For some time now, I’ve asked people that question when discussing the book business, which Bezos and I are both in. Of course, he’s in a lot of other businesses as well (he owns The Post), while I just run an independent bookstore. But he and I both decided to expand our book operations around the same time several years ago. We took very different tacks.

As head of Amazon, Bezos moved from selling books just online to launching a string of physical bookstores around the country, including two in the Washington metro area. As co-owner of Politics and Prose, whose original location is in Northwest D.C., I opened a couple of branch stores in the city

For his preferred sites, Bezos chose Georgetown and Bethesda, two of the most established — and expensive — retail neighborhoods. They were also where Barnes & Noble once operated, until it found the locations too challenging and unprofitable for a bookstore chain.

P&P’s branches opened in Union Market in Northeast D.C. and the Wharf in Southwest, two historically underserved communities undergoing transformation and renewed growth. Committed as P&P remains to its roots in Northwest, where the store was founded in 1984, we’ve sought to extend our bookselling and community-building efforts into other, diverse, dynamic parts of the city.

From the outset, the purpose of the Amazon bookstores was never clear. Various accounts indicated their aim was less to sell books than to promote Prime membership and perhaps some nonbook products.

In style and concept, Amazon’s stores differed markedly from the independent bookstores that dot the D.C. landscape. They conveyed the parent company’s homogenized corporate identity rather than the distinctive character of their communities. They lacked the quirky personality and warmth of indies. And their book offerings were based not on the choices of individual buyers familiar with the interests of local customers but on data generated from Amazon’s online shoppers. Walk into an Amazon bookstore and you’d see what everyone else was reading, not a thoughtfully curated selection of books worth discovering.

So, it was hardly surprising to me when Amazon confirmed on Wednesday that it was closing its 24 bookstores. It is also terminating its pop-up kiosks and 4-Star stores, which carried electronics, toys and home goods.
But Amazon isn’t getting out of brick-and-mortar entirely. The company now intends to focus its physical retail efforts on Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, Amazon Go and a new fashion venture, Amazon Style. In the process, Amazon is also likely to keep pursuing its “Just Walk Out” technology, which dispenses with checkout stations.

Amazon’s retreat from the physical bookstore business underscores what those of us in it know all too well: It isn’t easy. It requires superb customer service, dedicated staff who provide knowledgeable advice about what to read, an inviting environment in which to browse and shop, and literary activities that connect patrons directly to authors through book talks and other programming. Most of all, it demands a deep commitment to the local communities that sustain us.

Even through the pandemic of the past two years, most independent bookstores have managed to survive. Doing so has meant doing what indies do best, which is adapting, innovating and staying focused on community. At P&P, we started offering curbside pickup and local delivery services, moved our author talks and literary classes online, and expanded our Web order capabilities, all while keeping staff employed and protected from covid-19.
But Amazon remains a major threat to us and to independent bookstores everywhere. Though it’s now shuttering its physical book outlets, the company persists as a dominant presence online, choking competition and engaging in unfair practices

A national conversation about the costs and consequences of Amazon’s enormous power is already underway, with attention being paid to how the company adversely affects neighborhoods through the erosion of jobs, a loss of character for our hometowns and less money in sales taxes for local economies. Hopefully, this attention will lead to some sort of breakup or regulation.

In the meantime, it will be up to customers to make the critical choice between shopping indie and shopping Amazon. As Allison Hill, chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, stated, “As the pandemic subsides and we return to the social spaces that bring us together, we will decide whether we want to be commoditized or recognized as individuals. Independent businesses all across the country add diversity, character and humanity to our communities and they need our support.”

I’m not going to spend much time gloating over the end of Amazon’s bookstores. Not given the challenges Amazon still poses. But now there’s a new answer to the question about the difference between Jeff Bezos and me: I’m in the physical bookstore business, and he’s not.


