Ivory Tower Intrigues: The pseudo-meritocracy of the Ivy League.

By James Traub
Posted Monday, Oct. 24, 2005, at 2:35 AM PT

Thanks to Jerome Karabel, author of The Chosen, I know now a great deal more about the circumstances surrounding my admission to Harvard in 1972 than I ever wanted to know. I understood even then that my unimpressive academic record would not have put me over the top had my father not attended Harvard. But I now know that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, supposedly a time when the admissions process had at last been freed of archaic bias, "legacies" were two-and-a-half to three times likelier to be admitted than was the average applicant; that admitted legacies ranked lower than average admits on everything Harvard cared about—personal attributes, extracurricular activities, academic achievement, recommendations, and so forth; and that the degree of preference granted legacies was only slightly less than that given to black candidates, who in turn received less of a thumb on the scale than did athletes. I was, in short, an affirmative-action baby.