Discussion of white discrimination

Of course not. People never get upset about anachronistic devices that help the wealthy or the privileged.

 

Actually, the legacy favoritism has been used quite often in Senate discussions, when discussing racial preferences. It is quite an interesting counterpoint to use, and has a lot of relevance to the discussion, I think.

 

Not just legacy admissions, but in some instances...if you went to an esteemed private school, you get more consideration than someone from say, a mediocre public school.

From CNN...

Are legacy college admissions racist?
Wednesday, March 5, 2003

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia (AP) -- Like many children of University of Virginia graduates, Mary Stuart Young of Atlanta, Georgia, wore Cavalier orange and blue long before she took an SAT or mailed an application.

"Coming here just felt right," said Young, 21, who expects to graduate with a religious studies degree in 2004. "This was where I should be."

After all, with two generations of faithful alumni backing her, Young doubled her chances of getting into Thomas Jefferson's university.

The practice of favoring the sons and daughters of alumni is a tradition at elite schools. It is also essentially racist, say affirmative action supporters, who are attacking "legacy preferences" as never before while the Supreme Court scrutinizes race-conscious admissions policies.

The reason: Legacy preferences tend to benefit whites, like Young.

"Even if one takes into account that there's now a generation of minority students applying, the legacy preference can reach back generations," said Theodore M. Shaw, an NAACP lawyer representing 16 black and Hispanic students in the University of Michigan affirmative action case now before the high court. "It will take a long time before there is any equity there."

Keeping donors happy
The admissions process has never been equal for everyone. Universities have been known -- and criticized -- for bending the rules for athletes and children of major donors. Legacy preferences became popular in the 19th century as a way of keeping alumni fathers happy and limiting the number of Jewish applicants.

Today, sons and daughters of alumni make up more than 10 percent of students at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. They are 23 percent of the student population at Notre Dame. At the University of Virginia, 11 percent of this year's freshmen class were children of alumni -- and more than 91 percent of them are white.

At U.Va., the legacy preference is seen as one way to encourage alumni to keep on making the donations that help keep tuition down.

Even if one takes into account that there's now a generation of minority students applying, ... it will take a long time before there is any equity there.
-- Theodore M. Shaw, NAACP lawyer


Legacy preferences are "extremely important, particularly now when the state just doesn't have the resources to help with everything we do," Virginia's dean of undergraduate admissions, John A. Blackburn.

That is not to say that U.Va.'s legacy students would not have been admitted anyway. Blackburn said U.Va. legacies generally have better grades than the university's in-state students, but not as good as the out-of-state students.

Legacy applicants also have no guarantee that they will get in. Instead, they are treated as "plus" applications -- the same distinction given to racial minorities. If the choice is between two relatively equal applicants, Blackburn said, the legacy or the minority gets the edge.

"When I applied I was a little worried about my SAT," said Young, whose 1280 score out of a possible 1600 is about 34 points below average for incoming U.Va. freshmen. "But I went to a private high school that was really challenging, and sometimes I think college has actually been easier."

Because legacy preferences are not by definition based on race, they are not subject to the same legal review as affirmative action. But as long as both exist, they will be coupled in political debates since one seems to balance the other, said Boston University professor of economics Glenn Loury.

"On the surface, it would be inconsistent to approve of one policy and not the other," Loury said.

Playing catch up President Bush, a third-generation legacy at Yale, said he opposes such race-based policies of the sort under attack at the University of Michigan, drawing s

 

Actually, the legacy favoritism has been used quite often in Senate discussions, when discussing racial preferences. It is quite an interesting counterpoint to use, and has a lot of relevance to the discussion, I think.

I'm not so sure about the obviousness of the relevance of legacy preferences here. Yes, legacy programs will have the effect of overrepresenting children of alumni. As one of the articles posted mentioned, at my alma mater, almost a quarter of students are legacy, and I know they are put in a separate admissions pile where a higher percentage (but by no means all) are admitted.

But this is different than racial preferences, in a key way: legacy preferences do not have the same invidious history in America that racial preferences do. The Constitution recognizes that equal protection of the laws may not be denied on the basis of race, religion, or national origin. Those are the stated categories: it doesn't say equal protection shall not be denied on basis of race and college legacy status.

And for good reason: in our country, racial preferences (and the converse, discrimation) have a real and ugly history, that we recognized were so baseless and detrimental to our society that we wrote it into the Constitution that such preferences had no more place in American law. Read fairly and plainly, the 14th amendment allows for NO discrimination on the basis of race - whether race for blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, or whites. In practical constitutional jurisprudence, you can discriminate on the basis of race only where it is necessary to serve a compelling government interest. The Supreme Court had eliminated race quota systems in education and the workplace since at least Bakke, but turned a blind eye to the equivalent affirmative action plans in place at universities aside from quotas. It had said remedying past discrimination was not a "compelling" interest, nor was getting more minorities in leadership positions, nor was compensating for poverty. Just this summer, the court invented the rationale that "diversity" was now a "compelling" interest, so non-quota affirmative action was okay. I agreed entirely with Justice Thomas's dissent on this point.

But back to my point, legacy preferences don't have the invidious history that race discrimination does in this country. I think you could oppose legacy preferences by saying all admissions should be purely on merit, but I don't think legacy admissions are (or should be) unconstitutional, nor especially pernicious -- colleges, after all, are essentially running businesses, and are dependent on donations to keep up their endowments. Maybe it's not so wrong for them to use legacy admissions to help with that.

 

legacy preferences don't have the invidious history that race discrimination does in this country

But don't they carry forward the legacy of race discrimination in admissions practiced when those alumni were in attendance?

 

Not necessarily, no. (For instance, who's to say all children of white alumni are white? I was a legacy at Notre Dame. My father is Anglo, but my mother is Hispanic. No "legacy" of white preferences was carried on there -- and it's not like most universities in the late 70's were still discriminating anyway, and it certainly wouldn't be *my* fault in the late 90's if it had been the case earlier.)

But more to the point, legacy preferences have nothing to do with race the way affirmative action directly based on race does. They aren't practiced because of race, or continued on the basis of race. Even if there is an incidental disparate impact, disparate impact is a questionable legal theory to try to maintain discrimination actions on (since by definition these practices aren't comprised of direct disparate treatment of individuals). Courts are by no means unanimous on that -- but the theories have mainly been applied just to the workplace, in any event.