Stockpiling Books

I've been buying a lot of books this summer. That's not "a lot of books" by the usual standards, because I've always been a better-than-average bookstore customer. Lately I've been buying a lot of books even for me. But I haven't been buying them to read. I've been buying books to write.

Over the last two years, I have been steadily squirreling away books I need for the book I'm writing. Every scholarly book is built out of earlier books, in pretty visible ways. If you want your book to say something new, rather than just parroting what has gone before, you're actually going to need to build it from more books, not fewer. If you read shallowly, you'll end up saying what everyone else said. If you have a question that someone else hasn't asked, you'll have to dig for hints and clues and small pieces of evidence through dozens-to-hundreds of other books that were after different questions. If people don't already know (or think they know) the answer to your question, there's going to be a lot of research.

(Fiction is also built out of earlier books, but less obviously. A novelist or short story writer can only create something that seems fresh after she's read and digested hundreds and hundreds of other works of fiction. If you've only read a dozen novels in your whole life and then try to write one yourself, what you come up with will sound appallingly close to one of those dozen. You will sound like someone trying to imitate your favorite writer, and it will basically be fanfic. You probably won't even realize how close you are to outright plagiarism. It takes a lot of reading to get a sense of all the possible moves you can make in a story and to digest a bunch of different influences before you stop trying to sound like someone else and start trying to sound like yourself.)

Now, you can't research an academic book without an academic library and inter-library loan. But writing requires keeping a bunch of other books handy for a long stretch of time. You'll have to root back through those books repeatedly to check one thing or another, and won't necessarily foresee exactly what you'll need to look for day to day. So after a certain point, depending on the library for those books becomes either inefficient or anti-social. You need to be able to check facts as you write. You can't always be stopping short and making out a list of things to look up on Monday. On the other hand, the more useful a book is, the less fair it is to hog the library copy while writing something that takes years to finish. You don't want to be the guy who's had the standard biography of Milton out of the college library since 2008.

So, I've spent the last two years buying a book here and a book there, as I happened to find things on used-book shelves, building up a small collection of books I knew I would need for the project I've been researching. Over the years I spent writing my dissertation and then turning it into my first book, I collected a bunch of specialized monographs and reference works I needed for that project. Because my second book takes a different methodological approach, I have to accumulate a new section of my personal working library.

But over the last six weeks, the buying has picked up intensity. Instead of buying a couple of books every month, I've purchased a couple of dozen since May. Part of that was opportunity, the result of visits to used-book stores while traveling with my spouse or of finally seeing things at a good price on abebooks.com. Every individual book was a good or excellent bargain, at least five or ten times cheaper than a new book from a university press. But I bought a lot of them, including multi-volume sets, more than enough to make me reorganize the shelves in my study. I've walked into bookstores and walked out with a box, more than once.

This newly serious book-buying feels like part of a new intensity in the writing process. The work is picking up steam, and so the reading and fact-checking have to keep pace. The preliminary phase of research and drafting is done, and now I'm starting the first really serious push. If I can sustain it, that push will take the next two years or so. During that time, I will have to work on lots of other things beside the book, but it will be the central project and there should be periods of fairly intense and sustained writing. I need a solid core of particular reference material in my writing space in order to keep momentum, need to be able to put my hand on exactly the volume I want at a specific moment in order to keep from slowing down. Assembling the books I need is like stockpiling supplies and equipment for the long push. I'm tooling up.

How this big push actually turns out won't be clear until it's done. At the moment I feel like the next two years will be the central and crucial part of the writing process. But I might be further from the end than I think. It's hard to know exactly where you are in the process of your second academic book, because the experience of writing your first book doesn't give you a clear road map. Writing that original, started-out-as-a-dissertation book is a torturous and often backward process. You start out with a few seminar papers and some ideas, and try to bootstrap them into a dissertation; because you've never written a dissertation before, you have to figure out the rules of that genre as you go, and often piece out the actual, workable structure for that document fairly late in the game. Then you've got a book-like object called a dissertation which you have to reverse-engineer into another, very different piece of writing, an actual publishable book. That process frequently demands more unexpected and sometimes radical restructuring, even very late in the game. The final version of my book was written almost exactly backwards: most of chapter four had been written first, followed in order by chapters five, three, two, one, and the introduction. While I would always recommend writing the intro last, and while I do plan some late tweaks to chapter one so that it sets up the rest of the book smoothly, that's not generally a writing process I want to reproduce.