Here’s the Difference between Jeff Bezos and Me

​by Bradley Graham
  co-owner of Politics and Prose, Washington, D.C.
OXFORD, Miss. — Penguin Random House, the largest English-language trade book publisher in the world, has made an offer to acquire Simon & Schuster, another large publisher and one of its rivals. For American consumers, this is bad news. Allison Hill, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, a trade association that promotes independent bookstores like mine, said the sale “threatens to undermine competition … and put bookstores and authors at risk.” A lawyer for the Justice Department, which is suing to block the purchase, commented that the lawsuit “will prevent further consolidation in an industry that has a history of collusion.”

The problem is not what we know about these giant publishers, or specifically about Penguin Random House or Simon & Schuster; we know that they and the other publishers that make up the so-called Big Five publish many good books, and they probably will continue to deal fairly with the bookstore world in the near future. What I worry about are the writers and books that will not get published or could be otherwise marginalized because of this even greater concentration of power.

If the Penguin Random House deal is successful, the Justice Department argues that the resulting merged company would control close to half of the best-seller market, continuing a longer history of publisher acquisitions, mergers and consolidation. This extraordinary shift in the balance of power in one of our nation’s most important industries has gone largely unremarked upon, even if it may change the kinds of books most Americans learn about and choose to read.
And who are these remaining publishing giants? Penguin Random House (owned by Bertelsmann, a German company), which I will now pair with Simon & Schuster (formerly Paramount Global, American-based); HarperCollins (News Corp, maybe an American corporation, maybe Australian, depending upon who’s asking, and so convoluted it might as well be another country); Hachette (Lagardère, a French group); and Macmillan (Holtzbrinck, another German company). Together these four corporations make up 80 percent of the U.S. book market.
What I have seen as a bookseller is that publishing, originally geared toward offering new writers the chance to connect with readers, evermore trends toward an industry narrowly engineered to produce repeat best sellers. The immense resources of a Penguin Random House or a Simon & Schuster will train mostly on a small percentage of its authors; the rest of the authors whom they publish will hope to take advantage of what collateral prestige and opportunity exists by being published in the company of household names.

The number of copies of best sellers sold rose nearly 30 percent from 2017 to 2019, while all other book sales fell by 16 percent. The number of midlist titles (books with modest print runs and sales expectations) is being greatly diminished, which means that fewer books of quality — or indeed, fewer potential best sellers — will have the chance to be published and read. In the 43 years that my bookstore, Square Books, has been in business — and we now have four different shops in three buildings 100 feet apart — our gross revenue has declined from the previous year only twice (once in 2008, when the economy teetered; the other during the height of Covid).

Many booksellers may remember a series of lawsuits that addressed anticompetitive behavior in the 1980s and ’90s. Those suits hinged on a little-known but important aspect of antitrust law, the Robinson-Patman Act, which prohibited manufacturers (publishers) from selling goods (books) to retail vendors (bookstores) at “disproportionate” or discriminatory prices. A publisher used to be able to sell its books to a corporate bookstore for less than it might to an independent bookstore — but only to the extent that the difference was equivalent to the savings by the publisher. What the American Booksellers Association found was that the pricing was both disproportionate and arbitrary, and large chain store accounts were demanding and receiving much lower prices.

The American Booksellers Association eventually settled with a group of six publishers, who signed consent decrees agreeing to abide by legal terms henceforth. This set a standard for all publishers and leveled the playing field. Later, one of the publishers, Penguin, was found to have violated the consent decree. The matter was resolved by a $25 million settlement paid to the American Booksellers Association and distributed to its member bookstores, the largest monetary settlement in a discriminatory pricing case in U.S. legal history at the time.

A few years later, in 1999, bookstores gathered some 90,000 signatures in a petition to the Federal Trade Commission opposing Barnes & Noble’s offer to buy Ingram Book Group, the largest book wholesaler in the country and a company that virtually every independent bookstore did business with.
The American Booksellers Association wrote a letter — under my signature, as I was board chair at the time — to Attorney General Janet Reno and Robert Pitofsky, who was then the Federal Trade Commission chair, stating our opinion that the proposed merger of Barnes & Noble and Ingram was “a devastating development that threatens the viability of competition in the book industry and limits the diversity and availability of books to consumers” and calling for investigative action. After a June 1, 1999, report in The Times indicating that the Federal Trade Commission staff would recommend to the commission that it challenge the proposed $600 million purchase, Barnes & Noble terminated its deal, presumably, in part, to avoid the embarrassment of being denied.

