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Many different paths lead us to New Haven this weekend, and we come from many geographic and cultural backgrounds.
We will have traveled from far and wide, across mountains and rivers and oceans, to reunite with steadfast friends, engage in lively colloquy, and sing the old familiar songs. After the festivities end, we all go home again—but to where?
Both literally and metaphorically, we have all taken a journey away from home. At one time or another, we left our hometowns behind in favor of Yale and the ivory tower. Whether we desired it or not, we gained “elite” status in the eyes of many, and were accepted into the upper echelon of society. No doubt, many of us are glad we made this choice. Yale offered us vocational opportunities that might otherwise have been out of reach. Here in New Haven, we banded together as Federalists, forging an intellectual community that now celebrates its twelfth year. But in choosing one path, we rejected another.
When we left home and came to Yale, we sacrificed a part of ourselves. We began to pull up our roots, and something died in the process. Finding it impossible to live in both worlds at the same time, to what extent must we abandon our obligations to the place in which we were raised? We left something behind when we left home. Can we ever reclaim our inheritance? When we departed our hometowns to climb the ivory tower, did we leave for good? Or can we return, older, wiser, and more certain in our sense of belonging?
There is a difference between being from some place and being of that place, between growing up in a culture and belonging to that culture. Sometimes we might feel like cultural nomads, wavering between two identities but rejected by both. Where do we belong now? How do we reconcile our conflicting loyalties? More broadly, the same question could be asked of immigrants, cultural transplants, and other sorts of ideological converts. Can a boy from rural Texas move to New York and remain a Texan? If not, can he ever really be a New Yorker?
This may be a case where, the further we journey from home, the more we become strangers to it. Or perhaps the truth is quite the opposite—that we can only really go home after we have seen it from a distance.
For the purpose of this debate, “legacy admissions” refers to any college admissions policy that gives any preference to a given applicant on the basis of his familial relationship to alumni of the college.
We should ask ourselves two questions when considering this resolution. First, what should be the purpose of the college admissions process? Second, does the practice of legacy admissions align with the spirit of this process? According to Yale’s website, the purpose of the admissions process is to identify “students we can help to become the leaders of their generation in whatever they wish to pursue.” Whatever one may think of the appropriateness of this mission statement, it is worth reflecting on. After all, these are the guidelines that selected each of us.
Objectors to the practice of legacy admissions may point to its history, which is hardly without controversy. Many such policies were implemented during the 1920s, as an attempt to preserve the status quo in the face of Irish, Jewish, and Catholic immigration. Even if these policies are not so blatantly discriminatory today, they contribute to a system of elite universities that manufacture exclusivity and measure success by their microscopic acceptance rates.
Legacy students, who have grown up steeped in the tradition of their parents’ school, will tend to have a deeper knowledge of the institution than their non-legacy peers, and will be more familiar with the nuances of the application process. This advantage is generally reflected in the quality of their applications, as Harvard president Lawrence Bacow noted in 2018: “It's a self-selected pool, which, as a group, by almost any metric, looks very, very good relative to the broader applicant pool.” So why should legacy students have their applications “double-privileged,” so to speak? These students have parents who are well-educated (if the university did its job) and who have ostensibly raised them to love learning and strive for great achievement. Why, then, should they be deprived of the privilege of achieving college admission on their own merits? It may well be conservative for a student to follow in her parents’ footsteps, or for parents to instill in their children a love for their alma mater. But these tendencies are in the domain of the family, and the university should not burden itself by intervening in family business.
A complaint often levied against the practice of legacy admissions is that it is anti-meritocratic. This sounds very scary. Surely, we want students to be accepted on the basis of their merit—we find it extremely distasteful when complicating factors, like secret bribes, interfere with the proper execution of the selection process. But why should we strive for meritocracy in college admissions? In practice, “merit” escapes objective standards, and its definition will always be untethered to any principles except the whims of the directors of the process. Whatever the flaws of the legacy standard, with its aristocratic tendencies, is it really better than sham meritocracy?
Another benefit of legacy admissions is that it fosters a sense of community—and not just community as an accident of geography and academic interest, but community through the generations, bonds between the living and the dead. This is exactly the type of community that conservatives claim is fundamental to a properly ordered society.
If we reject legacy preference in college admissions, which is based on accident of birth, must we also reconsider admission preference based on race, family income, or any factor besides “merit,” however defined? Is there a substantive difference between the preference given based on legacy status and that given based on race, class, sex, or other non-academic factors? Can we reasonably abandon legacy preference without proceeding into “pure meritocracy?” Finally, when we speak of reforming a college admissions practice, who holds the sword? Should this decision fall under the domain of private institutions, or does the state have authority to compel or forbid certain types of admissions practices?
Ultimately, we must decide whether the practice of legacy admissions aligns with the spirit of the university. Should we embrace its aristocratic tendencies? Or must we reject its discriminatory wiles?
Not only is death inevitable, some might say, but it actually gives meaning to life. As such, confronting our mortality increases our gratitude for earthly life while it lasts and cultivates within us the character of saints. Avoiding reminders of death at all costs is dangerous to our souls and poisonous to our culture. Many societal ills can be attributed to our culture’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of death at its own peril. We misguidedly attempt to sterilize death by relegating it to stuffy white-walled hospital rooms—as if we could deprive death of its sting by removing its grossness; as if we could render ourselves immortal by simply avoiding the places where death besets us. Further, if we believe that society is a contract between the living, the dead, and the yet unborn, then certainly our city should contain cemeteries as physical reminders of the fact. As Joseph Bottum writes in his essay, “The living give us crowds. The dead give us communities.” How are we to remember our place within the historical community unless we are tangibly connected with our ancestors?
Some might argue, however, that public reminders of death are neither good nor healthy. Our actions should not be motivated by fear of death, but by love of life. The ability to make us afraid is one of Death’s cheap aesthetic thrills, and since our culture cannot be trusted to deal with death appropriately, we should avoid its representation in public life and the popular media. If we should not treat death with fearful reverence, then perhaps we should regard it mirthfully—but we should never gaze upon it with indifference, and too much frankness on the subject of death cultivates detachment rather than fervor. In the same way that gory movies desensitize us to violence if we consume too much of them, maybe we should restrict our exposure to the macabre, so as not to rob Death of its mystery.
Does Death belong in the public square? Or should we banish its likeness to the outskirts of the city? In a literal sense, is it healthy to be surrounded by reminders of our inevitable fate, whether in art, architecture, music, or some other form? Allegorically, how should the “city” of our soul countenance Death? With solemnity? With laughter? Or not at all?