Wesleyan University Ends Legacy Admissions

Great, though legacy admissions are only one aspect of the real problem.

Legacy admissions came up to point out the transparent hypocrisy of the recent Supreme Court decision. They claimed that they had to end "all" racism, but started by making things harder for a disadvantaged minority while putting forth zero effort into an incredibly obvious way in which they were disadvantaged. Nobody ever said it was the most important problem. It was just the simplest and easiest to explain.

Ending legacy admissions is the "plastic straw ban" of racism: solving a visible but relatively minor problem. Other problems are more diffuse: unequal funding, dysfunctional neighborhoods, poor policing practices, generational disadvantages left over from remarkably recent explicit racism, etc. You can't fix them with one change. And while they persist, some people are going to find it harder to get into college despite having as much potential as those who do.

An attitude of "We're going to fix the problems I can see in front of me and ignore the hard ones as long as they don't disadvantage me" underlies all of this. That's what made Roberts' opinion so galling.