This time I started with a clearer structure and a clearer plan. Putting a book together the hard way will teach you to appreciate how they're put together. So the sequence of writing might be more straightforward this time around. But writing a book in such a necessarily chaotic and haphazard way doesn't give you a feel for how a more normal version of the process goes, or where you might be in the process. You learn how to do it, and you learn that you never want to do it this way again. Writing the first book is about getting across the finish line alive. Writing the second book is about learning how writing one is actually supposed to work. Or at least that's my story right now; I'm sticking to it as long as I can.

cross-posted from Dagblog

The Muslim Brotherhood Blows It

cross-posted from Dagblog

One of the most startling things about the terrible events in Egypt is that the Muslim Brotherhood, the great-granddaddy of all Islamist movements, has blown its shot at governing the country, a chance the Brotherhood spent decades waiting and planning for. That does not excuse the military coup, and the Brotherhood isn't the only party to blame. But there's no point in pretending that Morsi and the Brotherhood have been defenders of constitutional democracy either, and their refusal to share power or respect civil process helped create the mess their country is in tonight. Those protesters in Tahrir Square are real, and their anger is real, and it's the Brotherhood that made them angry. Even if you took the Brotherhood's own position on events, that the military was just looking for an excuse for a coup, the Brotherhood gave them that excuse.

If any Islamist group seemed capable of profiting from the Arab Spring, it was the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. They are the original Islamist party, founded in the 1920s, and they long ago became a major and venerable national institution. They are heavily involved in charity work across the country. They have steadily resisted decades of military rulers, and the British before them. They have proved themselves capable, for long stretches, of non-violent resistance, and they proved impossible for Farouk or Nasser or Mubarak to root out, because the Brotherhood has become an intrinsic part of Egyptian society. We are not talking about some upstart freak show like al-Qaeda, who are literally good for nothing but mayhem. The Muslim Brotherhood are Islamists, not jihadists. They're supposed to be the grownups, focused on building the country. And while I've admitted that I disagree with nearly all of their policies, I once had guarded hopes that the Brotherhood would settle down and become a normal political party inside a constitutional framework. The Brotherhood was, for many reasons, the Islamic religious party most capable of growing up, sharing power, and being a responsible role model for other Islamist groups. Now they've blown it.

The big mistake is refusing to share power. They have ruled like the single-party apparatus they used to resist, when the most important thing is to build national unity and make sure all constituencies are represented. That Morsi won the presidency with 51% should have been a warning, and it was. But Morsi refused to accept it. (51% of a presidential vote is okay in a mature democracy, where all the major parties are in agreement on the really big things, like who our national allies are or what form of government we have. A 51% victory in a brand-new democracy is a mandate to reach out and make partners, because you need them.) Morsi chose to rule like a dictator, issuing decrees to give himself more power and decreeing the court system powerless against him. I'd prefer to see the courts and not the army rein Morsi in, but Morsi himself made that impossible.

And while ignoring any constituency but their own, the Brotherhood ignored the constituency that toppled the Mubarak regime. The Brotherhood waited decades for their movement to topple the generals, but it did not. The Mubarak regime was only toppled when a new protest movement, not associated with the Brotherhood and not necessarily sharing its goals, appeared in the streets. This was the revolution the Brotherhood was waiting for, but not the one they planned. They have spent the past two years treating the revolution that actually took place as if it had been the revolution they originally expected, a revolution of and by the Brotherhood alone. They ignored their revolutionary partners, who had put them in power in the first place. Now the people they refused to treat as partners are back in Tahrir Square, and the Brotherhood hasn't been shown any idea what to do about that except to try to hold on. It took them only two years to change places with Mubarak, in the worst possible way.

