President Bush's niece Lauren was admitted in 2002 even though she applied after the deadline. The anthropology major graduated without honors in 2006. And despite the populist stance of her father, North Carolina State University alumnus and 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards, Catharine Edwards not only enrolled at Princeton but joined the blue-blooded Ivy club. She graduated with honors in politics in 2004.

  Although West Virginia senator Jay Rockefeller is a Harvard man, the Rockefeller family has ties to Princeton as well. Princeton's Rockefeller College is named after the senator's father, John D. Rockefeller III, who graduated in 1929. The senator's youngest child, Justin, emulated his grandfather by enrolling at Princeton in 1998. Justin had attended St. Albans, where he was active in student government but did not rank in the top 20 percent of his class. He told me that Princeton also admitted his three older siblings, but they went to Yale and Stanford instead. A “little nervous” that Princeton would decide to reject him before he too could spurn it, he wrote to Fred Hargadon, then dean of admission, giving his word that he would matriculate if accepted.

  At Princeton, Justin was concerned about the tendency of affluent white students to congregate among themselves. As vice president of Ivy, he sponsored a series of dialogues about race relations on campus and in the exclusive eating club itself. He and minority students participating in the discussions “really bonded,” he told me. “There were tears, hugs, everything.” He also sought, unsuccessfully, to replace portraits on the club walls of “1930s white guys,” which he felt were intimidating to minorities, with more contemporary and diverse pictures. He graduated in 2002 with a degree in politics; although he did not earn honors, he was nominated for a prize for best senior thesis. He recently cofounded Generation Engage, a nonprofit aimed at boosting voting rates among eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds with no college experience.

  Justin told me he has “absolutely no way of knowing” whether he and his siblings owed their Princeton admissions to their family name. “Ideally, college admissions would be based simply on merit, but we're not there yet as a society,” he said, adding that he supports preference for minority and low-income applicants: “Someone who's come up through the ranks facing more adversity should absolutely be noticed, and his or her struggle taken into account.”

  Other senatorial offspring at Princeton also displayed a social conscience. Like their father, Maryland senator and Princeton trustee Paul Sarbanes, Janet Sarbanes and her two brothers attended Princeton. And like their father, who fought against anti-Semitism during his student days, the three younger Sarbaneses were campus activists, with a passion for social justice stirred by childhood attendance at a predominantly African American elementary school in Baltimore.

  Janet told me that she and her brothers were outstanding high school students; she finished second in her class at a private Baltimore school for girls. “My father loved Princeton,” she said. “Princeton was a holy word in our house. We had all the benefits of being raised with the Princeton idea, of the well-rounded scholar-athlete with many extracurriculars. Culturally, we had all these advantages when it came time to apply. My parents were really strong that we should deserve to get into Princeton on the level of grades and sports and SAT scores. But we had the benefit of them knowing what it would take to get us into Princeton.”

  At Princeton, Janet said, she was surrounded by privilege. “I've never met people with as much wealth as I did at Princeton, and I never will again,” she said. She spoke out for women's rights and was responsible for replacing references to “boys” and “sons” in the school song with gender-neutral lyrics. She passed out the alternative lyrics at football games, and buttons with the slogan “Expand the tradition.” Janet graduated in 1989 with high honors in comparative literature and now teaches in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.

  Asked about legacy preference, she said, “There is an argument for keeping families involved in schools to maintain tradition and endowment, but it's certainly valuing that over diversity and equal opportunity.” Later, she called me back to add, “In some ways, you could say my brothers and I make the argument for legacy admissions, because we were raised with this idea of Princeton as a kind of beloved community. When we got to the school and saw that it was failing to live up to that mission in various ways, we saw it as our responsibility to do something about it. So I told you about my involvement in women's rights, and my brother Michael was involved in getting Princeton to divest out of South Africa.

  “There's this kind of alternative legacy tradition of making Princeton a more socially responsible place. That said, I certainly don't think it takes precedence over increasing the opportunities for socially and economically disadvantaged students to earn a Princeton degree.”

  DESPITE THE political risks, Senator Kennedy encouraged Michael Dannenberg to attack the admissions preference that had helped solidify the Kennedy family's political dynasty. In an April 2005 interview in his Washington office, relaxing in an easy chair with his Portuguese water dog, Sunny, dozing beside him, the senator described legacy preference as an “anachronism” violating his “core commitment” to access to higher education for low-income students. Because of admissions breaks for alumni children and early decision applicants, “a big chunk of the class is already spoken for,” he said. Like legacy preference, the admissions advantage— estimated at 100 SAT points—for early applicants mainly helps affluent white students, in part because the requirement that candidates attend if accepted is a deterrent to low-income families who want to shop for the best financial aid deal.

  Thick-skinned from a long and turbulent career, and with a Senate seat as safe as any in the country, Kennedy wasn't overly worried that critics would call him a hypocrite because he had enjoyed legacy preference, or dredge up his suspension from Harvard for cheating on a Spanish exam. (“Based on Teddy Kennedy's academic career, he's the one that ought to be giving us more guidance on this,” Congressman Lungren said sarcastically when I brought up Kennedy's anti-legacy efforts.)

