LETTERS

...ROBERT COULSON Hartford City, Indiana The editor replies: Sports and the performing arts are two other areas where skill alone can carry the day...

...In public housing, tenants are taking over their developments...

...The question I raised was not whether admitted legacies are minimally competent, but how they stack up against nonlegacies— a question the outraged critics of minority preferences somehow overlook...

...Reed uses "are" with care...

...However, as one former Harvard admissions officer advised me, "You, as a Harvard student, should know that just about anyone, with some judicious course selection, can make it through...

...This is incorrect...

...How Harvard's spokesmen can argue that legacies "perform in outstanding ways throughout their undergraduate careers" is beyond me, because no one at Harvard has any solid evidence one way or the other...

...Probably...

...Whose lion...

...Empowerment of communities to deal with problems is infinitely preferable to service delivery by bureaucrats and professionals...

...Rose's neat distinctions between salary and other forms of income serve only to obscure the fact that all of these big numbers represent the same thing: skewed priorities for an institution that carries the word "public" in its name...

...The author, instead of citing Gregorian's annual salary figure, added the annual salary to the one-year sabbatical figure to arrive at the grandiose figure of $247,469...

...I didn't have the proper credentials...

...my material was published—but not edited—at company headquarters in Minneapolis...

...The library had promised him a sabbatical after six years...

...The author replies: As "grandiose" as President Gregorian's 1989 income of $247,469 may seem, it actually represents a reduction in grandeur from his earnings of the previous year...

...Fitzsimmons estimated that 20 to 25 percent would be accepted, compared to 15 percent or so for all applicants...

...By admitting them, colleges benefit immediately by not having to offer financial aid and in the long run by increasing alumni donations...

...Community service Katherine Boo's piece in the June issue ["What Mother Teresa Could Learn in a Leather Bar"] was absolutely superb and extremely important...

...In low-income housing, cities and states are pushing tenant cooperatives and other forms of tenant control...

...One of the engineers from the Wabash factory did get a tech writing job somewhere else...

...A working partnership between the private sector and the city is essential to maintain services to all users...

...The first question invariably was, "Where did you go to school...

...The class entering in 1966 was composed of 19 percent alumni children...

...Freelance writing is one profession, at least, where skill counts more than credentials, but it may be the only one...

...DAVID OSBORNE Dedham, Massachusetts The great white Hobe With regard to your commentary in June's "Who's Who," I have no comment on the silliness of the item...

...4) Larew states that alumni children were "significantly less qualified" than other students using "admission office ratings on academics, extracurriculars, personal qualities, recommendations, and other categories . . . with the exception of the athletic rating...

...I had thought that journalists were supposed to contact people about whom they write, but perhaps this is a new era of journalism and a new breed of journalists...

...As for the dispute over the proportion of legacies in each class, Fitzsimmons and McGrath Lewis have simply plucked a couple of unrepresentative years to make their case...

...How unqualified are they...

...During his tenure, he took only 45 days of vacation...

...The current New York City fiscal crisis has increased the pressure on the operating budgets of both the research libraries and the branch libraries...

...MARSHALL ROSE New York, New York Mr...

...However, credentialism is nothing new, though it may have become worse over the years...

...The library is a private corporation...

...In 1989, the year referred to in your article, the library's audited financial statement showed an operating deficit of $410,000 in the research libraries—not, as you reported, "a $12.2 million excess over operating costs...

...Far from being "unqualified," our alumni children are among the strongest students in the country...

...The central question of John Gill's article on the New York Public Library ["Bookshelves of the Vanities," June] is stated on its second page: "Why [do] neighborhood libraries struggle for survival while their parent institution sits on a heap of gold...

...At a time when the neighborhood branches had not fully recovered from the ravages of the seventies' financial crisis, the library's big-hearted board of trustees saw fit to pay one man more than half a million dollars over a twoyear period...

...School crazed I appreciated "America: A Repair Guide" [Charles Peters and James Bennet, July/August...

...When the factory closed, I declined a transfer to Chicago and applied for technical writing positions at other companies in smaller midwestern towns...

...The real scandal is how low Harvard will sink in individual cases...

...WILLIAM R. FITZSIMMONS MARLYN McGRATH LEWIS Cambridge, Massachusetts Mr...

