An Inconvenient Blog

By Ashkan

Few things match the awkwardness of bashing legacy admissions to someone who later sheepishly reveals “my dad went here…” Hasn’t really stopped me, though. I feast on the souls of soft-penised dilettantes who were grandfathered into what I traded my adolescence to achieve. 

I am no friend of legacy admissions. And California just banned it! That’s a good thing. Right? Is it bad that I’m feeling a little… left out? What about my kids? If Pennsylvania follows suit, my children wouldn’t be afforded the advantages that reams of old-money White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have leveraged to build their generational wealth.

It just stings a bit. It feels like I’ve been screwed over twice — applying as a straight, White (or WINO), upper-middle class male from a California public school with legacy-less Iranian parents granted me precisely zero admissions gimmicks. And so I worked hard. Much of me wanted to work hard so that my kids wouldn’t have to. I guess it seems unfair that just when Ivy League schools have begun to diversify (in terms of race, class, geography, et cetera) that the ability to pass on our success to our kids might be done away with. It was hard for me to get in and will be just as hard for my kids.

Shouldn’t the nouveau browned, queer-coded wave of Ivy Leaguers have the chance to conceive family empires like the Trumps or the Lauders or the Perelmans did? From a public policy perspective, I don’t really know. I guess not. I’m just personally frustrated. Obviously we should empower meritocracy above all else. Looking past one’s last name or other immutable characteristics, enabling the best man to win, is integral to American identity. So I do support getting rid of legacy, even if it’s a bitter support.

These topics are complicated and multifaceted. Can a just, pure meritocracy ever be designed? I don’t think so. Even a common sense policy like scrapping legacy can be logically deflected with appeals to justice and equity and other buzzwords that Abigail’s comrades salivate to employ.

I do understand why many see other meritocracy obfuscators like race-based affirmative action as necessary scale-tippers. There is an undeniable history of racism in this country and some of it is persistent. But what becomes of the kids of Filipino San Franciscans who had their homes in Manilatown destroyed in a naked feat of 20th-century institutional racism, for example? They’re just Asian and penalized for it. And what about the children of highly-educated Nigerian immigrants, a community which is far more prosperous than the average American? They’re given a leg up.

The Sisyphean task of classifying skin pixelation or aspiring to some ideal of restorative justice (which I attempted to do with my feeble defense of legacy) is just silly at some point. It picks winners and losers somewhat arbitrarily and is bound to displease many. This phenomenon extends to the job market too — selective banks and consultancies now have diversity programs to accelerate certain underrepresented candidates. As a recently out gay man, I attended some of these. Never have I seen so many Canada Goose jackets on the laps of heirs and heiresses to Latin American fortunes. Who is being helped here? Do they need it? And why do I get an advantage because of what I prefer to do in bed? 

The idea of establishing purely wealth-based affirmative action systems has gained traction recently. I am on board with this. It’s quantifiable, clean, and impersonal. One grew up with X amount of financial wherewithal which precluded them from doing X, Y, and Z. Let’s take that into account when evaluating their candidacy. Of course, this poses its own problems — why pass up a wealthier student who has a demonstrated record of academic and professional achievement to opt for a poorer student who the admissions committee thinks might have potential? Is that fair? All investments have risk: what if the less-proven student turns out to be a dud (respectfully)? Personally, I am comfortable with this degree of uncertainty and meritocratic dilution in the name of creating a level playing field. 

Achieving equality (or is it equity now? Abigail, I can’t keep up anymore) is messy. Legacy is bad, race-based affirmative action is imperfect, and poverty-based preference is expedient. Right? I’m pretty sure.