As noted in a previous chapter, Harvard snared another sibling— Chandler Bass, who enrolled in 1996 from the Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts. Her father then became cochairman of Harvard's parent fund-raising committee and later endowed two professorships there.

  Robert Bass has been even more generous to Stanford. After joining its board of trustees in 1989, he and his wife donated $25 million in 1991 and have made other substantial gifts in subsequent years. Two of their children, Timothy and Margaret, enrolled there. Because their father holds a degree from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, Timothy and Margaret did enjoy legacy preference under university rules. But that connection was hardly sufficient to explain the size of Margaret's admissions break.

  Of nine applicants to Stanford from the Groton School in 1998, Margaret Bass was the only one accepted. Yet, according to a document from Groton's college counseling office, most of the rejected Groton applicants had superior academic records to hers. Her grades placed her in the middle of her Groton class, and she had an SAT score of 1220, lower than seven of the other eight applicants to Stanford. Three-fourths of Stanford freshmen have scores of 1360 or better.

  Robert Bass and his daughter referred me to a family lawyer, Martin London, who said Margaret's record on the Groton document was inaccurate, but declined to be specific. (Twenty other Groton graduates said the document accurately listed their academic records, and another person familiar with Margaret's record at Groton said her data were correct.) Her roommate at Groton, Claire Abernathy, said Margaret is a “great writer,” and “I'm sure her admissions essay was fantastic.”

  Margaret Bass graduated from Stanford in 2002. The next year, I asked Robin Mamlet, then Stanford admissions dean, about Margaret's admission to the university. Mamlet acknowledged that the university's development office supplied her with names of applicants whose parents had been major donors. She said a history of family giving is factored into an admissions decision but that Stanford has often rejected children of donors.

  Tim Bass was three years ahead of Margaret at Groton, where his grades were slightly weaker than hers, according to people familiar with his record. Tim did distinguish himself on the gridiron, where he started for Groton for three years and earned all-league honors. But it's a huge leap from starring in a prep school league to playing in the Pacific-10 conference, a proving ground for future pros. Tim Bass wasn't fast enough to play for Stanford—and his coaches and teammates knew it. But they also knew who his father was, which might have helped him make the team.

  As a Stanford applicant, Timothy sent information about his high school football record and game video to football coaches, and asked to join its team. His request was handled “at the highest levels of the athletic department and the development office,” according to a person familiar with the matter. Timothy made the squad as one of a handful of “walk-ons”—players without athletic scholarships. For three college football seasons, from 1995 to 1997, Timothy Bass wore uniform number 25 for Stanford University. But he rarely played. When the five-foot-eleven, 186-pound strong safety made his only career tackle, players and coaches on the Stanford sidelines cheered.

  London, the family lawyer, said that Stanford recruited Tim Bass to play football. “Tim was recruited by Stanford and several other schools solely and exclusively because of his football skills,” according to London.

  However, Tyrone Willingham, then Stanford coach, said he did not recruit Tim Bass. Willingham described Tim as a “modest athlete” who requested an opportunity to walk on.

  William Harris, then Stanford's defensive coordinator, said Tim lacked the speed to cover opposing receivers. “If you're trying to beat USC, you've got to have some talented people,” he said. Harris, now a high school coach, said he was unaware of why Tim made the team, but said college administrators often plead with football coaches to take children of prominent families: “‘We've got Ted Kennedy's nephew here or whoever. He plays football. He'd like to try to walk on.” If you've got some spots, which normally you do, if you've got extra uniforms, it's not a problem.”

  Tony Vella, a teammate of Tim Bass at Stanford, said, “You could tell, once you got on the field, he might not have been a Division I football talent.” Vella added that he and his teammates “found it a crack-up” when they graduated from Stanford that Robert Bass, as board chairman from 1996 to 2000, signed their diplomas. Tim, who graduated in 1999, was “ribbed a little bit, nothing too drastic,” Vella said. “He's actually a very humble kid.”

