Every year about this time there’s a fleeting story or so on how many of the nation’s most prestigious campuses refuse admittance to meritorious students but accept the less worthy sons and daughters of powerful and wealthy parents and alums.
In The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges, Daniel Golden calls this ritual of string-pulling “affirmative action for rich white people.”
He says that Brown University, for example, shepherded Jane Fonda’s daughter through the admission gauntlet, following which the actress “gave $750,000 anonymously for minority scholarships.” Golden also writes that the sons of Senator Bill Frist and former Vice President Al Gore, “both middling students who preferred partying to homework” were admitted to Princeton and Harvard, respectively, where their fathers had matriculated.
This practice is so common, observes a Notre Dame administrator cited by the author, that “the poor schmuck who has to get in on his own has to walk on water.”
It is passing odd that unfair string-pulling receives such scant attention from proponents of ethnicity/gender “diversity.” On the other hand, their concept of justice does admit of the meting out of rewards on the basis of skin color or gender – for example, they have tended to approve of admissions quotas for minorities on campuses. Their egalitarianism is a departure from the erstwhile view that justice demands impartiality – in this case, that students should be judged on the basis of merit, not connections.
It may plausibly be argued that private institutions should be free to set their own admission standards and, in effect, admit the students who are able to bid the highest price. Legal issues aside, however, the depth of the hypocrisy is difficult to fathom.
In Reason and Law, M.R. Cohen writes that Plato equated justice with “the health of the body politic.” A concern with fairness, in other words, is the mark of a civilized society. From this perspective, the annual string-pulling on campuses is one more loose thread in the fabric of civilizational breakdown.