As noted in Chapter 1, Fitzsimmons unofficially interviews about one hundred applicants a year, many of them well connected. Knowles said he occasionally saw alumni or friends “with their offspring in tow” but never contacted the admissions office afterward.

  John Roberts said Henry Park was a “tremendous” math student. “If Henry had some kind of legacy connection, that would have helped him” get into Harvard, he added. “In my case, I had the scores. The family connection took out the added doubt.”

  Overall, Harvard admitted a dozen members of the 1998 class at Groton—more than any other Ivy League university. At least five of those accepted by Harvard were alumni children, including Matthew Burr— son of seven-figure Harvard donor Craig Burr—and Forbes Reynolds McPherson. McPherson, known as “Renny,” traces his lineage all the way back to Increase Mather, a seventeenth-century Harvard president; he's also the son and grandson of Harvard graduates. He had a solid 1480 SAT score but ranked in the bottom half of his Groton class. Applying in 1998, he was initially wait-listed at Harvard; the other top-tier universities to which he applied rejected him. After his grades improved in his final semester of high school, Harvard placed Renny on its “Z-list” of students admitted on condition that they delay enrolling for a year. Fitzsimmons says the university offered deferred admission to forty-eight applicants in 1998. Of those, seventeen students, or 35 percent, were children of alumni.

  “I didn't have the best grades, but I knew I could handle the work at Harvard,” said Renny, who graduated in 2003 and joined the U.S. Marines. He said his grades in college were better than in prep school. He was also editor in chief of a campus poetry review and a staffer on the Harvard Crimson newspaper.

  Henry Park's mother said a school counselor, echoing the Asian American stereotype, warned her that Henry wouldn't stand out from Harvard's other applicants. Since the counseling office typically writes a school's letter of recommendation, which can carry a good deal of weight, the implicit message was that Groton didn't consider him worth fighting for. Henry said his counselor, Johanna Boynton, recommended applying to “a lot of schools I hadn't heard of. My parents weren't too happy.”

  Marilee Jones, the MIT admissions dean, also suggested that Groton didn't put its weight behind Henry. “If the school was really plugging for him, he would've gotten into at least one” of the six elite schools that rebuffed him, she wrote me. “I'd bet my next month's paycheck that the school just wasn't supporting him as strongly” as other students.

  William Polk, then Groton headmaster, said in a written statement, “It is always disappointing when a student doesn't get into his/her college of choice, but we understand that a student's academic record is only one of many different factors that colleges consider.”

  Rejected by his top half-dozen choices, Henry was admitted to two universities in the next tier: Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins. He attended Carnegie Mellon for a year before enrolling at Johns Hopkins, where he majored in neuroscience and was on the dean's list. He is now in medical school at the University of Kansas.

  The psychological scars—and lessons—of his college admissions setbacks have lingered for Henry and his family. “I have thought many, many times why Henry failed,” his mother said, “It was just devastating. He just failed like a falling leaf…. Korean Americans have to do a lot better than Caucasians to get admitted, and it's probably the same for other Asians. It's very, very tough. Presently, yes, there is discrimination.”

  In the late summer of 2001, Michael Dannenberg proposed a provocative strategy to his boss, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, for rallying public and media support behind the besieged cause of minority preference in college admissions. The lanky, boyish Dannenberg, who had recently joined the senator's staff as senior education counsel, made his suggestion as affirmative action was reeling from one judicial setback after another. Federal courts had struck down race-conscious admissions policies at state universities in Texas, Michigan, and, just the week before, Georgia. No longer could universities take shelter under Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell's concurring opinion in University of California Regents v. Bakke (1978) that the value of having a diverse student body justified special treatment for minority applicants. The state of the law was increasingly unsettled, and the Supreme Court was widely expected to take up the Michigan case in its 2002-3 term.