  THE PHOTOGRAPH on the cover of the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, November 18, 1984, represented a personal triumph for Terry Sanford, then nearing the end of his fifteen-year stint as Duke president. Under the headline “Hot Colleges and How They Get That Way,” the photo portrayed students in Duke sweatshirts walking across the campus quadrangle. The accompanying story actually gave more space to other colleges in vogue, from Brown University to the United States Military Academy at West Point. But it began by featuring a prep school senior who wanted to go to Vanderbilt University and lamented that “everybody's really pushing … Duke.” Farther down, the article noted that Duke was “one of the hottest colleges” for students in Greenwich, Connecticut, an upscale New York suburb, but was largely overlooked by seniors at Boston Latin School, a “high-powered school populated primarily by poor and minority students.”

  Sanford had been hired to transform Duke into a national institution, and the Times coverage seemed to be powerful evidence that he had delivered on that commitment. Interviewed by the newspaper, Sanford offered a banal explanation for Duke's popularity: its emphasis on liberal arts. But he knew better. Duke's chic image in prep schools and wealthy suburbs, its anonymity among poor and minority students, and the newspaper's decision to feature Duke on the cover could be linked to his policy of recruiting and admitting offspring of rich or powerful families— including the daughter of the newspaper's publisher and the son of the editor in chief of the Times magazine.

  This strategy came naturally to Sanford. As a moderate Democrat who stood for civil rights and racial integration and sought to bring the South into the American mainstream, he had many influential friends and admirers in politics, business, and the media. He was even considered for the presidency of that ultimate establishment body, the Ford Foundation.

  When Sanford assumed Duke's presidency in 1970, he later said, he thought he “could elevate Duke to national and international status.” But he lacked resources. The school was facing a budget deficit, its endowment was inadequate, and its alumni were too young to leave money to Duke. “Terry said, ‘What we need is some first-class funerals,”” said his biographer, Howard Covington.

  To increase donations, Sanford turned to admissions—and to someone who understood the prep school world: Croom Beatty, a teacher and fund-raiser at a boys” boarding school in Asheville, North Carolina, whose own children attended elite northern private schools. They had been friends ever since Sanford's governorship, when his son, Terry Sanford Jr., was a pupil in Beatty's history class. Now retired in Asheville, Beatty recalled in a telephone interview that Duke's student body in the early 1970s was heavily composed of middle-class public school students from the northern and mid-Atlantic states. Turned down by Harvard or Yale, they applied to Duke because it kept its tuition relatively low, and were admitted largely on the basis of high SAT scores. “They would come down, they would study, and go back,” Beatty said. After graduating, they “didn't connect with Duke,” and their giving was insufficient.

  Sanford wanted more public school students from North Carolina and more private school students from other states. At his urging, Beatty scoured the nation's prep schools for applicants whose families could fill Duke's coffers. Although his title was associate director for admissions, Beatty combined admissions and fund-raising in a way that reduced the supposed barrier between the two functions to rubble. “I handled the private schools,” he said. “I would go and visit and come back. I basically kept a list of people whom it would be in Duke's best interest to have them come. It wasn't that large, maybe about twenty-five names.” When the families visited campus, Beatty and his wife entertained them at their home, and if the applicants were particularly important, he would tell Sanford, who would review the files. For these students, Beatty said, a sub-par SAT score was not necessarily a barrier to admission if they showed leadership qualities.

  Beatty's names weren't the only well-heeled candidates requiring delicate handling by admissions. The development office supplied its own list, and Sanford passed along names accumulated from his contacts. Joel Fleishman, a Duke public policy professor, vice chancellor, and longtime Sanford confidant, also identified prospects. All told, former admissions director Jean Scott estimated, “a couple of hundred” applicants a year were given special attention as children of prospective donors.

  Beatty initiated Duke's parent fund-raising committee, institutionalizing the implicit understanding that parents would reward the university for admitting their children. “Parents have more interest at that given time than anyone,” Beatty said. “They care. Their child is being educated, they're more attuned. I find alums only get very excited at twenty-five-year or fifty-year intervals.”

