President George W. Bush was an affirmative-action beneficiary, at Yale University and then atHarvard Business School. Now he wants the University of Michigan to end itspolicy of considering applicants' race, among other factors, inadmitting students. According to Bush, this approach "amounts to aquota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students based ontheir race."
Bush was admitted to Yale in 1964 under an affirmative-action policy for children of alumni -- what colleges call a "legacy" system. Legacy preferences still exist, of course, at most selective schools, including Michigan and Yale. But they no longer carry quite the same weight they did at schools such as Yale, Princeton University and Harvard University when Bush was applying to colleges in 1964.
The president never released his high-school grades from Andover -- an elite NewEngland prep school that his father had also attended -- or his SAT scores.But several years ago, The New Yorker got hold of Bush's Yale records and discovered that he scored a 566 on the verbal SAT and a 640 on the math SAT -- 180 points below the median score for his Yale classmates.
From what is known about Bush's academic performance at Andover, it isdoubtful that he would have been admitted to Yale unless his father (at the time a Texas businessman running for the U.S. Senate in a race he eventually lost) and grandfather (Prescott Bush, a former Republican U.S. senator who represented Connecticut from 1952to 1962) had been Yalies (from, respectively, the classes of 1948 and 1917). In fact, as a student, Bush studied in the Yale library's Prescott Walker BushMemorial Wing.
Back then, Yale's student body was disproportionately made up of white,upper-class students from the nation's most elite prep schools. But without a Yale legacy, even a student from the most selectprivate high school needed excellent grades and SAT scores to get in. Likeother Ivy League colleges, Yale at the time had its own criteria for"diversity." It looked for students with strong athletic abilities orspecial skills such as musical or theatrical talent, as well as students from different parts of the country. These non-legacy students had to meet Yale's basic academic standards, of course, though the college no doubt rejected plenty of one-dimensional students who may have had higher grades and SAT scores butlacked other qualities Yale was looking for. (At the time, however, Yale made little effort to recruit minorities. In the fall of 1964, there were only 28 African-Americanstudents out of 4,093 undergraduates.)
Other than being a legacy, Bush had no qualities that would havegotten him into Yale. Had he been a National Merit Scholar finalist, anoutstanding athlete or actor or editor of the Andover newspaper, or had he perhaps organizedhis fellow students to tutor underprivileged kids, we probably would know by now. In fact, he was a mediocre student -- he never made the honor roll -- anddemonstrated no particularly outstanding talents to warrant being admitted to Yale. He was head cheerleader during his senior year,organized the school's stickball league and played baseball, basketball andfootball. But, unlike his father, who was an outstanding baseball player, W. was not a star athlete, and certainly not good enough to be recruited by Yale's coaches. Perhaps Yale was looking for students from west Texas to add somecultural and regional diversity, but, if so, why accept a kid from Midland,Texas, who had attended prep school in Massachusetts?
It probably didn't hurt that three of the seven members of Yale's admissionscommittee who reviewed Bush's application had been in Skull and Bones,the exclusive college club that also included W.'s grandfather and fatheramong its members (and would later "tap" W. for membershipduring his junior year). The fact is that, just a few years later, when Yale began admitting women andtightened its legacy policy, it is unlikely that Bush -- even with all his connections -- would have gotten in.
And has anyone asked the president how he got into Harvard Business School, the nation's premier training ground for corporate executives? We liketo think that the school selects students based on meritocratic criteria: college grades,scores on the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) or someexperience in the real world of business that would demonstrate the skillsnecessary to run a major corporation.
But Bush's Yale transcript shows that he was a C student. He got particularlypoor grades in political science and economics. In his freshman year -- the only year for which The New Yorker obtained rankings -- Bush was in the 21st percentile of his class. In other words, 79 percent of the students had better grades than he did. Indeed, when he gave a speech at Yale's 2001 commencement ceremony, he joked, "To the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States."