  Dannenberg's brainstorm was that Kennedy, then chairman and now ranking minority member of the Senate education committee, should counter conservative opposition to affirmative action by attacking the preference for alumni children. Because it isn't racially discriminatory on its face, the preference for alumni children is less vulnerable than affirmative action to legal challenge, but a legislative assault on it would likely have grassroots appeal. And since the Supreme Court's consideration of Michigan would likely coincide with debate over reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, Kennedy could package an anti-legacy provision in the Democratic version of the bill.

  This idea struck some of Kennedy's other staffers as politically naive. Edward Kennedy was the last legislator one would expect to assail legacy preference. The senator belonged to one of the country's best-known Harvard families; he, his father, his three older brothers, and several nieces and nephews had all gone there. The reception room of his Senate office proudly displayed a framed photograph of the senator as a young man scoring a touchdown for the Crimson against Yale.

  Moreover, private higher education—not only Harvard, but also MIT, Boston University, Boston College, Tufts, and many other schools— was one of the biggest businesses in Massachusetts, the senator's home state. Senator Kennedy had served on the boards of Boston University and Boston College; his daughter Kara graduated from Tufts. Private colleges had supported him for decades; their lobbyists had raised money for his campaigns and worked side by side with him to increase financial aid for low-income students; now they were allies again in defense of affirmative action. These colleges all gave legacy preference to alumni children and would oppose any initiative to restrict it. Small wonder that one savvy colleague warned Dannenberg that an anti-legacy initiative might be good policy but would never get off the ground.

  Still, Dannenberg was determined to explore this uncharted terrain. Three-fourths of Americans agreed with Dannenberg that legacy status should have no bearing on college admissions, according to a 2004 poll by the Chronicle of Higher Education. A 2003 poll of Michigan voters found that 61 percent opposed “extra admission points that are added to a student's application if one or both of that applicant's parents or grandparents attended the school”; only 27 percent favored the legacy boost, with 12 percent undecided.

  Yet no one had ever filed, much less succeeded in passing, legislation to curb legacy preference. No one had even made a serious effort to muster the outrage of ordinary Americans, who wanted their own children to achieve the college degrees and white-collar careers that had eluded them, at this emblem of upper-class privilege. The issue had languished for decades as an occasional rhetorical target for affirmative action supporters. As the advent of minority preference in the late 1960s triggered outcries of reverse discrimination and lawsuits from white applicants who had been passed over, liberals responded that wealthy whites enjoyed their own preferences.

  “It is somewhat ironic to have us so deeply disturbed over a program where race is an element of consciousness,” Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in Bakke, “and yet to be aware of the fact, as we are, that institutions of higher learning … have given conceded preferences up to a point to those possessed of athletic skills, to the children of alumni, to the affluent who may bestow their largess on the institutions, and those having connections with celebrities, the famous, and the powerful.”

  Avoiding the inconsistency that Justice Blackmun mocked, a few conservatives have opposed both affirmative action and alumni child preferences. Notable among these anti-legacy Republicans, who generally come from rural states and resent what they consider the Ivy League elitism of the party's eastern wing, is former Kansas senator Robert Dole.

  Senator Dole rose from poverty and became the first member of his family to graduate from college (Washburn Municipal University in Topeka, Kansas) despite war wounds that cost him use of his right arm. As Senate minority leader in December 1990, he urged Lamar Alexander, then secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, to reexamine admissions preferences for alumni children at private universities that receive federal funds. Two months earlier, an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education had concluded that Harvard was not violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act even though Asian American applicants were less likely to be admitted than whites with the same credentials. The department found that Harvard had the right to raise money through the use of legacy preference, which accounted for much of the Asian-white gap.

  “The last thing we need in American education is a caste system,” Senator Dole wrote to Secretary Alexander. “These alumni perks have absolutely nothing to do with an individual's qualifications on merit.”

