The New York Times has a staff editorial calling on federal and state governments to push colleges to end preferential admissions treatment for children of alumni.
"Preferential treatment for legacy admissions is anti-meritocratic, inhibits social mobility and helps perpetuate a de facto class system. In short, it is an engine of inequity," the Times editorial says. "Continuing to give applicants an advantage simply because of where their parents went to school is, as one critic called it, 'a form of property transfer from one generation to another.'"
The humor here is in the Times denouncing, as obviously unfair, "property transfer from one generation to another." From the New York Times' own news article about the naming of A.G. Sulzberger as publisher: "A. G. Sulzberger will be the sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to serve as publisher since its patriarch, Adolph S. Ochs, purchased the paper in a bankruptcy sale in 1896."
So the Times wants to prevent colleges from allowing children whose parents were not lucky enough to inherit a newspaper from being advantaged instead by parental help in providing access to education? If the Times really wants to demonstrate its commitment to meritocracy, its opposition to the class system, and its opposition to "property transfer from one generation to another," A.G. Sulzberger can immediately resign as publisher, and he and his cousins, including the other cousins who work at the New York Times Co., can put the newspaper up for sale and give the proceeds away to the government or charitable non-profit news organizations with ironclad anti-nepotism policies. Unless and until that happens, the Times isn't a particularly credible messenger on this topic.
On the broader issue, why not allow the colleges and universities to make their own decisions on admissions policies and compete, free of government interference, on the basis of how whatever decisions they do make affects their reputations? If that approach is good enough for newspaper companies, why hold universities to a different standard?