After Affirmative Action, Legacy Admissions Should Be the Next to Go
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court, in cases involving the University of North Carolina and Harvard, outlawed race-based admissions standards in higher education.
Aggrieved left-adherents, and more than a few conservatives, raised hackles about legacy admissions — preferential treatment for the applications of younger relatives of alumni.
Some 75% of Americans oppose them.
Both conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, in a concurring opinion, and liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, specifically objected to legacy admissions as an unfair advantage that may benefit whites over minorities.
Other observers argue that scrapping legacy admissions could compensate for the loss in racial diversity that will likely result from the Supreme Court’s ruling.
A non-profit called Lawyers for Civil Rights is currently handling a complaint filed by three Boston-area Black and Hispanic organizations against Harvard University, arguing that legacy admissions unfairly benefit white students and therefore violate federal civil rights laws.
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which normally takes months to respond to such complaints, speedily announced that it will investigate Harvard’s legacy admissions for racial bias.
A negative finding would likely compel Harvard, and other schools, to abandon the practice or potentially lose all federal funds.
While the racial argument may appear sound, it's actually fallacious.
Logically, it requires us to believe that the same admissions officials who used race-based criteria to discriminate against whites were simultaneously using legacy-based criteria to discriminate in favor of whites.
The numbers are also suspect.
The complaint before the Education Department notes that 70% of Harvard legacy admissions are white, but that's not outrageously out of proportion to the country’s white population or, still less, to the white population that applies to elite institutions.
As recent studies have shown, moreover, the major factor that results in disproportionate advantage in elite admissions is family wealth.
Supporters of legacy admissions implicitly admit this by arguing that the legacy system allows schools to foster a sense of loyalty — defined far above all else by raising money — from families with historic ties.
Similarly, defenders of legacy admissions argue that legacy applicants are well prepared for elite schools and generally rise to their academic expectations.
But if true, they should be able to win admission on their own without benefiting from de facto affirmative action.
Nevertheless, legacy admissions do offer one unfair advantage — to elite institutions themselves.
For alumni, the prospect of getting their children or other young relatives "in" motivates the most impressive range of kowtowing known in what we otherwise imagine to be a democratic society.
This sycophancy can take all manner of forms: humiliating professions of "school spirit," exaggerated rituals of thanksgiving, uncompensated time and effort in alumni "service" programs, immense but unwarranted personal flattery, generous donations, and even bribery facilitated by crooked admissions professionals or those with access to them.
Perhaps best of all for elite schools, legacy admissions induce paralyzing fear among alumni who will resist saying anything that might cause offense or even merely be conceived as critical of their alma maters.
If, to take a recent example at the University of Chicago, a school offers a class whose title describes being white as a "problem," white alumni with kids in the admissions pipeline can be counted on to say nothing outside the proverbial smoky kitchen.
In recent years, controversial firings, well publicized campus free speech violations, polls documenting pervasive on-campus fear of expressing disfavored opinions, and endless narratives of illiberal measures against free inquiry have failed to result in even one significant alumni-based movement challenging the status quo.
Even conservative alumni will keep their mouths shut if it helps their kids’ chance of admission. The currency ascribed to the elite school’s diploma is too simply valuable to risk over something as paltry as our basic freedoms.
University administrators are very well aware of this dilemma.
Not even serious fiduciary responsibility can persuade them.
Paul S. Levy, a University of Pennsylvania alumnus who in 2018 resigned from Penn’s board of trustees over the school’s controversial treatment of law professor Amy Wax, remains the only elite university trustee ever to have spoken out.
"Several Penn Trustees called me to say how much they admired my principled stand in defense of Amy Wax," Levy told me recently.
"But when asked if they could help fight for her basic right to free speech, they demurred saying 'I’d love to, but my kids (or grandkids) will be applying, and I don’t want to rock the boat.'"
For them, it helps that the process remains fundamentally uncertain.
Legacy status might be "a factor" in the admission of alumni children in most highly selective universities, but there is no guarantee that it alone will secure a place.
Like a Pavlovian experiment in behavioral psychology, the possibility of great reward, undermined by an element of randomness, guarantees continued alumni compliance and near-absolute immunity from alumni criticism.
Abolishing legacy admissions would go a long way toward ending this psychodrama.
Alumni parents would be free to offer criticism of their alma maters and those who run them without the fear, guilt, and shame of jeopardizing the advantage of legacy status.
They and their alumni children would have greater freedom to explore options across schools, without the anxiety-inducing expectation that the right school for their great-grandfathers is the right school for them.
Abolishing legacy admissions would also force elite colleges and universities to rely less on emotion, loyalty, and money extorted from eager alumni and stand on their own to attract top students responsibly.
Otherwise, whether the applicant is a tenth-generation Boston Brahim with a family history inseparable from Harvard, or a second-generation legacy who hopes to benefit from a parent's personal success, it’s the same rigged game.
And as in any rigged game, the best way to win is not to play.
Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University. Read more — Here.
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