The Review: Legacy admissions and aristocratic self-dealing

Are there any principled reasons for the practice? ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. In the contest over affirmative action, both camps had principles and values on their side: color-blind meritocracy on the one, the repair of historical injuries in the name of justice on the other. Can the same be said for the contest over legacy admissions, the preferential bump given to the children of alumni? In one corner, critics of such preferences argue, as James S. Murphy recently [wrote]( in our pages, that they are “unethical and anti-egalitarian” — and “now that the Supreme Court has barred colleges from considering race, they’re simply untenable,” since they mostly benefit white and wealthy applicants. Several selective colleges either never had legacy admissions or have already eliminated them: MIT, Caltech, more recently Johns Hopkins. The preferences are hugely unpopular with the public. In the other corner, there are, as far as I can tell, four arguments. The first is pragmatic: For colleges with insecure finances, legacy admissions can [produce]( better giving environments. That might be true, but it’s a hard sell from super-rich institutions like Harvard or Yale, which can presumably afford to take the hit. The second is a dodge disguised as a principle: Eliminating legacy admissions won’t increase racial or socioeconomic diversity. But so what? That’s not a reason to keep them. The third is more interesting: The majority opinion in Bakke, which upheld affirmative action, asserted that admissions decisions fall under the umbrella of academic freedom (“The freedom of a university to make its own judgments as to education includes the selection of its student body”); therefore, any encroachment on the autonomy of admissions officers risks, in the [words]( of Jeremiah Quinlan, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, “open[ing] the door to other intrusions on academic freedom.” But Quinlan wrote those words before Bakke had been effectively overturned. In any event, Quinlan’s objection is not so much a defense of legacy preferences per se as a critique of state-mandated reforms. Then there’s the fourth reason: tradition. As recently as 20 years ago, you could still find unembarrassed defenders of the moral virtue of lineage. [Here’s]( The Wall Street Journal, in 2003, quoting a proponent of legacy admissions: NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. John Sedgwick, the father of Harvard freshman Sara Sedgwick, argues that legacy preference helps keep the past alive. The family’s Harvard ties go back to Ms. Sedgwick’s great-great-grandfather, Henry Dwight Sedgwick II, who graduated in 1843. Her grandfather played on Harvard’s undefeated, Rose-Bowl-winning 1919 football team. “One of the salient characteristics of a college like Harvard is its history,” says Mr. Sedgwick, a novelist. “Legacy students are a visible representation of that history and make it real for the students who are attending.” I almost feel bad for Sara, charged by her father and by Harvard with embodying in her person, like an honorary hereditary royal in a parliamentary monarchy, the accumulated meaning of the past. Today, no savvy admissions officer would invoke that aristocratic model of institutional continuity. But there’s a reason upwards of three-quarters of Americans disapprove of legacy admissions, even though the number of students they affect is small: the suspicion that they aren’t, and really by definition can’t be, anything other than patrician self-dealing. 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