What College Trustees Are For

cross-posted from Dagblog

So it turns out that New York University has bought its president a summer home on Fire Island (h/t Tenured Radical). Or rather, a special foundation associated with New York University has loaned the university president, John Sexton, around a million dollars to buy a beach house, and there seems a real possibility that much of that million-dollar mortgage will eventually be forgiven, so that Sexton won't have to pay it back. NYU has also made similar vacation-home loans to other top administrators and VIP faculty, at least some of them on the same forgive-over-time plan. This represents a brave new financial frontier in higher education. No other university buys its executives second houses. This seems like an obvious story of an out-of-control administration. But more importantly, it's the story of a board of trustees failing to do its job.

A college or university's board of trustees oversees the long-term financial health of the institution. They approve the budget, keep tabs on how the school's endowment funds are being invested, hire and fire the president, monitor debt levels, and decide how much of the school's annual investment returns should be invested in running the school and how much should be reinvested in the markets. It's an absolutely necessary function.

Lately, there has been argument about how far boards' fiduciary authority extends, an argument that involves both genuine gray areas but also examples of poorly-thought-out overreach. Because their central job is financial oversight, trustees tend to be business and legal types. NYU's Board is fairly typical in that (except for two emeritus NYU presidents whose appointments may be honorary) the Board includes no one with a background in education. Barry Diller and Maria Bartiromo aren't necessarily the people you want to ask about how to teach history or which physics researchers to hire. They have (and need) a totally different kind of expertise. In the traditional arrangement, the faculty takes the lead in questions of teaching and scholarship, the administration takes the lead in daily management, and the trustees take the lead in questions of overall financial management. Some boards do seem intent on micromanaging things better left to the other two spheres (as in the recent CUNY mess, or last summer's debacle at the University of Virginia), but no matter how far a particular board believes its brief extends, fiscal oversight is its original core mission. Providing fiscal oversight is the reason any board of trustees exists in the first place. And when a board neglects that duty, bad things happen.

When the trustees don't do their jobs properly, the university administration begins to overspend on things that administrators tend to value: more administrators, higher administrative pay, more spending on big-ticket athletics (which can run up staggering deficits), and higher construction debt. University presidents have strong personal incentives to spend lots of money on large, impressive new buildings; putting up a "signature building" is considered a major achievement, and can help the president move on to a better job. Of course, raising the money for fancy new buildings really is a significant achievement, and a sign of a president's overall fundraising skill. But some university presidents don't want to wait until they've raised the necessary funds before they put up their big new construction project, or they have construction ambitions that are beyond their fund-raising skills. If the trustees don't holds the reins properly, a president can go on a building spree with borrowed money, saddling the institution with tens of millions of dollars in debt that will eventually have to come from other revenue. A healthy board should keep that from happening.

(What faculty generally want, on the other hand, is more money spent on the annual operations of the education side, including on faculty compensation but also on more faculty, more financial aid, and so forth. A university tilted to far toward faculty interests spends too much of the annual return on its endowment on the yearly operating budget and doesn't reinvest enough of those funds for the future.)

NYU doesn't blow its money on a football or basketball team. (It's Division III, which means no athletic scholarships.) It has been doing a lot of new building since Sexton took over, and is planning much more. Exactly what that means depends on the details of the financing. If Sexton has gotten donors to fund most of that construction, he's been doing exactly what the trustees hired him to do. If a lot of that construction has been financed with debt, on the other hand, that would mean the trustees haven't done their duty to the school.

On the question of executive compensation, however, NYU's Board seems to have lost its senses completely. There has already been a long history of controversy over how much NYU was spending on top executives. Buying those executives second homes ends the debate by proving the critics right.

NYU's board chairman, Martin Lipton, has written a letter to the New York Times defending NYU's practices while missing the real point. Lipton argues that the University needs to pay what it takes to attract and keep top talent, who other schools want to hire away from NYU, etc. But it's clear that Lipton doesn't get it. No one objects to paying employees what it takes to keep them. The problem is that NYU is paying certain favored people more than they could conceivably get anywhere else. It is a failure of the Board's fiduciary duty.

