately comment on the specifics of the lawsuit. But he shared a message to Yale students last month from the dean of Yale College, Marvin Chun, after a yearlong review of campus culture, including fraternity culture. It said in part, “I condemn the culture described in these accounts; it runs counter to our community’s values of making everyone feel welcome, respected, and safe. I also offer some plain advice about events like these: don’t go to them.”

The dean said that Yale “plays no formal role in the organizations not affiliated with the university, including Greek organizations,” and he said the university was working on providing alternative social spaces and events on campus.

The lawsuit acknowledges that there may be questions about Yale’s ability to regulate off-campus organizations.

“Yale often claims that the university cannot punish the fraternities because they are unregistered, off-campus organizations,” the lawsuit says. But it argues that this position is disingenuous, because the fraternities “act as extensions of Yale,” providing party space, while Yale permits them to use the Yale name, Yale email addresses, Yale bulletin boards and campus facilities for recruitment.

Peter McDonough, general counsel of the American Council on Education, a university trade group, said universities have been reluctant to become too deeply involved in regulating fraternity life.

“The very concept of a campus is where people learn not only from each other but through shared experiences,” he said. “And this isn’t the K through 12 environment.”

The plaintiffs — a sophomore and two juniors — have demanded in the lawsuit that Yale and its fraternities rein in the parties. They have also asked for a court order that would force the fraternities to admit women and allow them to share in the benefits of membership, like housing and powerful alumni networks that can lead to jobs, internships and social capital.

“Simply put, fraternities elevate men to social gatekeepers and relegate women and non-binary students to sexual objects,” the lawsuit said. “Moreover, Yale’s fraternities have alumni and professional connections to the business world, including banking and consulting firms, which often result in coveted job offers and economic opportunities.”

The three women who filed the suit are Anna McNeil, 20, a junior from Brooklyn majoring in art history; Eliana Singer, 19, a sophomore from Minneapolis majoring in political science; and Ry Walker, 20, a junior from Brooklyn majoring in astrophysics and African-American studies. The law firm representing them, Sanford Heisler Sharp, is also representing women who are suing Dartmouth College for sexual assault and discrimination by three professors who they said turned a human behavior research department “into a 21st-century Animal House.”

All three women in the Yale case said they were groped at fraternity parties during their first semesters. In the lawsuit, Walker, who is African-American, said she was passed over by fraternity brothers controlling admission to a party, while white women behind her were admitted.

“We eat together, take classes together, exist in this coeducational place,” Walker said in an interview. “But somehow because of the way Greek life operates on campus and the control they have over social spaces here, that means that on weekend nights, men are the only ones who have power.”

Sororities are not a substitute for fraternities, the plaintiffs said, because they have been around for much less time, and do not have the depth of contacts that fraternities have.

The lawsuit, filed as a class-action complaint, accuses Yale of violating Title IX of federal education law, which prohibits sex discrimination by institutions receiving federal funding, and breach of contract for not providing the educational environment it promised. It accuses the fraternities of violating the Fair Housing Act for offering housing only to men, and Yale and the fraternities of violating Connecticut’s law against discrimination in places of public accommodation. It seeks unspecified damages.

The women belong to a student group called Engender that has used civil rights-type tactics to try to force fraternities to accept women. For the past three years, women and “non-binary” students from Engender have tried to join fraternities. Only one fraternity, Sigma Phi Epsilon, let them apply, according to court papers. But in the end they were denied and the fraternity chapter said it was because their national chapter did not allow women, the lawsuit says.

The complaint suggests that there is a “symbiotic” relationship between Yale and its fraternities, which involves letting the fraternities manage social life on campus, in exchange for Yale officials looking the other way when parties get out of hand.

“The fraternities take on the liability associated with student alcohol consumption, and in exchange, Yale allows the fraternities to use Yale resources (and recruit Yale students) and largely turns a blind eye to the sexual harassment and assault occurring in connection with the fraternities,” the complaint says.

The lawsuit claims that Yale lags behind peers like Harvard, which in 2016 announced that it was discouraging students from joining single-sex social clubs by barring them from leadership positions on campus and from receiving endorsements for prestigious scholarships like the Rhodes.

In December, Harvard was sued by fraternities, sororities and students saying the new policy is discriminatory.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/us/yale-fraternities.html" id="708b0a46-e73b-39a5-a621-3b415b37f5bc">The New York Times</a>.

Women Sue Yale Over a Fraternity Culture They Say Enables Harassment

Three Yale students who claim they were groped at fraternity parties have filed a class-action lawsuit against the university, arguing the school has fostered an environment where alcohol-fueled gatherings at off-campus fraternity houses dictate the undergraduate social scene.