Interestingly, it wasn’t just associations of authors and booksellers who opposed the Barnes & Noble and Ingram consolidation but also a company that then had nearly 60 percent of its order fulfillment provided through Ingram: Amazon, which would continue to grow and flex its own ability to negotiate. Fifteen years later, in 2014, over 900 authors, including Stephen King, Anna Quindlen and John Grisham, signed a full-page ad in The Times asking Amazon to stop its “selective retaliation” against authors whose publishers had not capitulated to Amazon’s demands. Today the American Booksellers Association, on behalf of indie stores, continues to challenge Amazon’s anticompetitive behavior, lobbying for antitrust legislation like the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. This bipartisan bill, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee by a 16-to-6 vote in early 2022, creates rules for fair competition online by banning monopolistic behavior by large online platforms.

According to the Justice Department, Penguin Random House argued that the potential acquisition of Simon & Schuster “will provide a counterweight to Amazon’s alleged buying power,” but the Justice Department countered that “internal documents tell a different story: Penguin Random House plans to embrace Amazon even more closely after the merger.”

Publishers are by necessity gatekeepers. They can accept only as many manuscripts or writers as they can afford to publish and sell. They are limited by their competition, however, because only so many books may be published and purchased. Today there are roughly 2.5 books sold per person in the United States every year.

In the world of book selling today, a customer may be left with a book less well made, less appealing, less diverse, more expensive, and whose author makes less money. No two books are the same, you say? Yes, and every day I see buyers choosing one book rather than another. While Amazon has siphoned off an enormous share of the physical book market and almost the entire e-book market, our customers at Square Books constantly express thanks for our actual presence and what they tell us is a better, more pleasurable way to shop. The language they use to express their preferences is money.

I hesitate to speak critically of Penguin Random House. After all, William Faulkner, published almost entirely by Random House, was a longtime resident of Oxford, Miss. — where I live — and Penguin Random House published my wife’s novel, “Summerlings,” for heaven’s sake, so of course our store does business with it. And a whole lot of business it is. Penguin Random House, even without including Simon & Schuster, has a larger share of our business than all of Square Books’ other accounts — combined.
But how would readers ever have discovered Larry Brown, another fine writer — who, like Faulkner, was a resident of Lafayette County — if he hadn’t been discovered by a brilliant editor, Shannon Ravenel, at a small outfit, Algonquin, having enjoyed little or no interest from the biggies? Or Kiese Laymon, whose first two books originated with a tiny publisher, or Lee Durkee, who lives in Oxford and whose recent novel “The Last Taxi Driver” was published by the independent press Tin House?
While Faulkner was associated with Random House for the bulk of his career, his first two books were published by Boni & Liveright, which grew into W.W. Norton (incidentally, the publisher of Lee Durkee’s first novel). I am sure Penguin Random House would love to add Norton, one of the finest, most distinguished publishers in our country, to its amalgamation, were it to find a way to wrest the company from its employees — who own it.

​Publishers' Consolidation Is a Threat to American Literature

by Richard Howorth - A founder, with his wife Lisa Howorth
of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

Want to know how few students pay full price, or the odds of getting merit aid? The so-called Common Data Set can help, but some schools don’t post it.
By now, many people shopping for college have gotten the message that not everyone pays the list price. But what percentage do get some kind of discount, how much is it and what sorts of students get one?

One way to answer these questions — and many more about the overall undergraduate experience — is by reading the so-called Common Data Set. The C.D.S. is a collection of information about admissions, demographics, financial aid, academics and campus life. Schools assemble it each year and send it along to U.S. News & World Report, Peterson’s and other entities that sort or rank colleges and universities.

Most institutions post their C.D.S. somewhere on their websites. But at least a dozen did not at the start of this week. Over the last five days, I reached out to ask why, and a number of them — including Boston College and the University of Chicago — said they planned to release the C.D.S. after all. Others, like Emerson College, stood firm on keeping it to themselves. Albright College and High Point University did not respond to my queries at all.

