Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Jeremy R. Knowles has said, “Nothing is more important for the health of Harvard College than our policy of admitting students only on the basis of their talent and helping them to come here only on the basis of their need.” Consider the implications of these words: they mean that there is no goal superior to that of talent-based admissions. This seemingly straightforward sentence, then, implies that, if Harvard admits students on any other basis, it should stop. But this is obviously not Harvard’s real opinion. Each year, hundreds of students gain admission on the basis of something entirely removed from—indeed, often inimical to—a consideration of talent. You can get into Harvard because of the mere merits of your birth, rather than those of your life or your mind. You can get in because your parent is a graduate. You can get in because you are a “legacy.”
Before examining the moral and practical questions at hand, perhaps a brief history of “legacy preference”—the practice of giving the descendants of alumni a “second look” in the admissions process—would be helpful. Legacy preference began in 1925 at Yale, where the proportional number of Jews in the student body was growing at a rate that became alarming to the school’s administrators. Prior to that year, Yale had begun to incorporate such amorphous criteria as “character” and “solidity” into its admissions process as an excuse for screening out Jewish students. But nothing did the trick quite like legacy preference, which allowed the admissions board to summarily pass Jews over in favor of “Yale sons of good character and reasonably good record,” as a 1929 memo phrased it. Other schools, including Harvard, soon began to pursue similar policies for similar reasons.
While the ingrained system may encourage it, there is little evidence that Harvard currently sanctions the legacy policy for the same reasons it implemented it; the anti-Semitism is certainly gone, but the system of admission by birthright is not. In fact, it is alive and well at all of our nation’s top colleges and universities. John Larew ‘91, in an article in The Washington Monthly published in the month of his graduation, reported that the “overwhelmingly affluent, white children of alumni—legacies’—are three times more likely to be accepted to Harvard than high school kids who lack that handsome lineage.” Some argue that this phenomenon occurs simply because the descendants of alumni constitute an above-average applicant pool. Unfortunately for those who make this claim, empirical evidence directly contradicts it. A few months before Larew wrote his scathing critique of legacy preference, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) got its first peek at Harvard College’s admissions records. The results of the study were startling. The OCR revealed that “with the exception of the athletic rating, [admitted] non-legacies scored better than legacies in all areas of comparison.” It seems that Dean Knowles’ “policy of admitting students only on the basis of their talent” is a myth. Talent plays a large role in the admissions process, certainly, but there is clearly a very important admissions criterion which has nothing whatever to do with talent. According to the Dean’s own stated goals, then, Harvard should end this unfair, outdated practice as soon as possible.
There is, despite a moral pressure to do so, no evidence that Harvard plans to do away with legacy preference anytime soon. The policy does, of course, have its defenders: most notably, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons. Dean Fitzsimmons wrote a letter to the OCR defending the practice of legacy preference, claiming that “Without the fundraising activities of alumni, Harvard could not maintain many of its programs, including needs-blind admissions.” The implied argument: legacy preference induces alumni to give to the College, and this giving in turn provides the funds for a need-blind admissions policy. Consider the internal logic—or illogic—of this contention. First off, note that legacy students are on the average far more affluent (and therefore have far less need) than non-legacy admits. Harvard graduates in general have extraordinarily high incomes relative to most other cross-sections of the population. Their children, therefore, have far less financial need than we might expect of the average non-legacy. It follows, then, that our current admissions policy is not need-blind at all. Any system that takes into account the education of the parent makes an implicit calculation of financial need. So the need-blind admissions policy that legacy preference supposedly makes possible is nonexistent precisely because of legacy preference.
Regardless of this, though, one still might argue that legacy preference induces alumni giving, and that this giving is crucial to all of the College’s activities. Even if it is the case that alumni give largely because they expect something in return, that still does not make it right. The fact that police officers are quitting their jobs due to low wages would not justify legalizing bribery; so, too, the fact that reduced giving would damage Harvard’s finances does not justify allowing generous alumni to buy admission for their children. Even if the gross injustice embodied in legacy preference seemed somehow “worth it” because abandoning the policy would seriously jeopardize the College’s finances, there is still no reason to support this practice. No one has ever presented anything more than anecdotal evidence for the claim that alumni giving correlates with legacy preference. Indeed, as Larew points out, in the late 1950s, “the rate of admission for legacies began declining from about 90 percent to its current 43 percent. Administration anxiety rose inversely, but Harvard’s fundraising machine has somehow survived.” Besides, before the 1920s, Harvard had no legacy preference, and it managed just fine.
There is no reason to think that any one portion of the College’s income can make or break its ability to function in the long term. Harvard is remarkably wealthy, and the excuse that it simply cannot afford a fair admissions policy has no more merit than the excuse used by racist hotel and restaurant owners in response to the civil rights acts: sure, integration is the right thing to do, but it will drive us out of business. The fact is that it will not, and no one has ever proven that it will. And it wouldn’t be justified even in the absurd case that it did bankrupt the College.
I’ve tried to give a sense of the urgency with which this matter confronts us—the students. But historian, political analyst, and cultural commentator Michael Lind notes a far more sweeping trend symbolized by preferential admissions for legacy students: “Whatever the excuses offered to the public, the effect of legacy preference is to retard social mobility and to turn the new American oligarchy into a semi-hereditary aristocracy.” Legacy preference gives upper-class white students an edge that they shouldn’t have and certainly don’t need. As an editorial in The New York Times on December 8, 1990, reports, “If ‘legacies’ had been admitted in 1988 at the same rate as other applicants, their numbers in the freshman class would have dropped by close to 200—a figure that exceeds the total number of blacks, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans enrolled in the entire freshman class.” On a campus so self-conscious and proud of its diversity, it seems dishonest to pursue a policy that erodes that diversity in favor of questionable hereditary privileges.
We, who seem to charge ourselves with the responsibility of leading our generation, might someday be accused of causing its corruption. By virtue of our places here, we already have far more than most Americans can ever hope for. Let’s not try to solidify our advantages by engendering a system of merit by birthright.
If we, as Harvard students, truly want to do something brave and respectable for our community, let’s get to work on forcing the school to come to grips with this problem now. In Larew’s day, the issue died because students here didn’t begin work towards eradicating the injustice. I plan to pick up where Larew left off, and I’m going to start an organization dedicated to the removal of legacy preference from Harvard College’s admissions policy. If you’d like to help, please contact me (jmshapir@fas.harvard.edu).
There’s something to be said for tradition at colleges like ours. There’s something to be said for preserving the quaint institutions of the past. But there is no defense—moral, practical, or financial—for Harvard’s current hereditary spoils system.