I agree with you that eliminating legacy would solve the issue of making the school different - it's never gonna happen though, so there's no point in talking about it honestly.
Also yeah, MIT is not a legacy giving school
I'm not quite sure what this legacy thing is, but I don't think English universities do it. It sounds corrupt to me, and I think it would be a national scandal.
"What about university donors, though? Don’t they have an unfair advantage in this process? In truth, for every office of admissions there is a development office that builds a university’s endowment through donations from alumni and wealthy individuals. And every year, regardless of what a college or university says publicly, a number of children of wealthy donors and alumni get a nod in their direction while other applicants are rejected.
The reality is, the money generated by admitting wealthy students often serves to subsidize the financial aid of those less fortunate. If one squints, one might see here a karmic balance enabling many students to attend a college they otherwise could never afford."
Note he said "every office of admissions" and "regardless of what a college or university says publicly." If MIT were an exception, presumably he would have mentioned it. The "regardless of what a college or university says publicly" implies that MIT may be not stating the entire truth when they claim "we don't do legacy"[2] or that MIT's internal behavior may have changed since Crowley worked there. I'm not sure what MIT has to say about providing admissions preferences to children of wealthy donors the way many (most?)[3] universities including Stanford[4] do.
[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2019/03/13/co...
[2] https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-do...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-college-admissi...
[4] https://provost.stanford.edu/2020/06/26/admissions-considera...