If the C.D.S. is familiar, it may be because it was a bit player in the recent drama at Columbia University. A Columbia professor had called the school out for questionable data that led to a higher-than-warranted U.S. News ranking. The school’s mea culpa included publication of its own C.D.S.

The C.D.S. is a product of the uneasy relationship between the U.S. News college rankers and their overburdened rankees. Schools don’t have the capacity to spend months responding to different data requests from the magazine, Peterson’s, the College Board and others like them. Filling out a single, giant form saves labor. Plus, it’s in everyone’s interest to have standard definitions of the information under examination.

For college shoppers, the C.D.S. is excellent reading, even if the PDFs that most schools post are not all that reader-friendly. If your kid is not a joiner, the form can tell you the percentage of the students who are in fraternities and sororities. You can also learn how many people live off campus.

Instructor demographics are a feature as well. Faculty who are members of minority groups can be rare at some schools, and the C.D.S. spells out the figure at any given institution.

On the financial aid side, a quick read of the C.D.S. can give families hope and concern in equal measure. While colleges, on their “cost of attendance” web pages, often list sky-high prices, plenty of students at the schools don’t pay them.

Many people qualify for need-based financial aid, but most schools can’t afford to meet every family’s full need. Section H2 of the C.D.S. tells you how much of the need, on average, a school is able to meet. Families often end up filling any gap with student or parent loans.

Parents whose kids get in but find that a school meets even less of their need than average can appeal the financial aid offer. And if the school’s average gap seems particularly foreboding before application season begins, you can have a conversation with the financial aid officers. Ask them how they assess your odds of getting a decent amount of aid — and ultimately being able to afford the place at all.

Then there are the higher-income families. Plenty of people with household incomes of, say, $300,000 won’t qualify for much need-based aid, if any. Still, they may not have much college savings for their offspring if they’ve been repaying their own student debt for decades, and they may not feel able to afford a college’s full price or be willing to borrow a lot of money to do so.
That’s where Section H2A comes in. The technical description of what schools are revealing here is “institutional non-need-based scholarship or grant aid.” My translation is this: “Here’s how many discounts we issue to people who have the ability to pay, at least according to our financial aid calculations, but lack the willingness to do so.”

This is the so-called merit aid that so many schools give out nowadays. At lots of schools, nearly everyone gets something, and the C.D.S. lists the average amount of merit aid that people with no financial need end up getting.
The next step might be to use the form to find the number of people who get need-based aid and then the number who receive no-need merit. Add those together and subtract the sum from the total number of students, and you can figure out how many — or how few — people are paying the full price.
Maybe you don’t want to be among a low number of people paying retail. And perhaps some schools keep the C.D.S. to themselves because they don’t want to make it too easy for you to know what that number is — or whether you got a below-average merit aid offer.

The representatives of the schools I spoke to this week did not say this themselves. In fact, the reverse may be true, at least according to their consultants.“Most of our partners are trying to encourage families to understand that they probably will get something,” said Nathan Mueller, principal at EAB, which helps colleges recruit and retain students and determine what discounts to offer. “We’d rather have them know that.”

“Gen Z and their parents have much less confidence and trust in institutions, and unfortunately colleges and universities fall into that category,” she said. “Transparency sends a good-faith message to the market that we want to be open about who we are and how we’re helping people financially.”

So, hats off to the schools I contacted this week that seemed to see the wisdom in this way of thinking. Ohio Wesleyan University is working to fill in a blank C.D.S. webpage that currently has just a few Latin words on it. La Salle University’s new senior leaders “expect” to start publishing the C.D.S. “in the future.” Babson College sent similar word.

The University of Chicago said in a statement that it had “recently” reviewed its approach and planned to publish the C.D.S. “soon.” Boston College threw its C.D.S. up on a webpage and thanked me for bringing the matter to its attention. Bard and Marist Colleges will post their forms soon as well, and Stevens Institute of Technology intends to in 2023. I couldn’t bring Emerson around, though it said it would “certainly review our current practices.” Bentley University was another holdout at the beginning of the week, and its vice president of institutional research said in an email that the school had “just not found it helpful for families.”

