Word: legacyism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Harvard’s rhetoric regarding legacy is 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...
Yet, on the 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...
I, for one, believe that most legacies here are, if anything, overqualified. Perhaps gullibly, I believe McGrath Lewis when she says that legacy preference is a mere “feather on the scale.” But it’s a feather that looms large in the public...
Worse yet is the documented effect of the legacy preference policy on alumni children themselves. Georgetown University psychologist Deborah Perlman has observed that many legacy students suffer feelings of “self-doubt” as they wonder whether they were admitted because of their lineage or because of...
For many alumni here today, ties to Harvard are thicker than blood. And it’s insulting to suggest—as the University’s own rhetoric does—that their motives for contributing to Harvard are as crass as wanting to marginally improve their children?...