To get a few things out of the way: many universities, especially those in expensive real estate markets such as New York City or the San Francisco Bay Area, give their faculty housing assistance. Even some schools in fairly inexpensive areas help their faculty buy homes: for example, chipping in if the faculty buy a house in the neighborhood around campus. (Fair disclosure: none of my employers have given me housing assistance of this kind. Would I take such assistance if it was offered to me? Probably.) But if you're trying to run a world-class college in Manhattan, helping your hires with Manhattan real estate is part of hiring them. That is not crazy.

Also, just about every college provides the college president with a house, whether that's a mansion on campus or another place that the school purchases for the new hire. The college president is the school's most important fundraiser, and she or he needs a big, impressive house to throw functions for guests and donors. The house is part of the job, and the school provides it. That's not crazy, either.

But buying Sexton a beach house is crazy, because it has no market justification. This is excessive compensation because there is no market justification for it. No other school is going to steal John Sexton away by giving him a million-dollar beach house, because no other school buys someone two houses. NYU is compensating Sexton in vast excess of his market value; it's like an NFL team giving the quarterback a private jet and saying they needed to do it to keep him. They don't need to give him a jet, because no one else would give him a jet. NYU doesn't need to give Sexton two houses to keep him, because no one else would ever give him more than one free house.

But it's even worse than that. In a market where no one buys anywhere more than one house, NYU has been buying more than one house for more than one person: not just Sexton but at least one executive VP, the dean of the law school and several law and medical faculty. This suggests that the Board is totally out of its mind. It's giving an unheard-of six-or-seven figure perk, which no one else would give to any employee, to multiple employees. This is like an NFL team giving private jets to the backup quarterback, the wide receivers, and the punter. It doesn't make any sense. Most importantly, it doesn't make any business sense.

It's not even clear who the Trustees think will hire Sexton away from them. The actual market for his services at this point is surprisingly small. There aren't a lot of other universities bidding for his services, because even at actual market rates only a few other universities could afford his services, and most of them likely aren't interested.

There aren't many schools that wouldn't represent a step down from NYU, either in pay or in the desirability of the job itself. In fact, most of the richer and more famous schools pay their presidents less. (Columbia, the Ivy uptown from NYU, does seem to pay its president more; call it the Manhattan premium.) Moreover, several of the filthy-rich schools that could conceivably afford to give Sexton a raise have long traditions of only hiring presidents with a degree from their own school, or prefer to promote from within, or both. Yale and Princeton hired new presidents in the last year; both hired their own provosts. If you take the already-small pool that could afford to give Sexton a raise and that would look like a step up from NYU, and then you subtract the Princetons, Yales, etc., how many places are left? NYU's Trustees are giving Sexton things that no employer gives, for fear that he will leave them for another employer who does not exist.

Business sense is what the Trustees are for. If they're not providing that, they're worse than useless to the university. But at NYU, business sense seems to have given way to business culture. Many of the Trustees themselves are part of a culture of excessive CEO compensation, and their sense of what is "normal" for executive leadership has trumped their ability (or their will) to make a hard-nosed evaluation of actual market prices. That lack of business judgement undermines NYU's financial strength, wasting funds that should have been invested in the institution itself. They are bidding against themselves to retain people who are in little danger of leaving, and they they pay their outrageous auction prices with the University's money.

Red States and Blue States After DOMA

cross-posted from Dagblog

I'm delighted about the Supreme Court's decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor. It's a triumph for human dignity, and also a triumph for federalism. The federal government should not be in the business of restricting the rights that individual states extend to citizens. If thirteen states see fit to recognize same-sex marriage, Washington should not interfere.

One result, however, is that the divide between the red states and the blue states will be wider tomorrow. Millions of Americans will only be able to be married in some states and not others, and  may only have their existing marriages recognized in certain states. If you drive from Boston to Chicago you'll be married as you drive through Massachusetts and New York, just dating as you go through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, and only in a civil union when you reach Illinois. That's silly, but it has real personal consequences, and it will have real economic consequences for different states. The end of DOMA opens a whole new front of inter-state business competition, and it's the red states that are most likely to sing the blues.