My experience is the exact opposite. When I sit families down with a C.D.S. and take two minutes to explain things, I quite often see their eyes pop out of their heads as they finally understand who pays what and under what circumstances. By the end of the week, Bentley had changed its mind and published it.
The C.D.S. is not foolproof. U.S. News has ended up with incorrect data over the years. Good-faith errors do occur.

Meanwhile, college counselors and start-up services of various sorts have assembled their own collections of pricing data. The College Transitions Dataverse site is worth a look, as are Big J Educational Consulting, Road2College, TuitionFit, MeritMore and Moore College Data.

Collecting and sorting college pricing and other data should not be this hard or require so many entities to do so much parsing, but this is personal finance in America, after all. There are lots of market players, plenty of opacity and a good chance that big feelings get in the way of common sense.

Plaintive wailing aside, it is indeed worth some effort, before you apply, to get a clear sense of the price a school might quote you if you get in — and why it might do so. The C.D.S. can help you figure that out.

If you run across a school that doesn’t post it or has an old one online, you are well within the bounds of politeness to ask the institution to hand the latest version over. And while you’re at it, please ask that it post the data somewhere where all of us can find and benefit from it.



​The Discount Data That Some Colleges Won’t Publish
by Ron Leiber
Re “How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy,” by Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Jan. 15):

I fed this essay into ChatGPT and asked it to write a rebuttal. ChatGPT read the article and wrote the following in less than a minute:

As a writer and researcher who is familiar with the capabilities of language models like ChatGPT, I was surprised to read the recent New York Times essay that suggested that this technology could be used to “upend” democratic processes through lobbying.

While it is true that ChatGPT can generate text that is often indistinguishable from human writing, it is important to note that this technology is not capable of understanding the nuances and subtleties of political networks and systems.

Additionally, the idea that ChatGPT could be used to “ruthlessly exploit” policymaking vulnerabilities is a gross exaggeration of its capabilities.
Furthermore, it is important to note that the problem of automatically generated comments is not new. For several years, we have struggled with bots that automatically post content. Platforms like Facebook have become better at removing “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

In reality, ChatGPT and similar technologies have the potential to be powerful tools for businesses, researchers and educators. They can be used to automate repetitive tasks, improve efficiency and generate new insights. However, the notion that ChatGPT could be used to compromise democratic processes is fear-based speculation that is not rooted in reality.

It is important to approach new technologies with caution and to understand their capabilities and limitations. However, it is also essential not to exaggerate their potential dangers and to consider how they can be used in a positive and responsible manner.

REMEMBER NOW…THIS IS THE BOT SPEAKING!!!!

LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”

On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!” 

“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”

Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.” 

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said. 

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.” 

Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.” 

Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques: 

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”

Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.” 

Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.” 

The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.

“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.” And if “we want to make certain that fascism does not come to America, we must make certain that it does not thrive anywhere in the world.” 

Seventy-eight years after the publication of “FASCISM!” with its program for recognizing that political system and stopping it from taking over the United States, President Joe Biden today at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, honored those who gave their lives fighting to preserve democracy. “On this day, we come together again to reflect, to remember, but above all, to recommit to the future our fallen heroes fought for, …a future grounded in freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, opportunity, and…justice.”

“[T]he truest memorial to their lives,” the president said, is to act “every day to ensure that our democracy endures, our Constitution endures, and the soul of our nation and our decency endures.”
—


Fascism
by Heather Cox Richardson

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

A: First, a refresher on what the electoral college is: It dictates that if you win the popular vote in a state, you win all of those state’s electors (except in two states: Maine and Nebraska, where the electoral votes are split up and awarded by congressional districts). The state electors go on to vote for the president. This means the candidate who wins the popular vote might not necessarily win the election.

Why do we need it? The Founding Fathers created the electoral college for two reasons:

1.It was a compromise between those who wanted members of Congress to elect the president directly and those who wanted a popular vote.
2.It gave smaller states a bigger role in electing the president; otherwise, candidates might try to appeal only to voters in the nation’s biggest states.