  The senator—about whom a political opponent once remarked that if his name were Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, his candidacy “would be a joke”—said his Harvard admission wasn't due only to his famous surname. He ranked in the “bottom of the top quarter” at his prep school, Milton Academy, he said: “My last two years there, I did pretty well.” None of his three children went to Harvard, he added, because they wanted to follow “different pathways” from their father. “It's a lot different now. There are so many good colleges.”

  Later, through an aide, the senator said he is “not convinced that legacy preferences are essential” to alumni giving. “Over the last fifty years, colleges have reduced their legacy preference, and financially they're in better shape than ever…. By and large, I think people give to their alma mater because of their personal experience and connection to the school.”

  Despite being a third-generation Notre Dame graduate, Danica Petroshius, then Kennedy's chief education adviser, backed Dannenberg as well. “The thing I can't get beyond, when I talk to higher education officials, is, Why is legacy important besides making donors happy?” Petroshius told me. “There are a lot of smart people out there who could find another way to make donors happy.”

  In early 2002, Dannenberg gained another key ally. Sharing a ride to New York City with an aide to North Carolina senator John Edwards, he railed against legacy preference. Impressed, the aide then pitched legacy to Senator Edwards as an issue for his upcoming presidential campaign. The senator “had an immediate visceral and ethical reaction that legacy preference was wrong,” the aide told me.

  That November, in a speech on education delivered at the University of Maryland, Senator Edwards derided legacy preference as “a birthright out of eighteenth-century British aristocracy, not twenty-first-century American democracy.” The senator decided not to call for federal limits on alumni child preference, instead issuing a challenge to colleges and universities to end legacy and early decision voluntarily.

  “It wasn't a hard call for John Edwards to say, ‘Legacy preferences are wrong,”” a person familiar with his thinking told me. “It was more difficult to say, ‘What's the federal role here? Bar them? A sunshine law? Just jawbone?” We spent a lot of time thinking about how to handle that. What ultimately became clear was that just the act of standing up and saying this was wrong is a big deal. There is a legitimate question about whether you want the federal government dictating policies like this. It wasn't necessary to cross that bridge.”

  Still, Edwards's speech was a breakthrough for the anti-legacy effort, and it combined with two events the next month to generate momentum and media attention for the cause. On December 2,2002, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in the Michigan case—or, more precisely, two cases, one involving law school admissions, the other undergraduate. Three days later, Senate Republican leader Trent Lott appeared to endorse racial segregation by proclaiming at a one-hundredth-birthday party for South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond that the country “wouldn't have had all these problems” if it had elected Thurmond as president in 1948, when he was the candidate of the white-supremacist Dixiecrat party. Not only did Lott's remarks remind Americans why affirmative action was needed, but the senator himself, seeking to defend himself against charges of being a racist, went on Black Entertainment Television and criticized legacy preference for discriminating against minorities.

  On December 20, Kennedy sought to capitalize on these developments. He and House education committee chairman George Miller wrote to President Bush, citing the Lott controversy and asking him to file a friend-of-the-court brief supporting affirmative action in the Michigan case. They also slipped in the first public signal of Kennedy's anti-legacy plans: “We will be working in the next Congress on a legislative initiative that will help universities to implement fair admissions programs that provide opportunities for minority and first-generation college students.”

  On January 15, 2003,1 reported on the anti-legacy movement in a front-page Wall Street Journal article, which was followed by other articles, editorials, and opinion pieces in influential publications—including a New York Times column by conservative pundit William E Buckley, who had run for a seat on the Yale Corporation thirty-five years earlier on a pro-legacy platform. “There are tribal instincts in life, colleges and universities are part of life, and nobody has proved that any harm whatever has been done by private colleges writing their own admissions policies,” Buckley declared.

  Despite this media flurry, not all of Senator Kennedy's Democratic colleagues were eager to wave the anti-legacy banner. Some of them were alarmed at the prospect of alienating the University of Michigan and other higher education allies that were spending time and money to defend affirmative action in court, and argued that an anti-legacy proposal could backfire by undermining the minority preferences it was intended to save. Congress, they noted, traditionally stayed out of college admissions. If Kennedy introduced a bill to ban legacy preference, the Republicans might retaliate by adding an amendment to prohibit considering race in admissions. The Democrats would then be hard put to justify eliminating one preference, legacy, that was allowed by the Constitution, and not the other, affirmative action, which was in legal jeopardy.

  Bethany Little, an education staffer to Washington senator Patty Murray from 2001 to 2003, agreed with Dannenberg. “I felt like the best defense is a good offense,” Bethany told me. “We should come out swinging. If you want to talk about what's really unjust in higher education, let's not talk about affirmative action, let's talk about legacy preference. The biggest single inequity still out there in college admissions is the legacy system. It seemed almost ridiculous to be having a debate about whether it was acceptable to consider race when for a lot of people it was perfectly socially acceptable to consider race and class anyway.”

