The Supreme Court decision on affirmative action has returned the spotlight to another tilt in the playing field: Legacy admission, the process by which certain schools, especially in the Ivy League, give preferential treatment (by a factor of six, in some accounts) to applicants who are children of alumni. It’s just another way for wealthy white people who’ve grown up with privilege to continue to benefit from a non-meritocratic system, the tear-it-down side argues. The universities counter that legacy admission fosters community and encourages giving.
I graduated from Princeton in 2001. I would like to propose a gentle corrective to both sides.
Over the last generation, either because of affirmative action or progressive values, the nation’s best universities have – fitfully and imperfectly – transformed their enrollments, substantially increasing minority numbers. Because they require a generation to manifest, changes in legacy admission take a longer time – Harvard is 40% white, but 70% of its legacy admittees are. The more important question is whether the latter number has been trending in the right direction. In another generation, the legacy percentage should be closer to the minority one. By advocating against legacy admissions, aren’t liberal activists undermining a tradition that, preferential as it is, may finally be about to yield results for their cause? Few of the liberals I know are above preferential treatment, as long as it preferences their values.
This is one of the conservative arguments against liberal attitudes toward affirmative action and related initiatives. Liberals aren’t for fairness; they’re for the same preferential treatment, just for “their own,” often at the expense of genuine progress. The best example is athletic admissions, which favors minority students. Universities use it to pad their minority quotas. Abolishing sports admissions would force colleges to admit minority students based on academic potential. But liberal arguments against unfair admission policies tend not to invoke athletic admissions.
To detractors, this is hypocrisy. I prefer to think of it as a messy, flawed moral flexibility whose argument for inequality as a redress for former inequality – whether right or wrong, whether you agree with it or not – at least has the benefit of self-awareness. But that’s not the way many liberals think of their values. They see their arguments as pure, unvarying justice, and the failure of others to produce instant change as a fig leaf for retrograde positions. But sometimes things – good if imperfect things, things worth waiting for – take time.
I am reminded of the physician father of a dear friend of mine, who spent his career working in south Brooklyn, his clientele increasingly made up of emigres from the former Soviet Union like myself. I asked him once, with the outrage that only an ashamed son of the community could feel, why he continued to see patients who, he knew, colluded in medical-insurance fraud with other doctors in the community. He said: “These people used to live in a country where you couldn’t get anything fairly. They’re traumatized. Give them a generation here. Nothing I say now will make a difference, anyway. Give them time. Their children will be nothing like this.” That generation has now passed. So has he. But his humane, forgiving, and patient prediction was correct.
Take my story. On paper, I am a privileged white male. But my privilege began only when I was admitted to Princeton. I didn’t speak English till I was 10. My family came to America from a radically different society. We had $250 to our names, and carried the mental burden of having been nearly exterminated by the Nazis two generations before, and having grown up in a country (the USSR) that treated Jews like us as second-class citizens, denying us jobs, education, and physical safety. Those experiences of humiliation, abuse, privation, and extreme othering – but also self-reinvention thanks to American liberty and opportunity – can continue to make Princeton a more interesting, noble, and accountable place if my children get to attend there. It’s not all sweater vests and lacrosse sticks. Not all struggle is visible.
These are complicated issues. They don’t have perfect answers. And personal illusions of moral purity, for either side, are an impediment to progress. The better question to ask is: How much temporary injustice is it wise to put up with in service of a higher cause? I think of that old film School Ties, in which the Jewish prep-school student played by Brendan Fraser learns that, as a Jew, he has been admitted only because he’s a good football player. He says to his headmaster: “You used me for football. I’ll use you to get into Harvard.”
The ideologues on either side of these debates would do well to develop a quality that we immigrants carry nearly from birth: Humility, and the lack of that luxury that allows us to be above compromise. We compromised the moment our parents decided to seek better lives somewhere else in the world, where none of us spoke the language, none of us had the money, and few of us understood what it meant to be an American.
Even Princeton has to compromise. For all the children of captains of industry who swell its enrollment and coffers, they have to consider for legacy admission children of people like me, who have given the university exactly $20 a year since I graduated. (I missed some years, too.) That has been a measure of my income as an artist, but also my ambivalence about the place, which was profoundly alienating from a social perspective and life-changing from an academic one.
I taught at Princeton for five years, and though a teacher’s perspective is limited, I glimpsed among my students some of the same social strains and dampeners that made my time there so lonely. Regardless, because a Princeton education is exceptional, I would love for my children to attend there. That is the largest gift I can give to Princeton – to turn over to its care for four years young people to whom I will have given every principle and wisdom I can. That I believe the Princeton admission office will give extra attention to my children’s candidacy because I persevered there is Princeton’s gift to me in return, a forgiveness and chance as large-hearted and wise as the education I got there in the first place.