Newsom has it right, legacy admissions have to go

Yeah, and one day in California, they came for legacy admissions, and no one spoke out, because, well, it was the right thing to do at a time when beleaguered white males who walk around with victim complexes are working overtime to restrict access to higher education to anyone who doesn’t look like them, it’s morally correct that we also do away with the oldest form of affirmative action, the age old policy that dictates that who you know is more important than what you know, racial preferences. That’s nickels and dimes. The big con are those preferences for alumni or donors. That’s the real injustice in the Golden State. It is now a violation of state law for either a public or private college or university to give an applicant a leg up in the admissions process just because a parent went there or someone hand over a big check to fund a new football stadium. Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed into law AB 1780 which prohibits legacy and donor preferences in the admissions process that’s going to shake up fancy private institutions of higher learning in California, like Santa Clara University, where in 2022 13.3% of the entering freshman class had family ties. Or the University of Southern California, where 14.4% had a family connection. And Stanford University, where 13.8% had a relative hook them up. The law, which won’t go into effect until September 2025 is the second of its kind, following the lead of Maryland, which earlier this year, also banned legacy admissions in both public and private schools. So what’s behind this trend? A couple of things, actually. First, do you remember the varsity blue scandal from a few years ago? Sure you do. The Justice Department dropped the hammer on parents and college admissions consultants who tried to lie and cheat rich kids way into selective schools. Then came the crackdown on affirmative action, which culminated in the Supreme Court striking down the consideration of race or ethnicity in college and university admissions. You put those two things together, and we were bound to get to a place where people begin to question whether the privileged, the coddled and the entitled are amid all this chaos, using a side door to continue to sneak in to the corridors of power and privilege. Look, I have no beef with legacies, per se. People are going to use whatever advantage they can to improve their chances of getting into highly selective colleges and universities. That’s human nature. Sometimes that means playing a sport or a musical instrument. Other times it could mean hailing from Montana or some other state that is woefully underrepresented in the student body. You see, diversity takes many forms, but there is a question about fairness and moral consistency in all this. Remember the concept of merit? You hear that word, the M word, fired off all the time in the affirmative action debate, or whenever white conservatives are trying to keep people of color away from any opportunity to better themselves, the exclusionists worship at the altar of merit. This is their holy grail. All hail the God of merit. All that is good and pure. Well, how about now? Where’s the merit when it comes to legacy admission? What happened to merit when someone need only donate a library to ensure that their child is admitted to a selective school, while someone else who worked harder and made sacrifices isn’t let in as a dark blue state where there is no real check on the power of one of the political parties. California doesn’t always get it right, but this time, I think it did. Legacy admissions had to go. After all, fair is fair. If we’re going to end one kind of admissions preference, we had better end them all. Otherwise people might conclude that the never ending crusade to keep people of color away from colleges and university campuses isn’t about defending merit at all, but rather about something indefensible, racism.