Noah Feldman, Columnist

Georgetown's Modest Plan to Help Slaves' Descendants

The law around university admissions is still tricky.

September 2, 2016 at 6:33 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

An overdue symbolic apology.
Photographer: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images

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It seems fitting that Georgetown University is offering preferential admission to the descendants of slaves whom it sold in 1838. But is it legal? Colleges can’t admit students on the basis of naked racial preferences -- and slavery is the archetypal example of a race-based category.

The answer is probably yes, because the Georgetown program is an extension of the legacy admissions preference for children of alumni -- it’s just another kind of legacy that the college is acknowledging. And like most legacy admissions, the program for slaves’ descendants has something of a token character, because Georgetown, like its peer schools, already weighs racial diversity in admissions.