  Although Dannenberg and his allies favored an outright ban on legacy preference, they needed a less drastic option to win over skeptical committee Democrats. They devised an alternative approach—penalizing colleges that practiced early decision and legacy preference and that also had significantly higher graduation rates for white students with college-educated parents than for minorities and first-generation college students. These schools would be required either to give up early decision or legacy policies or spend more money to reduce dropout rates of African American, Hispanic, and first-generation students. The proposal would affect more than eighty colleges, including five of the eight Ivies: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Penn. Dannenberg hoped this idea would be more palatable to colleges than a ban, because it would not affect alumni donations.

  Before committing to this idea, Democratic staffers wanted to gauge outside reaction. Since Democrats were still divided over the legacy issue, Dannenberg didn't want the proposal to be traced to Kennedy. Instead, he floated it through a friendly advocacy group, the Hispanic Education Coalition. One of its staffers, Marilyn McAdam, now deceased, “had pushed the coalition to realize that legacy policy was not going to benefit Hispanic students and this was an issue they should be vocal on,” Bethany Little said.

  The higher education community wasn't fooled. On April 29, a sympathetic lobbyist warned Kennedy's staff that any attack on legacy preference and early decision would “create a massive firestorm of protest from colleges and universities … Go there at your own peril.”

  The prediction was accurate; higher education groups, such as the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and the American Council on Education, organized a low-profile but intense campaign against the proposal. They didn't send out a “major blast” calling for colleges to denounce it publicly, one lobbyist told me, for fear that it would appeal to the media and public opinion. “We didn't want this crazy idea to take off,” the lobbyist said. Instead, emissaries from private colleges in their home states visited the Democratic committee members, conveying the message that the proposal went too far and that any federal intervention in college admissions, even one designed to help minority students graduate from college, would in the end damage affirmative action.

  Danica Petroshius told me that two lobbyists for private colleges buttonholed Kennedy in Massachusetts, urging him to abandon his anti-legacy stance. (One of the lobbyists, whom I subsequently contacted, said he did not approach Kennedy in person but wrote him a letter.) The response was “rough,” she said. “As soon as they heard it was being floated, the lobbyists called us screaming. They said it was the biggest thing they would fight. We didn't even have a proposal yet, and they were already saying no. Behind the scenes, in the boardrooms, they talk about this more than they talk about Pell grants.”

  “We all heard from a lot of schools,” Bethany Little said. “When I would talk to them, I explained what the policy would be, how unlikely they would be to be affected. We heard a lot of slippery-slope language— ‘What you're saying isn't that bad, but it could open the door to federal control of admissions policy” Certain members are more sensitive to the higher education lobby than others.”

  Asked about the reaction of the higher education lobby, Senator Kennedy smiled. “It was a firestorm up there,” he said. “These were very good friends we worked with on education policy.” He added that colleges have a tendency to cry wolf. When Congress adopted more stringent rules in 1998 for reporting data on campus crimes, he said, “you would have thought they'd have to close the universities down. Now it's routine to disclose that information.”

  Nevertheless, the blowback was effective. According to Bethany Little, some Democratic committee members began wavering, including a longtime friend of Kennedy's, Senator Christopher Dodd from Connecticut, who was besieged by complaints from private colleges in his state. Forced on the defensive, Dannenberg became demoralized. “Michael is a true believer. He believes strongly in our allies and that we're all after the same thing in the end,” Bethany Little said. “He thought people would jump and say, ‘This is an injustice we can do something about.” He was a little disillusioned.”

  “The prospect of losing this fight to ban legacy preference turns my stomach,” Dannenberg emailed his girlfriend on June 2. “If I can't convince Democrats to get rid of something as wrong, as immoral, as legacy preferences, what's the point of being here?”

  She answered, “The point is to raise it, raise it, raise it and keep fighting.”

  WHILE DANNENBERG fought on, the Supreme Court was poised to decide the Michigan cases. The Court had last weighed in on affirmative action in college admissions a quarter century earlier in Bakke, when by a 5-4 vote it had ruled against a white medical student who challenged his rejection by the University of California. Because of Bakke‘s narrow margin, and because the majority was split over the rationale for affirmative action—was it necessary to remedy past discrimination, as four justices contended, or to promote diversity, as Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. argued?— that decision failed to resolve the issue. Instead, the conflict became increasingly polarized, with courts or voters in a few states—including California, site of the Bakke case—banning affirmative action, but with some private and state universities, including Michigan, becoming more blatant in considering race in admissions.

  Michigan's 150-point undergraduate admissions scale, which awarded an automatic 20 points to blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans, smacked of a racial quota system—considered unconstitutional under Bakke. The law school's admissions process, also under challenge from a rejected white applicant, did not assign points but considered race in the context of each individual applicant's overall suitability, conforming more closely to Bakke guidelines.