  “There is no question that Duke in the 1970s began to pay much closer attention to admissions applicants whose families” resources would create great fund-raising potential for the university were their child to enroll at Duke,” recalled Edward Lingenheld, director of undergraduate admissions from 1976 to 1980. He said Duke unsuccessfully recruited John E Kennedy Jr., who went to Brown, and billionaire H. Ross Perot's son, H. Ross Perot Jr., who attended Vanderbilt.

  Word soon spread in private school circles that Duke was hunting for development admits and wasn't too concerned about their credentials. “There was definitely a sense that people who had money and had been in contact with somebody at Duke were siphoned into the process,” said Mary Anne Schwalbe, college counselor at the Dalton School in Manhattan from 1979 to 1985. “They received a preference even if they didn't have a strong record. I would say to the parents, ‘Duke is a long shot. I would recommend a less competitive school in the South.” The parents would say, ‘I've been in touch with somebody there, and it's looking good.””

  Beatty said his recruiting made major inroads for Duke—particularly at what he called “socioeconomically high-end” schools in the Dallas area. The “Duke Dallas” campaign, in which Beatty brought top university administrators to woo students and parents, quadrupled applications from those schools. “We really worked Dallas,” he said. Such courtship was effective; along with Yale, Duke has the lowest proportion of students on financial aid (40 percent) among the nation's top 10 universities.

  Beatty's excursions paid particular dividends among families that had traditionally attended Yale. In the mid-1960s, Yale briefly experimented with reducing legacy preference before yielding to an alumni backlash. Perhaps worried that their alma mater would turn down their children, some alumni were exploring other options. Duke raided Yale families such as the Mars candy bar clan, the Kohlers (Wisconsin makers of plumbing fixtures), and the Wrigleys of chewing gum fame. William E Wrigley Jr., son of a Yale alumnus, graduated from Duke in 1985 and now sits on the board of visitors for the university's Nicholas School of the Environment. He's also chief executive of the family company and in 2005 was the 65th richest American, with a net worth of $3.4 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

  Beatty recalled another applicant whose family connections made her stand out: Cynthia Fox Sulzberger, daughter of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, then publisher of the New York Times and now chairman emeritus. She enrolled at Duke in 1982 from the Dalton School, where she wasn't a top student. Her admission “worked out magically,” Beatty said, alluding to the magazine cover story, published while Cynthia was a Duke undergraduate. “Certainly she was on a development list. We were trying to do things in public policy, and the Sulzbergers were important people.”

  I found no evidence that Sulzberger intervened in any way in the magazine article. However, an editor close to the article had his own stake in Duke's goodwill. The son of Edward Klein, editor in chief of the magazine from 1977 to 1988, was applying to Duke at the time of publication. Alec Klein, a strong student at one of New York City's best public high schools, was admitted but enrolled at Brown instead; a former colleague of mine in The Wall Street Journal's Boston bureau, he is now a distinguished reporter for the Washington Post. Neither the Sulzberger nor Klein relationship was disclosed in the article.

  Michael Winerip, the author of the article, told me that editors wanted a reference to Duke moved up to the opening section, making it more plausible to feature Duke in the cover photo. “I do believe, in retrospect, they were trying to position Duke near the top of the piece to get that cover on it,” Winerip said. “I don't think it had anything to do with the Sulzbergers. In my twenty years at the Times, I've never seen any instance of the family using the paper that way. My suspicion is that Klein ordered up Duke.”

  Edward Klein now writes a weekly column for Parade magazine. He is the author of two books about the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and of a 2005 biography of Hillary Clinton, The Truth About Hillary. He acknowledged he chose the cover photo (in consultation with the executive editor at the time, Abe Rosenthal) but said that his son's application to Duke had no impact on the cover or article, and that Yale was his son's first choice.

