BY CAROLYN BETENSKY

In the wake of last month’s horrific Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action, an organization called Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) filed a federal civil rights complaint against Harvard University, challenging their legacy admissions policy. As LCR litigation fellow Michael Kippins put it in a press release on their website:

Harvard’s practice of giving a leg-up to the children of wealthy donors and alumni—who have done nothing to deserve it—must end. This preferential treatment overwhelmingly goes to white applicants and harms efforts to diversify. Particularly in light of last week’s decision from the Supreme Court, it is imperative that the federal government act now to eliminate this unfair barrier that systematically disadvantages students of color.

The fact that Harvard’s practice of discriminating in favor of white applicants is legal, while admissions policies that purposely seek out equally qualified applicants of color have been ruled unconstitutional, is a miscarriage of justice that cannot stand.

In the meantime, Musa al-Gharbi’s recent Inside Higher Ed essay “Education as Privilege Laundering” reminds us that higher education can function to consolidate economic (and, though he does not mention it himself in the essay, racial) privilege in ways that go far beyond legacy admissions policies:

Elite K–12 schools help ensure that the most valuable brand-name degrees end up in the hands of the “right kind of people” by allowing top-ranked colleges and universities to select for children of well-off families (who can pay full tuition, make generous endowment gifts, and whose progeny will be well-positioned to make alumni donations), but on ostensibly “meritocratic” grounds—i.e., on the basis of the supposedly “superior” K–12 education these affluent students received at their fancy schools. Elite college or university credentials enable employers to perform the same sleight of hand: through their preference for graduates of top universities, elite firms likewise overwhelmingly select candidates from affluent backgrounds, albeit on formally “meritocratic” grounds (again, on the basis of the “superior” education they are purported to have received, this time in college).

Al-Gharbi challenges the self-evidence of the “meritocratic” criteria so often championed by those who oppose policies that encourage equity and inclusion.

Al-Gharbi’s piece reminded me of a conversation I had with a young student not too long ago. The student, a white senior at an Ivy League university, was applying for a prestigious research fellowship abroad, at a laboratory headed by the parent of one of his classmates. Before college, he had gone to selective, private schools. As he told me about his application essay for the fellowship, I said I’d be happy to have a look at it. He declined my offer on the grounds that his department had a special undergraduate fellowship advisor who would do that for him. Furthermore, one of his high school teachers who had recommended him for college was now a graduate student at a different Ivy League university and had also offered to read his essay. Three readers was overkill, he told me. And he was right.

I do not want to suggest that this student had not worked hard in college, nor that he was not “deserving” of recognition, but it’s clear to me that whatever “merit” his application reflected was also the result of layer upon layer of privilege—privilege that went beyond his family’s racial and economic status, and beyond the sheer fact of his attendance at elite institutions (although his family’s racial and economic status, along with his attendance at elite institutions, had created the conditions for these layers of privilege to accrue). With the benefit of a social connection with a classmate whose parent headed a highly regarded research lab, a dedicated fellowship advisor, and a former prep school teacher to go over his application, he had advantages that are seldom acknowledged when students are evaluated on their “merits” alone.

Getting rid of legacy policies is the very least we can do to make university admissions more equitable. But dismantling the less visible effects of systemic (white) privilege will require much, much more work—especially now, without affirmative action.

Contributing editor Carolyn Betensky is professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, a former AAUP Council member, and a cofounder and executive committee member of Tenure for the Common Good.