Newsom’s Hypocrisy on Full Display with Ban on Legacy and Donor Preferences in College Admissions

But there are other reasons the California governor should have thought twice about signing this bill.

C alifornia’s legislature produces more bills than any other statehouse in the nation, and all that effluent ultimately finds itself pooling around Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk.

Think of the dark majesty of all of those words — in bills that prohibit Froot Loops on school menus, that deploy state power to the task of reorganizing your closet, that ban from public schools any mascot that might trigger the outrage of some infinitesimal fraction of the populace, and that prohibit employers from saying anything in the workplace about “politics” and “religion.”

Reading even some of the 1,200 bills that hit Newsom’s desk would be a Sisyphean task for anyone. Perhaps the governor reads only the titles of these bills. Even so, and despite the press of other business on the last day of September, he must have lingered briefly over the twelve words at the top of Assembly Bill 1780 (“Independent institutions of higher education: legacy and donor preference in admissions: prohibition”) or maybe considered the next 25 words, which read, “It is the intent of the Legislature to stop the practice of legacy and donor admissions and protect students as they pursue their higher education.”

Whether he skimmed the bill, read it completely, or merely signed it in some calligraphic frenzy, Newsom turned 1780 into state law. In doing so, he ignored multiple reasons to veto the bill, the most obvious of which is hypocrisy — because Newsom was himself the beneficiary of legacy connections in college admissions.

In his signing message, Newsom said, “In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work. The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few, which is why we’re opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly.”

The hypocrisy is immense. In April, when it still seemed that Newsom might run for president, reporters examined the governor’s record, including his long-standing claim that, hobbled by dyslexia, his excellence on the baseball fields of Redwood High School in Marin County earned him admission to the private Santa Clara University.

It’s a great story. CalMatters’ Alexei Koseff noted earlier this year that the governor’s putative baseball career at Santa Clara “has provided Newsom a triumphant narrative to push back on the perception that his upbringing was privileged and easy: The high school standout scouted by the major leagues, who overcame his dyslexia and academic shortcomings to earn a partial scholarship to Santa Clara University before an injury forced him to find a new purpose.”

Except that Newsom’s account is largely untrue. While he was invited to try out for Santa Clara’s junior varsity team, Newsom drifted away before he ever played an official game. Koseff searched official rosters but did not find his name. He spoke to Newsom’s contemporaries, one of whom, Kevin Schneider, pitched for two seasons and now runs a pitching academy in San Francisco.

“He didn’t earn it,” Schneider said. “He didn’t earn the right to say it. I worked my ass off. So did everyone else on that team. For him to just go all these years, to say he did something he didn’t that takes not just talent but also dedication and effort and sacrifice, it’s not right.”

The real story obscures Newsom’s debt to legacy connections in university admissions. Reporter Koseff put it this way:

A deeper look at his recruitment reveals that Newsom’s admission to Santa Clara University — like so many of his formative opportunities — was substantially boosted by friends and acquaintances of his father, William Newsom, a San Francisco judge and financial adviser to the Gettys, the wealthy oil family. One associate connected Newsom to the baseball program when he was in high school, while his father’s best friend, then a member of the university’s board of regents, wrote him a letter of recommendation.

In a less ridiculous California, we might recognize that these are the blessings of having been born among — what did Newsom call them? — the lucky few.

Family connections served Newsom well beyond college admissions. They channeled Getty money into young Newsom’s early business ventures, and money and endorsements to his political campaigns.

This machinery of Newsomian physics was still working in 2019, Newsom’s first year as governor. “While the dream of owning a home is increasingly out of reach for California’s families, it appears that Newsom received a $3.7 million estate from an LLC owned by his cousin, and then, a few months later, took out a $2.695 million (tax-free) cash-out mortgage on it,” RedState’s Jennifer Van Laar reported in 2020. He “didn’t report the gift on any of his financial disclosure forms.”

While there are fair arguments to make against legacy and donor preferences — especially in the wake of race-based admissions’ being checked by the courts — Newsom would have had several practical and policy reasons to turn back 1780 as well, even if his own shame didn’t stop him. First, California has prohibited the practice of legacy and donor preferences in admissions at the state’s public universities since 1998. Until Newsom signed 1780, California officials wisely acknowledged their limited authority to regulate otherwise reasonable funding considerations at private universities.

Second, even granting that the children of wealthy donors admitted this way may be knuckleheads (h/t to Tim Walz), private-university officials (and, yes, even their public-university counterparts) should be free to weigh the trade-offs of admitting a single dimwit for a gift that might fund a new chemistry lab, endow a chair in free-market economics, or even hand out scholarships to 100 poor kids who are great students.

Third, the new law will likely run into legal claims that it violates the First Amendment’s freedom of association — including the desire of families to attend private universities attended by their forebears, as well as the desire of universities to cultivate the kind of community they desire and to build alumni networks that attract more money for more amenities.

But 1780 does more than prohibit legacy and donor preferences in admissions. It also requires the state Department of Justice to punish violators with fines that will fund state-directed education grants, and it requires the department to post the names of the infamous malefactors on a state website.

Families are natural and good to all but progressives. The giants of economic philosophy — from Malthus, Hume, and Smith to Hayek and Friedman and beyond — underscore the natural desire of people to help those closest to them. But the Left has long identified the family as the enemy of progress, the locus of dangerous bourgeois moral formation — of learned patriarchy, ideas about self-sufficiency, and religiosity. In its various new laws — including one that requires education officials to lie to parents about their kids’ on-campus gender “preferences” — California has declared family the state’s Public Enemy No. 1.

It’s unlikely that California’s private universities will follow the alternative path laid out for them by others — at Grove City, for instance, or Hillsdale. They (and other private schools) have shed the gravity of government aid and fashionable politics to reveal real academic independence. The others can be expected to surrender to the moral drift of fashionable ideologies. Gavin Newsom has put the nation’s most populous state in the vanguard of that revolution.