Vivian Malone registers at the University of Alabama, accompanied by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and federal marshals
Affirmative Action continues to be under attack, and the Supreme Court's
Schuette decision was no surprise. But if it is a moral and perhaps legal outrage for colleges and universities to give admissions preference to specific demographic groups, why aren't the ostensibly principled warriors against Affirmative Action also fighting against legacy admissions?
Paul Waldman explains:
Meanwhile, the preferences whites enjoy remain firmly in place. There have yet to be any successful laws or ballot initiatives to ban “legacy admissions,” in which applicants who had a relative who attended the university are given special preference. No one can come up with rational grounds for retaining this affirmative action for wealthy white people, yet universities all across the country do. And there are other only slightly less blatant forms of favoritism; for instance, the reliance on standardized test scores provides a boost for wealthy students, most of them white, whose parents can afford expensive test prep courses and tutoring. Again, no serious person contends that SATs or ACTs are a pure measure of “merit,” yet they continue to play a huge role in college admissions.
Legacy admissions are blatantly racist, because at many American colleges and universities, minority admissions were prohibited or restricted until at least the latter half of the 20th century. Generations of white families established legacies at those colleges and universities, while minority families couldn't. The continued favoritism granted those often growing legacy families necessarily perpetuates the legacy of racism from the era of explicit minority exclusion. But about this form of affirmative action, those white supposed champions of equal opportunity are curiously silent. Perhaps they're not really concerned with fairness, perhaps they're really most concerned with protecting their historical privileges. Perhaps they fear that if admissions standards were truly fair and unbiased, they wouldn't be able to compete.