  In a 2004 phone interview, Dole said he still feels the same way. “It always seemed to me there ought to be a level playing field,” he told me. “Affirmative action ought to be based on economic needs, not on gender or color. Legacy preference is almost the reverse. The richer you are, the better chance you have of getting in. I can see a reason for legacy preference in the early days. When a college or university was starting one hundred years ago, it needed a steady stream of supporters, and it offered certain advantages to bring in a family. They didn't have scholarships or Pell grants then, they were relying on these people. But now there's no reason for it.”

  SENATOR DOLE'S jawboning garnered little support from other legislators or government officials. Few politicians want to dismantle preferences for alumni children and other privileged applicants, because the system works to their advantage. Not only do their own children enjoy special consideration, but they can deliver admissions breaks for children of campaign contributors and key constituents.

  Public universities give favored treatment to state legislators who control their appropriations; the University of Virginia, for instance, labels applicants sponsored by legislators as “special concern” cases. Elite private colleges need Washington's help for everything from campus expansion to scientific research. Yet, as nonprofit organizations, they can't endorse candidates or contribute to political campaigns without forfeiting their tax-exempt status (although individual administrators can and do donate). Instead, they buy influence through a different currency—admissions.

  Graduates of the Ivy League and other premier universities pervade the federal bureaucracy and Congress. Universities look to these alumni, along with representatives from their districts and states, to spearhead their funding requests and safeguard their institutional interests. They cultivate alumni with cocktail parties, honorary degrees, awards, invitations to speak at commencement, and legacy preference.

  Even politicians who are not alumni expect, and usually get, an admissions boost for their children and whomever else they recommend. Colleges view politically sponsored applicants from nonalumni families as akin to development cases, with the distinction that admission is expected to be followed by government funding rather than a private gift.

  Trading admissions slots for political favors has become increasingly common as colleges seek ever more support for laboratories and other pork-barrel projects. Congressional funding for noncompetitive grants earmarked to specific colleges—an almost unknown practice twenty years ago—quadrupled from $495 million in 1998 to $2 billion in 2003, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2004. During the same five years, higher education spending on lobbyists more than doubled to $61.7 million, surpassing expenditures for the same purpose by lawyers, labor unions, and the construction industry.

  “Sometimes it's a quid pro quo,” Daniel Saracino, Notre Dame assistant provost for admissions, acknowledged. “We've got a research grant worth $8 million and we need the support of senators to push it. We're going to keep them happy.”

  A longtime higher education administrator told me, “You have the problem of politicians who act like this is one of their donor or constituent services. The politician who may determine whether your building is going to be built calls you up and says it's very important that some kid is admitted.” He then offered a hypothetical example. “If Charles Rangel [Congressman Charles B. Rangel, who represents Harlem] calls up Columbia and says, ‘This kid's admission is important to me,” he's a very important person for Columbia with its expansion plans to build in Harlem. Making sure that everybody is as happy with you as possible is part of the thing. So much of this is by indirection. You hear from a trustee. Somebody says,? think it's very important to the congressman.””

  One higher education lobbyist explained to me how the game is played. “Schools pay very careful attention to those phone calls from politicians,” he told me. “Every college has a bunch of cases like this. Let's say you need a 3.5 grade point average to get in. And the person a politician is advancing is a 3.3. Oftentimes that's enough to put them over. If they need a 3.5 but they have a 2.5, that's usually not enough.

  “Colleges are willing to cut a little slack to everybody [in politics], along the lines of, ‘Even the people who have opposed us might someday be our friend.” But there's a little bit of a hierarchy. The people at the very top of the list are the folks who have helped direct earmarked funding to a school.

  “Once or twice a year, college presidents and very senior people come out and visit their members of Congress to talk about projects. During the course of this conversation, a member of Congress—I've been there when this has happened—will say, ‘Little Johnny is getting up there. We'd like to bring him by” This is a congressman who's been coming through for some time. The college president will go, ‘That's just great. Have him give my assistant a call. Make sure to bring him in to see me.’

