A league of their own

 New York

There comes a point in a New York expat’s life when you suddenly realise that the liberal elites that run this town have feet of clay.

You have watched them joining anti-Trump marches, opening their beautiful homes for Democrat fundraising parties and noisily bidding ludicrous sums at charity auctions. Then the time comes for their children to apply to university and the whole elaborate façade comes crashing down. My wife and I couldn’t help noticing that the parents of our daughter’s American friends didn’t exactly share our blind panic as we tried to work out where she should apply for university. Why were people who usually couldn’t shut up for worrying about their children’s schooling suddenly so much more blasé about the future than we were? Their children were bright, but not that bright. The universities in their sights were among the best in the country: Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the rest of the Ivy League. What these teenagers did have and our daughter didn’t, however, were parents who had been there, too. More often than not, their parents had even met there. Their success therefore was not quite guaranteed but vastly more likely than for us poor British saps and, more importantly, for the vast majority of their fellow Americans. It’s shocking enough to learn that proudly meritocratic America is about the only country whose universities give precedence to its richest, most entitled applicants. It’s doubly dispiriting to learn that liberal colleges, parents and, frankly, children collude without so much as a blush at this outrageous exercise in hypocrisy and inherited privilege. The dark mysteries of the grandiosely titled ‘legacy preference’ system have just been laid bare in a Boston courtroom. The case concerns Students for Fair Admissions, an anti-affirmative action campaign group that is suing Harvard University on the grounds that it discriminates against Asian-Americans.