It's official. John Edwards (D-N.C.), the telegenic senator with the tobacco-road twang, is running for president, and doctors and HMO executives and chambers of commerce across the country are undoubtedly not lining up to offer their support. (After all, Edwards made his fortune as a trial lawyer, bagging eye-popping sums in personal-injury and medical-malpractice lawsuits.) But there's another category of people who should be apprehensive about the prospect of an Edwards White House: college applicants counting on a little help getting into mom or dad's alma mater. As part of his education platform, Edwards has proposed eliminating the legacy preference from college and university admissions. It's a move designed to play to his strengths as a candidate -- and it might even recast the long-simmering debate over college admissions.
For someone with a political career that's barely 4 years old and lacking in substantive accomplishments, reaching for the presidency is a brazen move. But like his rival Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Edwards' appeal lies largely in what he did before being elected to public office. Kerry, the melancholic Boston Brahmin, trades on an aura of noblesse oblige that comes from having volunteered as a young man to go to Vietnam and fight in a war he opposed. Edwards, on the other hand, is the bootstrap kid, his tale one of pluck, luck and a courtroom manner that played well with juries. So just as Kerry generously laces his public statements with references to his military service -- and his political opponents' lily-livered lack thereof -- Edwards routinely tints his campaign rhetoric with references to his humble upbringing and tough climb to the top.
For Edwards, a college education is the linchpin of the upward mobility he represents and celebrates. Edwards the candidate may occasionally overstress his salt-of-the-earth bona fides -- as The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann has pointed out, Edwards' family was middle class, not working class -- but the fact remains that he was the first member of his family to go to college, and he did work his way through with jobs on a road crew, at a mill and loading delivery trucks.
Edwards' Ragged Dick-style narrative shines all the more when compared with that of the man he would be running against. George W. Bush was a legacy admission at Phillips Academy aka Andover and then Yale University, where he neither applied nor distinguished himself. While Edwards aced law school and then went on to a fantastically successful legal career, Bush coasted through business school and went on to a mediocre career as a businessman, repeatedly saved from failure -- and eventually made a multimillionaire -- by dint of his family connections.
The legacy-admissions issue, then, casts Edwards as the embodiment of the American dream and Bush as its antithesis. As Edwards put it in a speech on education this November at the University of Maryland in College Park, "The legacy preference rewards students who had the most advantages to begin with. It is a birthright out of 18th-century British aristocracy, not 21st-century American democracy. It is wrong." Later he added, "There is no royalty in America." The imagery is clear -- George W. equals George III -- and the rhetoric familiar. It is the language of populism, but with a twist: It is a middle-class populism, one pitched to the slice of society that is wealthy enough to send its kids to college but not established enough to be part of the club. Edwards' official announcement of his presidential candidacy on yesterday's Today Show was full of similar language about fighting for "regular folks" against the interests of "insiders" and career politicians. That special privileges and perks everywhere are under fire at the moment only strengthens the appeal of Edwards' message.
So might we expect a President Edwards to call out the National Guard to end the privileges of legacy admits? No. Edwards may paint himself as the patron saint of the little guy but he's not the type to waste energy on lost causes. As he well knows, the federal government can't do much to make colleges eliminate their legacy-admissions policies. Not being the child of a Princeton University alum, for example, isn't a protected category such as race or disability -- and discrimination on that basis is not grounds for legal action. That's why Edwards' legacies proposal, while vaguely hinting at government action, relies more on moral suasion, challenging colleges and universities to "live up to their ideals and America's ideals on their own."
Not surprisingly, college administrators are reluctant to do so. They insist that legacy admissions are a red herring. Tom Dingman, associate dean of Harvard College, for example, said, "I never felt that we did anything irresponsible with legacy admissions here." He points out that mommy or daddy's name means less than it used to, and that legacies do have to show that they can cut it academically to be admitted. But if it makes so little difference, why have it? Because membership still needs to have its privileges. Or, as Dingman puts it, the practice "heightens the sense of loyalty among those whose children are admitted." That loyalty, of course, is often expressed financially. And while admissions officers such as Diana Cook at Yale deny that there's anything like a quid pro quo going on -- she points out, "The money is dealt with by the development office; we don't care about it, it doesn't go in our pockets" -- the fact remains that the family that goes to homecoming together usually donates together.
But even if Edwards' proposal has little immediate effect, it may well help shape the debate over affirmative action that is once again gaining volume now that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to revisit the issue. Ever since the landmark 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case, the argument over affirmative action has fallen along the fault line of diversity versus merit. Supporters list the benefits of a rainbow-colored student body; critics lament the injustice of a system that privileges race over qualifications. Part of the value of Edwards' proposal is that it shifts the focus from race to class -- or, to put it more crudely, it redirects the resentment aimed at minority interlopers toward entrenched elites. Getting rid of the legacy preference means both more meritocracy and more diversity.
In doing so, though, it creates some odd bedfellows. For example, it brings Edwards, a committed advocate for affirmative action, into ideological alignment with, for example, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who singled out the legacy issue in his recent repentant Black Entertainment Television interview. Similarly, Ruth Chavez, former Bush cabinet nominee and president of the anti-affirmative-action Center for Equal Opportunity, endorsed Edwards' proposal when asked about it (though with caveats about an overly intrusive federal government). "As a matter of policy, I'm not in favor of legacies at public colleges and universities," she said. "They have a tendency to reinforce the privileges of class more than anything else. And they have a disproportionate effect on Hispanics."
But while Chavez in the same breath decries both affirmative action and legacy admissions, Edwards' position highlights the flimsiness of the core assumption of affirmative-action critics: that affirmative action imposes a political agenda on an otherwise ideologically neutral process. Colleges take all sorts of things -- some laudable, some less so -- into account when making admissions decisions. There are slots set aside for squash players and bassoonists and linguists and political activists and, yes, kids with the same last names as some of the dormitories. As Dingman freely admits, "We're not a meritocracy to begin with. We look to build a class in which people will have an opportunity to learn from each other."
A statement such as that, of course, would probably not sit so well with Edwards. There are hints in it of the old idea of the "well-rounded student," which, in the words of longtime education writer (and Prospect senior correspondent) Peter Schrag, basically meant "you wore white shoes and you went to Deerfield." We may have come a long way since the days of the "gentleman's C," but it's a measure of how far we have to go that -- as John Edwards knows and surely hopes to exploit -- we're currently governed by a man who was a legacy admission to high school, college and the White House.
Drake Bennett is a Prospect writing fellow.