  “That's the start of it. Let me carry that example a step further, based on actual experience. Little Johnny visits and loves the school. Four months later, the college gets a call from the congressman's chief of staff saying, ‘Little Johnny loved that school. He's applied and hasn't heard yet. We're afraid he's on the bubble. Gosh, it would be great if Johnny would get in there.” That precipitates a series of calls. I got the sense from the school that he probably wouldn't have made it without the congressman's help. His test scores were toward the bottom of the bubble.

  “Little Johnny got in.”

  HIS COLLEAGUES’ warning failed to deter Michael Dannenberg, whose cordial, self-effacing demeanor concealed a dogged resolve. Dannenberg's conviction that legacy preference was an unfair perquisite for the privileged, and his sympathy for the high-achieving working-class applicants it displaced, were rooted in his own experience. Growing up without a father in Yonkers and Ossining, New York, home of Sing Sing prison, he was raised by his mother and grandparents, none of whom had college degrees. Disabled by childhood polio, his mother worked for the state Department of Motor Vehicles, while his grandfather was a clothing salesman. The family's principal recreation was going to Belmont or Aqueduct race tracks on weekends, where his grandparents would bet a few dollars on the horses. By the age of seven, Michael was reading the Racing Form and analyzing the odds. “I'm convinced I did well academically because of my time at the track,” he told me.

  Admitted to Cornell University and the State University of New York at Binghamton, Michael enrolled at Boston University instead because it offered the best financial aid package. BU was “total culture shock,” he recalled. Many of his classmates had boosted their SAT scores by taking test-prep courses, which he hadn't heard of. “Everyone had a computer. I didn't have a computer. I was very unhappy. I didn't want to stay. There were all these rich kids, and I didn't fit in.” But he persevered, writing for the student newspaper, where he found like-minded friends.

  Supplementing his scholarship with federal aid and work-study jobs, he graduated magna cum laude in 1991 and headed to Washington with $1,000—his entire savings—to hunt for a job on Capitol Hill. That same spring, he read a cover story in the Washington Monthly headlined “Why Are Droves of Unqualified, Unprepared Kids Getting into Our Top Colleges?” The article, by John Larew, lambasted not affirmative action but legacy preference. “I remember thinking, ‘This is terrible,’” Dannenberg said. “It stoked a flame for me with respect to fairness and educational opportunities. To me, legacy is a civil rights issue, a question of morality.”

  Answering an ad, Michael interviewed for a job with Rhode Island senator Claiborne Pell, sponsor of the need-based grants that bear his name. “I said at my interview,? know these programs, I've been a recipient,”” he recalled. As a legislative aide for Senator Pell, Michael pushed for financial rewards to states that generously funded elementary and secondary schools in low-income neighborhoods. After the proposal was narrowly defeated, he decided to go to law school. Now able to afford a test-prep course, he aced the LSATs and enrolled at Yale Law for his first encounter with the Ivy League.

  Yale “was even worse than BU, it was old-money rich,” he said. “I sat there thinking, ‘Oh, God, I'm part of a club that I hate.”” One evening in his dorm, he began arguing about affirmative action with a conservative student in his constitutional law class. The student was a legacy at Yale Law, which gave preference to alumni children. Michael snapped at him, “You're the face of affirmative action.” Infuriated, the classmate insisted that he had earned his admission, but Michael was unconvinced. “The truth is, in the elite schools, a lot of kids with better grades and test scores are turned down,” he said.

  He taught at Stanford after his law-school graduation in 1998, but then accepted Senator Kennedy's job offer, intending to resume his quest for equity in K-12 education. When the affirmative action issue heated up, he saw an opening to bring fairness to college admissions as well—and do something about the preference that had outraged him ever since he read the Larew article a decade earlier. In his view, an anti-legacy, pro-affirmative-action message would position the Democrats as the party that believed in rewarding merit as well as promoting diversity. He wouldn't be easily dissuaded.