The briefs — 82 pages from Harvard and 86 pages from the plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions — were filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Boston after a high-profile trial in October and November.

The basic claim by the plaintiffs, a group representing Asian-American students rejected by Harvard, is that the university has systematically discriminated against Asian-Americans by holding them to a higher standard than other applicants. Harvard argues that in trying to compose a diverse class, it considers each applicant as an individual and does not discriminate.

The case could change the way colleges across the country conduct admissions. The latest papers lay out the crux of the dispute: The plaintiffs claim that Harvard systematically and knowingly discriminated; the university counters that it did its best and the students it admitted were the result of a normal selection process.

Here are some of the points addressed in Wednesday’s briefs. The judge, Allison D. Burroughs, is expected to deliver a decision in several months.

Stereotyping or accurate assessment?

The plaintiffs argue that Harvard has been racially stereotyping Asian-Americans for decades.

They cite a 1990 report by the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, finding that admissions officers had repeatedly characterized Asian-American applicants as “quiet, shy, science/math oriented, and hard workers.”

They argue that the practice has continued.

Harvard counters that out of 1,591 pages of documents reviewed in court, the plaintiffs were able to find only two handwritten notes that described individual Asian-American applicants as “quiet.”

Such comments, Harvard said, may have been an accurate reflection of the applicants, not stereotypes but “unbiased assessments.”

How much diversity is enough?

The plaintiffs supported an admissions system that would disregard race in favor of socioeconomic factors, like poverty, geography and other indicators of lack of opportunity.

In its brief, Harvard said that if it eliminated all consideration of race and other preferences, the African-American share of the class would decline to 5 percent from 14 percent and the Hispanic share would decline to 9 percent from 14 percent.

The plaintiffs say that Harvard could achieve levels of racial diversity close to what it has now if it were to eliminate preferences for the children of alumni, donors and staff, while allowing for a slight fall in SAT scores and a significant drop in the percentage of wealthy students.

Is statistical evidence enough?

The plaintiffs argue that statistical analysis shows that Asian-Americans as a group have better academic and extracurricular credentials than white applicants, but are penalized by a biased personal rating.

Harvard disputes the evidence offered by the plaintiffs but says that even if it were valid, it would not be enough to show that any disparate impact on Asian-Americans was intentional.

“Even though courts have recognized that statistical evidence generally cannot prove discriminatory intent, SFFA has repeatedly conceded that statistical evidence is the core of its intentional discrimination claim,” Harvard’s brief says, referring to the organization that filed the suit.

Where is the smoking gun?

Harvard says there is no evidence that the admissions committee — with about 40 members of diverse backgrounds — engaged in some kind of conspiracy to discriminate against Asian-Americans.

The plaintiffs say in this day and age, discrimination is often subtle and insidious, and people know better than to leave proof of it behind.

If Harvard were serious about avoiding racial bias in admissions, the plaintiffs contend, it would have instituted bias training, but it did not.

“Harvard’s failure to properly instruct admissions staff — in writing or even orally — as to when and how race should be used in evaluating applicants made matters worse,” the plaintiffs write.

Last summer, as the trial was approaching, a group of admissions officers recommended changes to the rules for evaluating applications that appeared intended to warn against racial and ethnic stereotyping.

The plaintiffs see the changes as a tacit admission that Harvard knew it needed to do better. Harvard says it was merely codifying what had long been the unspoken rules.

“Once this record became public, a group of admissions officers pushed for changes designed to counteract Asian-American stereotyping. Those changes included a new written instruction on how and when to use race that Harvard’s leadership adamantly claimed was unnecessary, as well as revisions to the criteria for assigning the personal rating that is sensitive to the stereotype that Asian-Americans are introverted,” the plaintiffs say in court papers. “That these individuals — unlike Harvard’s leadership — recognized the need to takes these steps speaks volumes.”

What about unconscious or implicit bias?

During the trial, the plaintiffs argued that there was evidence of unconscious bias in admissions.

In the latest brief, Harvard says that if it was bias then Asian-American legacies (children of alumni) would be less likely to get in than white legacies, but they are not.

The plaintiffs reply that members of favored groups, like legacies, are like family, and it would not be natural to discriminate against them.

“There is nothing anomalous about Asian-Americans who are athletes and legacies evading the racial stereotyping that plagues the 98 percent of Asian-Americans who are not lucky enough to be in the club,” the plaintiffs say in their brief.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/us/harvard-asian-american-students-discrimination.html" id="178b595a-e38a-3187-a767-f67159ae69cc">The New York Times</a>.

