| Topic Name: |
End Affirmative Action and Legacies |
| Message Name: |
An Apology to Original Poster |
| Date Posted: |
04/05/2001 |
| In Reply To: |
At least you have the honor to identify yourself? Yeah, very brave of you to use an alias istead of just "anonymous". FYI, I am just too damn lazy to log into Vault.
Your whiny defensiveness and ad hominem posturing makes it clear that you are trying to justify your own undeserved admission to a university.
You asked for documentation on my 10-15% figure, I shot you down by providing just that. I never said that no legacies would have been admitted without preference (certainly some would be some) or that they aren't "qualified" in the sense that they don't flunk out. It's very difficult to flunk out of any Ivy league school; even the most unqualified athletes, legacies, and AA cases rarely do.
Your point about legacy preference not showing up in US News Rankings is ludicrous. First off, since virtually all top schools practice legacy admission, the preferences from all the schools cancel out. If the rankings were close, it's possible that maybe, say, Penn would rise from #11 to #9 (or whatever its numbers are) if it replaced the 15% of its class who are legacies with the most-qualified non-legacies who were rejected.
If it had been my dream to attend Princeton all my life, then certainly I would use every advantage I could to get in, including legacy preference if I had it. But if I was admitted under a system, I would always know that my non-legacy classmates passed a tougher threshold to be admitted than I did and were likely more qualified and deserving than I.
If legacies don't NEED to be considered in a separate pool from the rest of the applicants in order to be admitted, then in what sense is it a "courtesy" to alumni if it doesn't benefit them? |
| Message: |
Anonymous Original Poster, thank you so much for showing me the error of my ways. It was particularly generous of you to set me straight with respect to black lawyers and Affirmative Action. First, I postulated -- ridiculously, in retrospect -- that many brilliant black lawyers have benefited from Affirmative Action. I did not account for that fact that, unless YOU have seen the phenomenon, it has never happened. Second, I labored under the delusion that a half-decade's experience in a position of responsibility with respect to minority education gave me some basis to know what I was talking about. Your lucid observation that "acitivists" would concentrate on improving minority education if AA was taken off the table have exposed the idiocy of my thinking for all to see. Finally, I must confess to one final heresy. I must admit that within my present and past BIGLAW firms I have become acquainted with black associates who attended GW, American, and Catholic, and have committed the sin of thinking some of them to be very good lawyers. Now that I have your guidance that "whenever I see a black lawyer I immediately presume he's less qualified," I will do what I can to drum these imposters from the firm. It will be painful, since some of them appear on the surface to be very successful lawyers, and one in particular has taught me a very great deal, or so I had thought. But I will now march into his office and say, "Sir, you profited from Affirmative Action and must be unqualified, whereas I went to Harvard on my own merits. Though I once thought you a mentor, I now realize that you must know nothing, since you had a low LSAT score. Now that Anonymous Original Poster has shown me the truth about Affirmative Action and black lawyers, I must admonish you to withdraw from the firm immediately, or I will expose you and have you drummed out." Incidentally, while penitently contemplating the error of my mays, I have tried to figure out how I could go so wrong while you, presumably much younger than I, could so clearly see the Truth. It has occured to me -- though this is only a working hypothesis based on the evidence -- that perhaps my attention to such minutiae as spelling, grammar, and doing what it takes to become a partner in a BIGLAW firm has so distracted me from what's really important that I have been surpassed in my understanding of the big picture by younger people like you, who can speak so authoritatively on so many subjects. Sir, you have my apology.
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