...In addition, Gregorian forfeited two years of paid sabbatical from the University of Pennsylvania...

...In Chicago, parents now have majority control over the schools...

...Back in the sixties, I spent five years in the technical writing department of a Honeywell factory in Wabash, Indiana, having been promoted from draftsman...

...The differences are statistically significant, which is a fancy way of saying they probably did not arise by random chance...

...There are many stories to be told...

...Rose is chairman of the board of the New York Public Library...

...A score of 5 or 6 in these ratings is not comparable to a score of 1 to 4 because 5 and 6 are special codes that mean either "information not available" or "special case...

...If its excess monies are available for executive bonuses but untouchable for the preservation of public service when the branches are in crisis, perhaps the institution should be known as a "free" library rather than a "public" one...

...Further, "it is clear that the 'lineage tip' can work to the advantage of an applicant by offsetting weaker credentials in virtually any of the ratings categories...

...During the past two years it averaged 13...

...Included in this year's class will be record numbers of minority students and women...

...JACK KAPLAN Hamden, Connecticut John Larew's article made a number of errors, omissions, and incorrect assumptions unworthy of your publication...

...Ivy League and other elite schools are much less democratic about who does and doesn't get in than they would have us believe...

...The class of 1966, which they also cite, is more typical, and by my calculation, 19 percent is just about, uh, one fifth...

...When I said I'd never been to college, there were no further questions...

...But beyond them Mr...

...While Larew discussed the legacy preference, I think a bigger problem is favoritism to students who attend elite prep schools...

...The fact that I'd been successfully doing tech writing and illustrating for five years was ignored...

...Would legacies be admitted at a higher than usual rate even in an "alumni-blind" process...

...I'm currently a book and magazine reviewer...

...The answer is that they are significantly less qualified...

...Fitzsimmons and McGrath Lewis insist that a 0.2 point difference is no big deal...

...Average combined SAT scores for alumni children in this fall's class differ by only 10 points (on a scale of 1600) from those of the total class, well below the standard error of measurement for the SAT...

...What Larew did not report is that the differences averaged only 0.2 of a point or less on 5 or 6 point scales, a difference that would do little to separate one candidate from another...

...The author replies: I believe that alumni children accepted at Harvard generally meet the school's definition of "qualified," which is, to quote Fitzsimmons himself, "capable of doing the work .. . without serious risk of academic failure...

...Healy is president of the New York Public Library...

...Coulson is right, and the republic is poorer because he is...

...In 1971 that percentage was 15...

...According to the library's vice president for finance, this 1988 income included a grand $108,000 bonus...

...McGrath Lewis is Director of Admissions at Harvard College...

...Fitzsimmons is Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid and Ms...

...In the fiscal year just ended, the Library Corporation will show an operating deficit of about $2.5 million...

...According to the Department of Education, "It is evident . . . that being the son or daughter of an alumnus was the decisive factor" in many cases...

...Outside of the imaginary fiscal world dreamed up by your writer, a subsidy from our research libraries to our branch libraries means tearing down one set of services to try to protect another set...

...After a careful study lasting over two years, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights concluded that this admissions policy serves "legitimate institutional goals" and "that there are no alternatives to these preferences that could effectively accomplish the same legitimate goals...

...Close to half the students at some colleges went to private schools—a far greater percentage than for the country as a whole...

...TIMOTHY S. HEALY New York, New York Mr...

...Therefore, if we admitted students strictly on test scores alone (which we do not), one would expect a higher than average admission rate for alumni children...

...I would like to correct John Gill on a number of assumptions...

...I can't believe they tried to pull that one...

...Holding the City of New York to its historical contract to fund the daily operations of all the city's branch library systems is the only responsible course...

...No self-respecting college would be so crass as to favor the rich openly in its admissions policy, so they accomplish the same thing indirectly by favoring students from schools only the rich can afford...

...eight years later, it was $130,000...

...Whether or not admitted legacies are sought after by other colleges (and I suspect that most Harvard students can name at least one Harvard legacy who was rejected by every other school to which he or she applied), they are demonstrably not up to Harvard's ordinarily rigorous standards...

...and worked up to door designer before retiring and converting my writing to fiction, eventually selling nine novels...