The Harvard Bias Suit by Asian-Americans: 5 Key Issues

The two sides in a case accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants have submitted documents to the court that try to synthesize the evidence and testimony for the judge ahead of her ruling.

In a good week, it’s a living — enough to pay the rent on his railroad flat in Harlem and put food on the table. A few times, he has seen a former classmate, Gregory Peterson, bound into the social club without so much as a nod.

Goodson, 67, and his classmate were among a record number of black students admitted to Columbia University in 1969. Columbia and other competitive colleges had already begun changing the racial makeup of their campuses as the civil rights movement gained ground, but the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and the resulting student strikes and urban uprisings, prompted them to redouble their efforts.

They acted partly out of a moral imperative, but also out of fear that the fabric of society was being torn apart by racial conflict. They took chances on promising black students from poor neighborhoods they had long ignored, in addition to black students groomed by boarding schools.

A look back through the decades shows what went right in the early years of affirmative action in college admissions, but also what can go wrong even with the best of intentions.

Those who were able, through luck or experience or hard work, to adapt to the culture of institutions that had long been pillars of the white establishment succeeded by most conventional measures. Others could not break through because of personal trauma, family troubles, financial issues, culture shock — the kind of problems felt by many white students as well, but compounded by being in such a tiny minority. And universities at the time, they said, did not have the will or the knowledge to help.

“I think it’s a fair question to ask: Did we really understand or know what we were doing, or could we have predicted what the issues would be?” said Robert L. Kirkpatrick Jr., who at the time was dean of admissions at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, which was part of these early efforts. “The answer is no. I think we were instinctively trying to do the right thing.”

Columbia — an Ivy League campus right next to Harlem — was a particularly revelatory setting. Perhaps nowhere else were the divisions more striking between the privilege inside university gates and the troubles and demands of black people outside them.

The New York Times tracked down many of the nearly 50 black students in Columbia’s Class of 1973, who arrived on campus as freshmen in 1969. Some of them have remained close friends and helped locate others from directories and photographs.

The number of black students admitted to Columbia more than doubled in 1969 from the year before. About half of those who enrolled received their degrees four years later.

Many, like Peterson, went on to comfortable lives and professional success. His classmate, Eric H. Holder Jr., rose from a strivers’ neighborhood in Queens to become the first black attorney general of the United States. There were future doctors in the class, future executives and lawyers. Others, like Goodson, strayed from prescribed paths.

The debate over race in college admissions only intensified. By the late 1970s, colleges began emphasizing the value of diversity on campus over the case for racial reparations.

Today, Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are facing legal challenges to race-conscious admissions that could reach the Supreme Court. The Trump administration is investigating allegations of discrimination against Asian-American applicants at Harvard and Yale. University officials who lived through the history fear that the gains of the last 50 years could be rolled back.

One of them is Lee Bollinger, the current president of Columbia, who first arrived on campus as a law student in 1968.

“In that time, there was a sense, pure and simple, that universities had to do their part to help integrate higher education,” Bollinger said. “We are still on that mission, but the sense of purpose and urgency and connection to the past have dissipated.”

The Musician

Goodson sits on a plastic milk crate covered by a clean, brightly colored cushion. He is wrapped in layers of flannel shirts, sweatshirts, a canvas jacket, and wears stylish suede shoes. A watch cap and a graying goatee hide his face.

He resents it when people assume he is homeless and plop down bags of food next to him without even asking. He is more forgiving of the police officers who routinely ask him if he would like to go to a shelter. He jokes: No thanks, he has a place at Trump Tower, across the street.

Goodson grew up in a housing project in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and in those days he was known as Ervin. His mother was a housekeeper for a wealthy family on Park Avenue; his father was a tailor and owned a dry-cleaning shop for a time. He took an early liking to music, learning to play the viola from Cora Roth, his fifth-grade teacher at Public School 46 in Brooklyn, now a painter in Los Angeles who still remembers him as “a pure soul.”

A number of programs sprang up at the time to find talented students from tough neighborhoods. In junior high school, Goodson was chosen to spend three summers in enrichment classes at Hotchkiss, a Connecticut boarding school, where he read incessantly. He was accepted to New York’s Stuyvesant High School, which at the time was mostly white. Now Stuyvesant is mostly Asian-American, and under attack for its test-based admissions. This year, seven black students were offered admission out of 895 slots.