  “If I were trying to help my son, if I was willing to be unethical enough to use the magazine to do so, the story I should have done was a story about Yale,” Klein said. Several of his friends, including New York magazine founder Clay Felker, had gone to Duke, and “it was just on my radar screen that Duke was coming up strongly.”

  Klein told me he “may have been aware” Cynthia Sulzberger was going to Duke, but said that knowledge also did not influence his handling of the article. “That would have had no bearing. Punch [Arthur Ochs Sulzberger] never, ever picked up the phone and called me on any story. He never asked any favors.”

  Catherine J. Mathis, spokeswoman for the New York Times, told me, “These events took place in 1984, and there's a danger of fallacy in applying 2004 standards retroactively. We are much more sensitive nowadays to the ethical desirability of disclosing connections, even if they have not influenced the journalism. Mr. Sulzberger was not aware that the magazine was going to run the story and was not thanked by Mr. Sanford or Duke officials after it appeared.”

  In any event, Duke's admission of Cynthia Sulzberger—and other relatives in the ensuing years—paid off in a more traditional way. In 1998, Sulzberger and family members pledged $700,000 to Duke's Center for Child and Family Policy. And the basement of a building on Duke's east campus houses the Cynthia Sulzberger Interactive Learning Lab.

  TEXAS ENTREPRENEUR Milledge “Mitch” Hart III, cofounder of Electronic Data Systems Corp., didn't know anyone at Duke in 1981. But that changed quickly after his daughter told him it was one of her top two choices. He called a former Duke dean, Robert Krueger, who had run unsuccessfully—with Hart's strong backing—for the U.S. Senate from Texas in 1978. Krueger assured his supporter that he would introduce him to the right person at Duke: vice chancellor Joel Fleishman.

  Fleishman met Hart and his wife and daughter at the airport and escorted them to the president's house, where the family stayed for three nights. Hart described it as an exhilarating visit in which he, Sanford, and Fleishman talked politics until 3 a.m.

  Hart's daughter enrolled at Duke—followed by three more of his children, as well as many other students he's recommended. Hart said all of them were competitive academically. In 1986, after Hart pledged $1 million to a fund-raising campaign led by Fleishman, Duke established the Hart Leadership Program, which educates students about leadership skills. He also served a term on Duke's board of trustees.

  “Joel is one of my four or five closest friends in the world.” Hart said. No matter where Hart happens to be on his birthday, he added, Fleishman calls him every year to sing “Happy Birthday” to him.

  Fleishman has held numerous titles at Duke—from senior vice president to founding director of the Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs to professor of law. Fleishman was Duke's fifth-highest-paid employee in 2005, earning $532,684 in salary, benefits, and deferred compensation. His impressive curriculum vitae also touts a wide variety of outside affiliations with nonprofit foundations and boards, as well as lucrative directorships on boards of companies whose chief executives are Duke donors and parents. But his fifteen-page resume has one important gap: it says not a word about Duke undergraduate admissions. Yet in his heyday under Sanford, and to some extent under ensuing administrations, Fleishman played a key role at the vortex of development and admissions. Like Croom Beatty, he breached the supposed wall between the two functions and helped funnel children of wealth into Duke's student body, preempt-ing slots that might otherwise have given a leg up to outstanding students from less cushy backgrounds.

  Fleishman's and Beatty's roles were complementary. Both enjoyed friendships with Sanford dating back to his governorship—Fleishman had been his legal assistant—and carried out his bidding as president, usually outside bureaucratic channels. Although Fleishman never worked in the development office, he chaired Duke's 1983-92 fund-raising campaign, which raised $221 million. While Beatty recruited wealthy students in the hope that their parents would give, Fleishman tirelessly courted potential donors—and, if necessary, pushed to admit their children.

  Jean Scott, the former admissions director, recalled conversations with Fleishman about candidates. “I'm sure he had input into the president's list or the development list or both,” she told me. Harold Wingood, a former senior associate director of admissions from 1986 to 1992, said Fleishman would add names to the development office list: “If necessary, Joel would call either me or the president's office.”