The divide between the universal-marriage states and limited-marriage states is likely to have very serious effects on business's ability to attract and retain certain kinds of workers. Would you take a job if it meant that your marriage would not be legally recognized any more? And how would you turn down a job that meant having your marriage recognized, for the first time, in the place where you lived? But on the other hand, would you accept a transfer to the Detroit office if it meant giving up being married? We're not just talking about fringe benefits here.

This eventually means that some businesses are going to have good reasons to work in the states where all their workers can get married if they want; it's a lot easier. It's going to get harder to attract businesses from pro-marriage states to limited-marriage states. And it will be hardest of all in businesses that rely heavily on educated and generally mobile knowledge workers: exactly the workers that are most important in a post-industrial economy.

Smart employers are going to start thinking about prize workers they can poach from competitors in the wrong states. Smart politicians are going to start talking to businesses they want to lure across state lines. And people beginning start-ups are going to find them a little bit easier to start up in Seattle and Boston than they will be in Austin and Durham. That's just economic reality.

We'll see how long it takes for business-oriented politicians in some of those limited-marriage states to see the light on marriage equality. Longer than I'd like, of course. But probably not that long.

Hard Truths About College Admissions and Affirmative Action

cross-posted from Dagblog

Public debates over affirmative action in college admissions, such as all the hubbub about Fisher v. Texas (in which a not-so-qualified white student named Abigail Fisher sued before the Supreme Court to end affirmative action at the University of Texas), usually run into basic confusion about how college admission works in the first place. Opponents of affirmative action often call, loudly, for American colleges to "go back" to an admissions system that has never existed.

During oral arguments for Fisher v. Texas last fall, a commenter on a news post wrote: "Here's an idea. Why don't we just let in the students with the best grades and test scores?" The commenter intended this as irony, because he assumed that was the normal and natural way to manage selective college admissions. But the system he thinks of as "normal" has never been used in this country, and it will not be used if affirmative action is abolished.

(The ugly irony, of course, is that plaintiffs like Abigail Fisher who complain about "reverse racism" would lose out under a strict academic meritocracy, since their actual academic credentials would not have gotten them into the schools they're suing. Despite all the fantasies about obviously-qualified white students being passed over for hopelessly-unqualified black students, somehow anti-affirmative-action groups can only find weak borderline applicants when it's time to sue. And seriously, America's B- white students do not need everything to be about grades and scores.)

So let's review a few basic facts:

1. College Admissions Has Never Been Strictly About Academics

This is the hardest one for people to accept. But it is absolutely true. Competitive college admissions in the United States has never been about scholarly qualifications alone. There are countries, like France, where the competition for places at top schools is strictly academic. This country has never been one of them.

There are American colleges that don't have the luxury of being selective, and some of those schools do primarily rely on grades and test scores and sometimes use numerical cut-offs. But those are schools that are worried about finding enough students. They are basically taking every qualified person who applies. These schools use grades and scores to screen out applicants who seem likely to flunk. But these schools are irrelevant to the affirmative-action discussion, because students do not compete with one another to get in. You can't claim that you lost your place to a minority, or a legacy, or a football recruit, because there aren't a limited number of places. Letting one student in doesn't mean turning another student away.

(I want to be clear, by the way, that a college that isn't selective isn't necessarily bad, or that schools that are harder to get into are better. Some good schools have trouble filling their classes, and some selective schools are overrated. I'm just talking about the practical side of admissions.)

On the other hand, Harvard, which is not necessarily the best school in America but has long been the most selective, had for many decades (and may still have) a policy that capped the number of undergrads who got in on nothing but academics to ten percent of the incoming class. Ask your friends what percentage of Harvard kids they think got in just on their grades. Ten percent won't come up often.

The other ninety percent have good-enough grades, with the definition of "good enough" changing over time and depending on the strength of the applicant's other qualifications. They all have to be in the pool of students who probably won't flunk out, but the pool of applicants who could eventually graduate if they were let in is much, much larger than the number of students Harvard can or will actually take.

That other ninety percent are selected for things like athletic ability, family connections to the school, signs of "leadership," artistic or other extracurricular talents, regional origin (because the school wants "geographic diversity," meaning more kids from Idaho), and history of charity work. Some of the spots in the ninety percent have always been set aside for students from poor backgrounds. Fifty years ago, racial diversity got added to the list of possible qualifications.

