The renewed discussion of “affirmative action” in college
admissions policies offers me the opportunity to think out loud about a topic
that has long troubled me: “legacy” admissions.
In Monday’s newspaper there was a particularly stimulating letter to the
editor of the Times, given the
heading “Legacy Admissions: Affirmative Action for Whites,” by T. H. Rawls, a one-time admissions officer at Princeton,
and (if my memory serves) before that an undergraduate of whom I was aware in
the late Sixties. I could give no better
summary of this thoughtful letter than is offered by its editorial heading; but
I highly recommend you read it in full.
I don’t know
whether Rawls is related to the famous Princeton alumnus who wrote A
Theory of Justice, but the letter raises, in the context of current racial
issues, fundamental ethical questions.
Is it really fair in the college admissions process at old Bindwood U to
give any weight to the fact that an applicant’s parent, grandparent, or other
kinsman graduated from the place?
Although
the American family is in dangerous decline, it still counts for a lot. Nobody thinks it odd that Hiram Highpockets,
Jr., might succeed Hiram Highpockets, Sr., as CEO over at Highpockets Hosiery,
Inc., even if everybody knows that a well-advertised national search would have
produced hundreds of better businessmen.
In the political sphere of the upstart American democracy we got all the
way to our second president (John Adams) before beginning a system of political
legacy. This gives me a rare opportunity
to say something nice about Donald Trump. He is neither the brother and son of former
presidents nor the spouse of one. There
are at least a hundred million potential presidential candidates in this
country, but two “legacy” candidates were our effective options before he
entered the race.
Questions of a meritocratic nature
were not raised when Ted Kennedy breezed into a lifetime job in the Senate,
even as no one did so when, like his father and brothers before him, he had earlier
matriculated at Harvard. Here the
analogy becomes more interesting. Harvard
College, which has ethical standards higher than those of the Senate, did expel
him when he revealed dishonorable character.
And it is the higher ethical standard most of us associate with the idea
of higher education that makes the question of legacy admissions
troubling. Princeton, like most of the
other most prestigious institutions in the country, is a private
corporation—not a public facility. It
ought to be able to do pretty much what it pleases. But my forty-year stretch on the faculty was
one long, voluntary worry about admissions standards—first as regarded the
admission of women, then as regarded the vigorous recruitment of certain racial
minorities, especially black Americans.
There are clear ethical arguments
to support affirmative action for blacks along the lines of historical and
restorative justice. Perhaps curiously,
however, the institutional argument usually made is of a more selfish sort:
“diversity” is good for the institution,
and therefore by ethical trickle-down, for everybody at it.
I think it obvious that the
thoughtful admission of qualified “legacies” is likewise good for the institution. Though not a ticket of admission, it should
not be a negative aspect of young
Schnackenfuss’s application that her granddaddy was the quarterback of
Bindwood’s undefeated team of 1967, or that his uncle’s princely gift founded
the Schnackenfuss Center for Computational Analysis on the south edge of the
Bindwood campus. A very remarkable thing
about American higher education, still the envy of the world, is that we have
so many excellent private colleges
and universities. Something that has
struck me forcefully about the current discussion of the student loan crisis is
the apparent belief in some quarters that the costs of higher education are
somehow factitious, like the drug prices set by Martin Shkreli at Turing
Pharmaceuticals. In fact those costs are
all too real, and they rise inexorably.
That is why college presidents spend so much time fund-raising.
Unexamined ethical questions may surround
the gargantuan endowments, in the billions of dollars, of a Yale, Stanford, Notre
Dame, or Duke. But that money did not
come from taxpayers in a congressional bail-out. Its source is private philanthropy, great and
small. All these institutions are in
fact giant charities whose long-term function has been to redistribute wealth
in the form of professional training and social capital. The highest quality American higher education
is paid for, in large measure, by people who have experienced it themselves and
want to ensure it for future generations—usually beginning with their own. That is neither a surprising nor a wicked
sociological fact. At Princeton the
percentage of alumni who make annual gifts for institutional operations and
development is extraordinary, and the sum total of gifts staggering, at least
to me.
Yale could, with no difficulty at
all, limit its entering class to high school valedictorians. They probably could fill half of it with left-handed valedictorians. As long as there are private educational
institutions with far more aspiring applicants than there are places, and as
long as so many uncertain variables render the admissions process arcane if not
occult, there is little danger that most people, let alone everyone, will
declare it satisfactory or “fair”. But there is a tremendous effort made by large
numbers of smart and ethical people to square the circle. Unfortunately, even college professors often
talk about the issue of alumni financial support for educational institutions
crudely (and ignorantly) in transactional terms. They may be more reticent in noting the
significant number of faculty children in each successive freshman class. Many large institutions, industrial no less
than educational, like to use the metaphor of the family: the “General Motors
family,” the “Bindwood family”. All
metaphors reach their terminus, some quite quickly. But in my view, and it is a view based on
some experience, the more closely an educational institution can uphold the
family model as opposed to the corporate model the better off it will be. That does not mean keeping it within the
family, but expanding the idea of what a family is.
