A year or so ago I found myself attempting to swat down so many attempts to argue that discrimination on the basis of race or religions was no different from discrimination on any other basis — residency, musical talent, athletic ability, legacy status — that I gave this argument a name, IUNS (for Invidious Ubiquitous Non-Sequitur). You can actually search on that term here.
Really, the idea that all discrimination is fungible — equally good or equally bad — is ridiculous, or worse, as is accompanying argument that anyone who opposes racial discrimination who does not also oppose, say, preferences to athletes or musicians is a hypocrite. That might be true for someone who argues that academic merit should be the only criterion used for college admissions, but most thoughtful anti-preferentialists do not make that argument. All they, we, say is that colleges should be free to use whatever admissions criterial they want — except race, religion, ethnicity.
Now the Chronicle of Higher Education is trying to stir up this debate again. First in an article, and next in a “Colloquy” that begins Thursday, which looks at the practice (oh horrors) that many colleges give preferences to the children of professors.
In the description of the upcoming Colloquy, it asks:
Should critics of race-based affirmative action and “legacy” preferences be just as outraged by employee-based affirmative action? If not, why not?
Briefly, No. Somewhat less briefly, the Chronicle’s question notwithstanding, race-based preferences are not at all the same as legacy preferences. Nothing in the text, structure, or history of the 14th Amendment, or indeed nothing anywhere in our entire history, suggests any right to be free from discrimination based on where your parents went, or did not go, to college. Nor should it. Ditto for whether or not your parents are professors.
Now as a matter of policy one can quite reasonably oppose legacy/offspring preferences, but to speak of them in the same breath as racial discrimination trivializes the latter.
If racial discrimination really should not be distinguished from any other imaginable form of discrimination, then lets move quickly to abolish all our civil rights laws. For if it is really so trivial, who needs them?
That the professor should even ask such a suggestion shows that we have come a long way from the day in which it would never have been asked. Not everyone has made the trip. Witness a fatuous poll taken on AOL
‘Briefly, No. Somewhat less briefly, the Chronicle’s question notwithstanding, race-based preferences are not at all the same as legacy preferences. ‘
I’ve heard that legacy preferences were instituted in the ivies to try to give the WASPS a leg up on the jewish applicants. Is that true?
Instead of trying to come up with nefarious reasons for legacy admissions, think of Occam’s Razor, i.e., the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. The University is still a business. It needs money to run. By admitting the children of (successful) alum, the university is greatly enhancing its chances of getting larger contributions. Or to put it another way, by not admitting the children of successful alum, the university stands a snowball
I suspect that when legacy preferences were first started the Ivies hardly needed them to give WASPs a leg up on the Jews inasmuch as they already had quotas on Jewish admissions. By the way, an underappreciated facet of those quotas is that were defended in terms very familiar to us now — as necessary in order to promote diversity. Without such quotas, it was argued, Jews would predominate to such a degree that diversity would be reduced. It hasn’t been so long since liberals thought was a bad policy.
‘I suspect that when legacy preferences were first started the Ivies hardly needed them to give WASPs a leg up on the Jews inasmuch as they already had quotas on Jewish admissions’
Right. The story I heard was they were a way of eliminating that quota.
actus, you mean that the quota was disgraceful, and becoming a public embarrassment, but the number of WASPs had to be kept up anyway? Interesting if true.
It reminds me of the old system in the San Francisco USD, whereby all public schools (for “diversity” purposes) had to stay close to court-determined racial percentages. The result was that Chinese-American students had to have better grades and scores than white students to get into the few selective public high schools. But it wasn’t about giving the white kids slots at the expense of the Chinese; it was about “diversity.” Of course.
‘actus, you mean that the quota was disgraceful, and becoming a public embarrassment, but the number of WASPs had to be kept up anyway? Interesting if true.’
It must have been sad to be surpassed, in way that catching up just isn’t, you know?