When a racially fueled teachers’ strike broke out during Goodson’s senior year, his parents managed to transfer him to the Wooster School, another boarding school in Connecticut. He had been a middling student at Stuyvesant, but vaulted to the top of his class in private school.

An English teacher drove him to Columbia for the admission interview, and he remembers feeling “a little bit phony” as he answered questions. He was also accepted at Dartmouth, but chose Columbia because it was closer to home.

In college, Goodson realized that he could reinvent himself, and began going by Les, his middle name, instead of Ervin. He wanted to be a photographer, and took pictures of B.B. King, Amiri Baraka and the band Sha Na Na with his Miranda camera. He made some rash decisions, once spending $600 of a $1,500 student loan on a Karmann Ghia sports car.

Not much in the course catalog spoke to him.

“If you go back and look at that blue book, all the courses — I would say 95 percent — were Eurocentric,” he said. “I remember they had a few black courses, and all the black students would take them because they were known as cushy courses, because they were easy to pass.”

The only black professor he can remember was Charles Hamilton, a political scientist who collaborated with Stokely Carmichael, the civil rights leader, to write about the Black Power movement, which Goodson said influenced him. Columbia’s first black department chair, Elliott Skinner, in anthropology, would not be named until 1972 — the year Goodson dropped out.

After his freshman year, Goodson was asked to take a leave for bad grades. He lived surreptitiously on campus, crashing in friends’ dorm rooms. He got a student at Barnard, Columbia’s sister college, pregnant, and his daughter was born in August 1971. After three years, he left Columbia for good.

“Nothing stopped me from finishing,” Goodson said. “I just did something else.”

‘I Didn’t Notice Being Black’

While civil rights leaders pressed colleges to admit more black students, the big push came after the assassination of King on April 4, 1968, followed by uprisings in more than 100 cities and student strikes.

“I don’t see how you can understand it apart from the upheavals on campus, racial upheavals in the larger society, the general upheavals around the world,” said Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a historian of college admissions.

Later that month, students occupied several buildings in protest of what they saw as Columbia’s complicity in the Vietnam War and a plan to build a gym in a Harlem park. The standoff ended with a violent clash with police.

The radical politics of 1968 came too late to affect the admissions decisions that fall, as acceptance notices had already gone out. But in 1969, the number of black students recruited and admitted to Ivy League universities and their sister schools rose sharply from the year before, in many cases by more than 100 percent, according to statistics published in The Times in April 1969.

From 1968 to 1969, according to archival data provided by Columbia this year, the number of students recorded as black who applied rose to 220 from 121, the number who were admitted rose to 130 from 58, and the number who registered rose to 48 from 31 out of a total class of about 700. (All of them were men; Columbia College did not begin admitting women until the 1980s.)

Some black students in that class resisted being cast as emissaries of racial understanding.

Gregory Peterson, the classmate Goodson has seen going into the University Club, did not see himself in any racial framework. “I shied away from anything that was like a ‘black’ group,” he said, “because I didn’t grow up that way.”

He and his twin brother, Maurice, were in advanced classes in predominantly white schools, although they were part of the black middle class in East Elmhurst, Queens. Their father owned a barbershop; their mother was a teacher.

When Peterson was in high school, the mother of a white friend took him to a cocktail party where he met a white intellectual who had gone to Exeter and Harvard. He became a mentor, encouraging Peterson’s ambitions to apply to Ivy League universities.

At Columbia, Peterson was an English major, and mixed with white students. He discovered his gay identity, though he remained closeted.

He did experience racial discrimination in college. A Southern white Barnard student apologized to him for not being able to invite him to a party back home. An older man at a reception once assumed he was on the basketball team.

But race took a back seat to his sexuality. “I was so busy having problems being gay that I didn’t notice being black,” he said.

After graduating in 1973, Peterson spent a few years in the arts before “the rational side took over,” and he went to Columbia Law School. He went on to become a corporate lawyer. His brother, who also graduated from Columbia, owns a spa.

Peterson and his husband now live on a high floor of a prewar building at 72nd Street and Riverside Drive, a prime Manhattan location. The light-filled apartment is crammed with his art collection. A portrait by Paul Hodgson of Peterson in a formal suit, looking cerebral and commanding, hangs on one wall.

A while back, as Peterson got out of a cab on his way to the University Club, he was greeted by a street musician.

NEW YORK — On cold mornings, Les Goodson shows up early outside the University Club, on a wealthy stretch of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and races two panhandlers he has nicknamed Catman and Pimp-the-Baby for a warm spot in front of a steam vent. He launches into “Take Five” on his saxophone, leaving his case open for bills and coins.

Anemona Hartocollis

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