InsideHighered.com
November 20
When critics question legacy admissions — special preferences for the children of alumni — they tend to focus on fairness, not legality. Politicians and others have periodically asked why colleges should give any assistance to those who are more likely to have other advantages anyway, given that their parents were well educated.
But legal challenges have been few. In the 1980s, the U.S. Education Department considered complaints that legacy admissions systems discriminated against Asian American applicants, but ruled that this was not the case because, as more Asian Americans became graduates of elite colleges, their children would benefit much as the children of white alumni have benefited over time.
But this week — for the second time this year — a law journal is publishing a legal analysis that suggests that legacy preferences are illegal. The new issue of the Santa Clara Review features an article — whose lead writer would like to find plaintiffs to test his theory — arguing that the 1866 Civil Rights Act bars legacy admissions at public and private institutions. An article earlier this year in the Washington University Law Review argues that the “nobility clauses” of the U.S. Constitution ban legacy admissions at public institutions.
In both cases, the lawyers and legal scholars who wrote the articles say that the statutes they cite effectively bar hereditary advantages and that legacy admissions are such an advantage, even if the authors of the statutes weren’t thinking about how one gets into Harvard.
Several advocates for colleges that use legacy admissions said that they hadn’t heard of the latest arguments and so couldn’t comment on them. But it would be an understatement to say that colleges with legacy preferences generally don’t like to talk about them (except, perhaps during reunion weekend).
Full story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/20/legacy
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