Legacy admission preferences are an unfair and illegal anachronism. On one level, they are a uniquely American phenomenon, underlining the point that the rest of the world’s universities somehow manage to survive without them. At the same time, they are fundamentally anti-American, at odds with the very founding of this nation. They were invented in a dark moment of early twentieth-century American history, even though they would have appalled the eighteenth-century founders of this nation.
For the most part, American higher education has sought to democratize, opening its doors to women, to people of color, and to the financially needy. Legacy preferences are an outlier in this trend, a relic that has no place in American society. In a fundamental sense, this nation’s first two great wars—the Revolution and the Civil War—were fought to defeat different forms of aristocracy. That this remnant of ancestry-based discrimination still survives—in American higher education of all places—is truly breathtaking.