Bush has never released his GMAT scores. During the five years between hisgraduation from Yale in 1968 and his application toHarvard Business School in 1973, he had no obvious career trajectory or major accomplishments. In1970 he worked on his father's second unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate. He had never worked in the business world except for nine months in 1971, when he was a management trainee with Stratford of Texas, an agricultural andranching company. In 1973 he worked for nine months as a counselor at theProfessional United Leadership League, a program that provided mentorsfrom professional sports leagues to Houston's inner-city children.
During this five-year period, Bush served part time in the Texas National Guard. And even his acceptance to the National Guard's pilot-training program required special treatment. Bush scored only 25 percent on apilot-aptitude test, the lowest acceptable grade. Nevertheless, commanders of the Texas Guard, aware that Bush's father was then a U.S. congressman fromTexas, swore W. in as an airman the same day he applied.
In 1973 he wasdischarged from the National Guard in order to enter Harvard Business School.By that time, Bush had already been rejected in his home state by the University of Texas' law school because of his lackluster performance atYale. So when the admissions directors at Harvard Business School looked at Bush's transcriptand application, they must have seen something that allowed them to take achance on an applicant who could charitably be labeled an "at-risk"student. (And it probably wasn't that he'd been president of his fraternity, Delta KappaEpsilon, known as the hardest-drinking jock house at Yale.)
At the time Bush's application landed at Harvard Business School, Bush Senior -- who hadrecovered from his defeated bids for U.S. Senate in 1964 and 1970 and was by thena former congressman from Texas, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations andformer U.S. diplomatic liaison to China -- was chairman of the RepublicanNational Committee. Might Senior's fame have played a role?
It isn't clear if the business school's forms asked if applicants had ever been arrested.But if so, Bush's application might have stood out -- for the wrong reasons. He was notarrested for protesting for civil rights or against the Vietnam War. Rather, as a20-year-old Yale junior, Bush was arrested for stealing a wreath from a NewHaven hotel. He was chargedwith disorderly conduct, though the charge was later dropped. Perhaps Harvard'sadmissions committee saw this experience as good training for someone who mightlater run a Texas oil company or, as president, have to decide how to deal withsuch corporate law breakers as Enron and WorldCom executives.
Regardless of his own privileged background -- and the obvious ways that Yale andHarvard ignored his grades and test scores when admitting him --Bush is entitled to his opinions about affirmative action. What heseems to misunderstand is that Michigan's affirmative-action policy does not allow theadmittance of students who are unqualified or unable to handle the academic work. Noselective school simply uses grades and test scores in decidingwhich students to accept. Colleges accept students whose high-school grades andSAT scores meet a basic threshold, and then give extra points to students withvarious characteristics, based on such factors as athletic or artistic ability; urban, suburban or rural background; demonstrated commitment to public service; attendance at public,private or religious high schools; and ethnic and racial backgrounds. All of this is done merely in the name of creating a diverse student body, a goal that Bush says he supports.
Bush, a mediocre student, got into Andover, Yale, Harvard Business School andthe Texas National Guard's pilot-training program because he was rich andwell-connected. His subsequent business career -- including his early efforts to start an oil company, the financial favoritism thatallowed him to buy part of the Texas Rangers baseball team with hardly any of his own money,the political favoritism that allowed him to persuade the city of Arlington, Texas, tosubsidize a new stadium -- was due in large part to his family and socialconnections. These connections laid the groundwork for Bush to enterpolitics and helped catapult him to the presidency.
The University of Michigan's affirmative-action program seeks to help qualifiedstudents without these sorts of connections -- indeed, to help some studentswho have had to cope with considerable economic and social disadvantages,including racism -- in order to level the playing field.
Bush says he wants college admissions to be "race neutral" because racial background isn't something you earn, it's something into which you're born. So the question for Bush is whether he would also have wanted college admissions to be "legacy neutral" for the exact same reasons -- and where in life he would be right now if they were.
Peter Dreier is a professor of politics and the director of the Urban andEnvironmental Policy program at Occidental College.
