Word: alumni
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It’s particularly unfortunate because one of the University’s most controversial (and least defensible) policies is aimed at currying favor (and funds) from alumni. That policy, legacy preference, gives a tip in the admissions process to applicants whose parents attended Harvard. To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, alumni children gain this advantage by the mere fact of being born. University officials say the legacy preference policy is meant to express gratitude toward alumni, who serve as interviewers for the admissions committee and who donate hundreds of millions of dollars to Harvard each year. But Harvard...
...course, I can’t say that for sure. Though today’s afternoon exercises are (technically) “the annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association,” don’t expect an open-forum “town meeting” out of New England’s Puritan past. On matters of import, “Analysis Grammatical, Logicall and Rhetoricall” is relegated to English-language newsprint...
...illogical (though, to its credit, grammatical). On the one hand, University officials argue that “legacy admissions are integral to the kind of community that any private educational institution is,” as then-President Lawrence H. Summers phrased the party line. According to this logic, alumni are more likely to contribute to their alma mater (financially and otherwise) if their children are admitted to Harvard. For a long time, I myself found this argument compelling. My parents are not Harvard degree-holders, but I have benefited from scholarship funds established by alumni whose progeny matriculated here...
...other hand, the University argues that legacy preference confers only a slight advantage on alumni children. Harvard’s admissions director, Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73, describes legacy preference as “a feather on the scale if all else is equal.” By this logic, the vast majority of legacies would have been admitted on their own achievements regardless of the policy. But if that’s true, the vast majority of alumni parents would have donated regardless of whether such a policy were in place. If legacy...
...played in promoting meritocracy in the first half of the 20th century.” The legacy “feather,” then, is a public-relations blunder of Summers-esque proportions. It casts a shadow upon Harvard’s sincere commitment to meritocracy. Why would alumni want to see their alma mater dragged through the mud on account of a policy with such marginal practical benefit...