...In 1988, without the help of any "one-year sabbatical" income, the nonprofit corporation's champion still managed to earn $263,158 (not counting a $37,000 contribution to his benefit package...

...That is why the trustees and the staff of this institution are fighting as hard as they can to roll back the city cuts...

...Unfortunately, that premise is simply wrong...

...I eventually took a factory job with the Overhead Door Co...

...However, this policy does not guarantee admission to the children of alumni (indeed the majority are not admitted), nor does it lead to the admission of those who are not well qualified...

...LETTERS Admissions denials I was delighted to read John Larew's excellent article ["Why Are Droves of Unqualified, Unprepared Kids Getting Into Our Top Colleges...

...In a number of cities, community-oriented policing is transforming the police into organizers who help communities solve their own problems...

...First off, that's 0.2 points on a 4 point scale (not 5 or 6 as they assert), which amounts to 5 percent...

...1) It has been a long-standing policy to admit alumni children when all other factors are substantially equal...

...This claim, too, is at variance with the facts...

...Until well after the practice was forbidden by the Supreme Court, the bylaws of the Jupiter Island Club, whose members included Reed, George Bush, and C. Boyden Gray, specifically excluded Jews...

...The library's endowment provides income sufficient to cover only 20 percent of the cost of operating the research libraries...

...Alumni children at Harvard (as noted in the federal study he cited) averaged 674 on the verbal SAT and 695 on the math, scores that place them in the 94th percentile nationally...

...This is the same library that now pleads poverty when asked by the librarians' union to release endowment dollars to protect front-line public service jobs and keep neighborhood branch libraries open...

...Larew mentions admission rates for alumni children and concludes that 200 of them were "marginally qualified...

...When Vartan Gregorian was appointed president of the New York Public Library in 1981, his salary was $90,000...

...The editors reply: Mr...

...Given that 35 to 40 percent of legacies are actually admitted, as many as half of them, by the dean's own optimistic estimate, are unqualified by ordinary standards...

...instead, at the end of eight years, we decided to honor our commitment by giving him a year's salary in lieu of the sabbatical...

...JOSEPH REED Washington, D.C...

...The $17 million cut in our branch libraries would more than swallow up all the private fundraising we do to maintain current service levels in our research libraries...

...Alumni have provided 90 percent of the $30 million in scholarships that will be granted to undergraduates this year...

...2) Larew asserts: "For more than 40 years, an astounding one fifth of Harvard's students" have received alumni consideration...

...3) Children of alumni who apply to Harvard, despite Larew's implication to the contrary, have higher average test scores than the average applicant...

...While admissions officers would undoubtedly claim that this is because many private schools offer a better education and produce more qualified graduates, one suspects the real reason is that most prep school students are the children of wealthy parents...

...Your article stated, incorrectly, that "whenever the city reduces its funding to NYPL, only the neighborhood branches—the traditional outposts of learning for the hoi polloi—are hit hard...

...Tell that to the librarians or the users in the Central Research Library, the Schomburg Center for Black Culture, and the Library for the Performing Arts, each of which stands to lose two full days of service under the current city cuts...

...Besides, the average difference between legacies and nonlegacies is not the most important statistic—you can drown in a lake that's an average of six inches deep...

...The last time Harvard investigated the matter (in 1956), it found that some legacies were indeed outstanding, but that the greater portion of them numbered among the worst students in the university...

...Far from hindering access to a Harvard education, our policies regarding the children of alumni have made it possible to admit the best students from every segment of society, regardless of their family financial circumstances...

...Seventy percent of our freshmen this fall will have received financial aid, and 45 percent of the class will hold direct scholarship grants from Harvard...

...Yet I would like to clarify that, as a former member of the Jupiter Island Club in Hobe Sound, Florida, I know that there are no exclusionary or restrictive covenants with regard to membership in the club...

...Both would lose...

...It applies to any social service—or, in fact, to any public service...

...I did complete instruction sheets and manuals for everything produced at that factory...

...That means that some less fortunate saps are rejected for no other reason than the accident of their births...

...June] on the neglected subject of college admissions...

...Our alumni children have outstanding scores and other admission credentials...

...The man could not produce a coherent sentence, but he had a degree...