Other selective schools work on basically the same model, with the specific percentages varying a little. (Some schools give more weight to legacies, or a little less to athletes, or set aside 15% instead of 10% for academic stars, but the general pattern holds.) Harvard's a convenient example because its fame means there has been more written and published about its practices, but all of Harvard's peers and rivals, and all of the schools struggling to get closer to that exclusive tier, operate in much the same way.

But these colleges operated this way for decades before affirmative action. Giving some consideration to minority applicants didn't change the fundamental procedure, and banning such consideration wouldn't either.

2. Selective Admissions Are Driven by the Schools' Self-Interest

Why do colleges give these preferences to athletes, legacies, class presidents, bassoon players,  blood drive organizers, and kids from Wyoming or West Virginia? Because they believe that doing so is good for the school.

Selective colleges don't favor athletes in the admissions process just because they're trying to make money off football or basketball. Schools with no big-revenue sports programs still give athletes preference, and they give preference to athletes in non-revenue sports like track and lacrosse. The Harvard-Yale game isn't going to bring in any TV dollars, but both of those schools recruit football players. The exclusive private colleges don't admit athletes to make money off sports. They're actually willing to lose money on sports in order to recruit athletes.

Why would schools do this? Because they believe (or enough people within the institution believe), that athletic standouts are likely to excel in other fields after graduation. They view a B+ or A- student who is showing leadership, discipline, and drive on the playing field as more likely to succeed in life than another student with similar grades. So they look for rowers, fencers, and swimmers. And if you think it sounds crazy to look for the next Mark Zuckerberg on a high school fencing team, remember that the last Mark Zuckerberg was captain of his high school fencing team.

A college that's able to choose the students it accepts does its best to choose a group that will become successful alumni in as many different fields as possible. The graduates' success raises the school's reputation and strengthens its core pool of donors. So the best strategy is to choose students with a wide range of different strengths and advantages. You want brains. You want motivation and leadership. You want some socially adroit students who will go on to success in business or politics, so you take kids who were president of three different clubs in high school. You want a certain number of students who were born to money and privilege, because their money and privilege will make them influential later. You want students from all over the country because you want to have alumni all over the country. You want a few driven poor kids who will make good. You want a few artists, a few non-profit leaders, a few intellectuals. (Harvard's 10% rule suggests the percentage of academics and intellectuals they want to turn out.) This isn't so much "diversity" as diversification: admitted students are the schools' long-term investment portfolio, and like smart investors schools spread their bets around.

These are all value judgements, and they are inseparable from the institution's value system. The schools have long-standing ties to certain established elites; they have a long-standing commitment giving legs up to at least a few poor kids. But institutions' values only shape their sense of their own long-term interests. In the end, they make the admissions decisions that they believe will best serve the school itself.

Affirmative action programs are ultimately just another admissions bet, and many of them have paid off. Any country with distinct racial and ethnic groups will always produce a number of high-profile leaders drawn from those groups. Elite schools want those leaders to be their alumni. W.E.B. DuBois had a Harvard degree, but the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement generally had not been educated in the traditional elite schools. Whether the Ivy League's leaders welcomed the Civil Rights movement or feared it, none of them wanted to see a whole set of national leaders coming exclusively from Howard. They started making a point of admitting minorities, and eventually a Columbia/Harvard Law man was elected the first black president of the United States. Mission accomplished.

Elite colleges make sure to take kids from Utah or North Dakota because they want a chance to produce some of Utah and North Dakota's future leaders. They make sure to take some kids from the privileged classes because they want a chance to produce the privileged classes' future leaders. Now they also make sure to take some minority kids because they want a chance to produce some of those minority groups' future leaders. It isn't white guilt. It's time-honored strategy.

3. Academics Were Less Important to Colleges Before Affirmative Action

People talk about affirmative action as if it gutted the academic integrity of American colleges and lowered standards. But exactly the opposite is true for selective college admissions. Academic expectations for all applicants have been much higher in the affirmative action era than they had ever been before.

