Thomas Jefferson didn’t get into Harvard
Is legacy inegalitarian and un-American?
Notre Dame University has taken heat recently for inviting President Obama to speak at commencement and for offering to award him an honorary degree. The source of Catholic frustration is Obama’s professed defense of abortion.
Now it’s Obama who’s feeling the heat, this time from the left in the American Prospect.
Richard Kahlenberg and Steve Shadowen argue that Obama should give the Notre Dame ceremony a pass due to the university’s “legacy” admissions policy that reserves 25 percent of incoming seats to children of alumni. According to Kahlenberg and Shadowen, legacy “offends” the American principle of equality:
Notre Dame’s quota for right-ancestry students offends an American egalitarian tradition dating back to the Revolution. The Founders overthrew a semi-feudal order where rank and status were inherited rather than earned. In Gordon Wood’s memorable phrase, the Revolution was “a vindication of frustrated talent at the expense of birth and blood.” After transcribing the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal,” Thomas Jefferson wrote that this equality encompasses “particularly the denial of a preeminence by birth.” He asserted that Americans are entitled to “honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth but from our actions and their sense of them.”
This meritocratic interpretation of equality certainly has a lot of currency in the United States, but the case is less cut and dried than Kahlenberg and Shadowen imply. First, it’s a mere fact that America was a highly segmented society around the time of its birth, replete with entrenched socioeconomic divisions. It’s true that, but for race and gender, America had class-blind suffrage, but there were few if any programs to promote social mobility.
There’s a decent chance that Jefferson (and others) were taking aim at British peerage as much as they were endorsing an all-encompassing meritocracy. In fact, public education — just exactly the kind of institution essential to Kahlenberg and Shadowen’s meritocratic egalitarianism — wasn’t commonplace during our early history. Common school did not proliferate until the 19th century and the first state compulsory education law was not passed until 1852. There is no federal compulsory attendance law for primary and secondary education.
Kahlenberg and Shadowen do point to federal laws and practices that would seemingly prohibit legacy as a form of discrimination:
These schools cannot hide behind the façade that they are “private” institutions and can discriminate however they please. They purport to be open to all on an equal opportunity basis, and each of them annually receives tens of millions of dollars in federal funds. In 2008, Notre Dame received $60 million in federal research funds; $20 million more in government grants for tuition; and $265 million in charitable donations for which we taxpayers picked up the tab of about $80 million, by way of tax deductions to the donors.
These universities are subject to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or ancestry in the admissions decisions of private schools. The 1866 Act — the first civil rights statute in the nation’s history — overturned the infamous Dred Scott decision, which had held that U.S. citizenship was inherited from a person’s ancestors. The Act mandated instead that all persons born in the United States — “the children of all parentage whatever” — are U.S. citizens and have an equal right to enter into contracts, including contracts to attend a school, without discrimination based on ancestry or race.
U.S. law prohibits discrimination of many kinds, especially in contracts, but that’s exactly the problem with the kind of meritocratic egalitarianism Kahlenberg and Shadowen are espousing. Our laws take issue with discrimination because it denies people full rights, privileges and protection under the law for reasons we consider arbitrary. Sometimes, arbitrary means not relating to one’s abilities, but other times, even focusing on an individual’s abilities is arbitrary (for example, people with higher test scores don’t get to ride in the front of the bus).
The federal government has lately embraced a much more expansive understanding of equality, particularly during the second half of the 20th century. There’s good reason to think that, nowadays, admissions decisions not based on merit really do fly in the face of the American idea of equality.
It’s less clear Thomas Jefferson whould have thought the same way, no matter how many good quotes we dig up.
–Sam
Related posts:
- The politics of identity
- Term limit tensions
- What’s wrong with racial profiling?
- Equity aptitude test
- No one reforms my kid’s education
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