Affirmative Action, Bush-Style Affirmative Action, Bush-Style
Ellis Henican
January 22 2003
He was a C student at Phillips Andover. He got a not-so-stellar 1206 on his SATs - 566 verbal, 640 math. That was a full 180 points below the median score for the Yale University class of '68. But boola-boola for him! In the fall of 1964, George W. Bush was welcomed inside Yale's ivy-covered walls as a "legacy admittee." And why not? The wisecracking Texas teen had something far more powerful than dumb ol' test scores or silly grades.
He had a father, George H.W. Bush, who was a rich and prominent Yale alum. And a grandfather, too. Prescott S. Bush, the aristocratic Connecticut senator, was even a Yale trustee. If this wasn't affirmative action, nothing is. Affirmative action for rich white kids whose daddy and granddaddy also went to Yale. And of course, this particular unlevel playing field denied a place to some higher-scoring, harder-working student who made a single, tragic mistake - not being born as well as the Bushes. Tough luck for him or her.
But wait! Wasn't that just the kind of squeezed-out student that now-President Bush was supposedly speaking for this past week when his Justice Department filed a brief with the Supreme Court challenging the affirmative-action program at the University of Michigan? First, Bush inaccurately derided the Michigan plan as "quotas." Then he got all moralistic, saying that giving a leg up to black or Latino applicants is "divisive, unfair and impossible to square with the Constitution." That kind of system, he complained, "unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students."
It's unfair? Unfair like being ushered into the Ivy League by Poppy and Gramps? Unfair like getting into Yale with a 1206 and C's? And in W's case, the special boosts didn't begin or end with the admissions committee at Yale. Had the future president's name been, say, "Arbusto" instead of Bush, would he even have made it as far as Andover, the tony prep school that was also up to its crinkled nose in Bushes? At Andover, Bush never got his name on the honor roll, even one term. The published record shows that on his very first essay assignment, the future president's grade was zero.
"Disgraceful," the teacher wrote in bright red ink. With a prep-school record this sad, his college counselor suggested, maybe he ought consider applying to a safety school in case things didn't work out at Yale. Bush chose the University of Texas. But the Bush name packed such a wallop at Yale that he never had to fall back on Austin. And once classes started in New Haven, this third-generation Yalie continued not to impress academically. Oh, his easy manner won him plenty of friends on campus.
He was active in his fraternity, rising eventually to president. He made the cheerleading squad and the super-secret Skull and Bones society. But freshman year, his grades put him in the 21st percentile of his class, meaning four-fifths of his classmates did better than the future leader of the free world.
And in the years that followed, young W never pulled his average above a C. His college transcript, in an eye-popping leak to The New Yorker magazine, showed a 73 in Introduction to the American Political System and a 71 in Introduction to International Relations, to cite two examples that could mean something in hindsight. Now, none of this is any cause for shame. Lots of people do poorly in college and succeed grandly in life. And a crucial lesson was obviously learned.
The playing field is never level, whatever people say. Just make sure the tilt is your way. As it was for George W. Bush. His own family-sponsored affirmative-action plan kept pulling through. Despite the Yale grades, he was accepted at the Harvard Business School. Despite repeated business failures, cronies kept bailing him out. You don't think some black kid in Michigan would have a problem with that?
Ellis Henican is a columnist for Newsday, where this article first appeared.
Copyright 2003, Hartford Courant
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