This is more coincidence than causation. Affirmative action did not make the standards higher. It just began around the same time that other major changes were taking place, including coeducation at formerly all-male schools and a major shift away from legacy admissions and toward greater emphasis on scores and grades.

Over the course of the 1960s, elite East Coast colleges seriously reduced their investment in the sons of the traditional East-Coast elite and began investing much more heavily in academically talented middle-class students from public schools. The reasons for this are complex. Part has to do with the richest schools becoming rich enough, for the first time, to become relatively independent of their traditional old-money clients. Another part has to do with universities' changing sense of where America's leadership class was going to come from in the future. Ivy League schools bet (correctly, as it turned out) that the old East Coast ruling class was going to keep a major seat at the table but would no longer dominate national institutions as it had before World War II. Schools adjusted their admissions strategies accordingly, reducing the number of legacy and prep-school kids so that they represented a large and still-important but not predominant share of each entering class. At the same time, schools took more upwardly-mobile public-school kids with impressive SATs. Some old-money alumni naturally howled bloody murder about reverse discrimination. But in the long run, it seems to have been the right move.

Naturally, it was the academically-weaker legacy kids who got left out of this process. The Gentlemen's C is no longer a qualification if the school you're applying to is no longer primarily interested in recruiting gentlemen. This was a real and large academic change. One Princeton alumni group pamphlet from the 1950s makes it clear that every "Princeton son" who applies will automatically get in if he looks like he can make it through to graduation. (The pamphlet goes on to reassure worried parents that the lowest quartile of Princeton boys is absolutely stuffed with legacies, so don't worry that your precious child needs to a genius.) That isn't even remotely the case any more. Legacies still have a very large statistical advantage in college admissions, but today they face an only slightly (if crucially) easier standard than non-legacies face. (Of course, when standards have risen so high, a slight relaxation matters enormously.) The days of you're-in-if-you-won't-flunk are long gone.

As the aristocrats with mediocre grades got replaced by studious middle-class kids, the overall academic qualifications for admitted students rose sharply. The academic qualifications of that "other" ninety percent admitted to Harvard have gone upward with them. "Good enough" grades for a lacrosse star applying to Harvard today are a lot higher than "good enough" grades for a lacrosse star in 1935 or 1955. Admitting women (and thereby doubling the pool of potential applicants) only made competition fiercer, and the excessive admissions arms race of the last thirty years, with selective admissions rates falling nearly every year and those at the most selective schools going from around 20% to somewhere in the single digits, has relentlessly kept defining "decent grades" upward.  Every generation of Ivy Leaguers is full of people who will tell you, "Of course, I would never get in today."

Affirmative action didn't cause that upward spiral in academic expectations. But it hasn't been a noticeable drag on it. And more importantly, the definition of "good enough" grades for an affirmative action applicant is essentially pegged to the standard of "good enough grades" for other kinds of favored applicants. As "good enough" grades for athletes and legacies have gotten higher, so have "good enough" grades for recruited minorities.

Of course, "good enough" grades for black and Latino applicants will never be as low as "good enough" grades for legacies or athletes. Selective colleges' interest in recruiting lacrosse players and aristocrats has always been greater than their interest in recruiting disadvantaged minorities. Studies of admissions have repeatedly shown that the advantages for athletes and legacies is significantly higher than any advantage for underrepresented minorities. (It's worth noting that anti-affirmative-action plaintiff Abigail Fisher has no problem with legacy preferences. One of her complaints about how UT has done her wrong is that all of her family has gone to UT. Clearly, she thinks giving her an advantage because of that would be more than fair.)

At bottom, schools perceive recruiting athletes and legacies as better for the school's long-term advantage than recruiting minorities. They want to recruit future leaders from minority communities, but they want to recruit track stars and aristocrats even more. The average academic standards for affirmative-action recruits hovers somewhere above the average academic standards set for big-time legacies and lacrosse heroes. As competitive pressure has raised the floor for the athletes and legacies, the expectations for recruited minorities have also increased. That is not the story anyone tells about affirmative action in America's colleges. But it is what's actually happening.