But the electoral college is controversial because it also sets up a disparity: Each state, no matter how small it is, gets a minimum of three electoral votes. That means small states can make or break a close election.

Most Americans (sixty-three percent, according to the Pew Research Center) think we should change the system so that whoever wins the popular vote becomes president. But ditching the current system would take a constitutional amendment, one of the most difficult things to get done in all of governing. And one party has benefited greatly from the electoral college recently. The last two Republican presidents actually lost the popular vote but won the electoral college.


A Refresher on The Electoral College
 Actually, legacy admissions are good. Here’s why.
By Steven B. Gerrard

The torches are aflame, and the castles of higher education are being stormed: Burn down legacy admissions!

I teach my students never to begin with a cliché, but it’s appropriate here, as the arguments against legacy admissions are clichés, matters of myth and superficial branding, not of reason. In reality, at highly selective liberal arts colleges, legacy admissions benefit everyone — especially those not historically welcome at these citadels.

Universities such as Harvard might operate differently, so my analysis applies only to colleges like the one I attended (Amherst) and the one where I teach (Williams). But it has broader implications.

The great myth: Legacy admissions are the enemy of diversity, institutionalizing privilege at everyone else’s expense. The surprising truth: Legacy admissions do not harm diversity. They enhance it.

Well over half the applicants to highly selective colleges could shine equally as students. How, then, do admissions officers decide who gets the golden ring? They always say they are constructing a class. A freshman cohort consisting only of science nerds or political activists or athletes would not make a genuine liberal arts college. And demographics are part of that construction.

If the legacy student took the place of a first-generation student, I would light the torches myself. But that’s not the way it works. At least at the colleges I am talking about, no legacy is admitted at the expense of a first-generation student; they are admitted at the expense of other privileged students who have other excellent options.

The corporate lawyer’s daughter attending the elite Phillips Academy boarding school in Andover, Mass., is not competing against the factory worker’s son from West Virginia’s Charleston High School (which I attended). She is competing against her equally privileged classmate. And if that classmate is beaten out because the corporate lawyer went to Williams, that classmate will then have to go to another highly selective college, or, tragically, to a merely selective college.

Furthermore, legacy admissions contribute to the sense of community at small liberal arts colleges. When our students metamorphose into alumni, they do not leave us behind. They still feel part of our intergenerational community. Most alumni at some point happily contemplate the possibility of their offspring wearing their school colors, whether that ultimately happens or not. (And, thanks to previous affirmative action, this community now includes a significant number of alumni of color. It would be a bitter irony if, just when affirmative action is eliminated and alumni of color’s children are finally candidates for legacy admissions, that ladder, too, should be kicked away.

This sense of community benefits everyone, most especially those who are not from privileged backgrounds. Consider one of the chief advantages of attending a highly selective liberal arts college: the network. A student from a privileged background can always call his uncle or his parents’ friends for advice or an internship. He doesn’t need the advantage of a highly selective college. But a first-generation Williams sophomore can call any Williams graduate and almost always get through, gaining through her hard work some of the advantages her privileged classmates simply inherited. She especially benefits from the sense of community. Many factors contribute to this, and legacy admissions might be only one, but this intergenerational loyalty and inheritance of social capital are real, and what is real should count.

What do we find in the opposing corner? Symbolism. Marketing. Propaganda. Public relations posturing. (Only those with a fondness for clichés would call it virtue signaling.) The message to high school students: Welcome to the elite! No one by birth has a better chance than you! To the public: We might charge $65,000 a year, but we are for the proletariat! (Yes, only old college grads say “proletariat,” but you know what I mean.) To alumni: See how good your old school is! By the way, click on this link to donate.

Divesting from legacy admissions (and loudly proclaiming it to the world) is a lot easier than doing the real work of making admissions fair: reaching out to neighborhoods and schools that haven’t heard of your institution, partnering with community colleges, recruiting veterans with the same fervor you bring to recruiting athletes, and contributing talent and money to the difficult, multigenerational task of genuinely educating all elementary school students regardless of their Zip code. This is not to say that some of the colleges that boast of eliminating legacy admissions aren’t doing that work, but if they are, why add empty symbolism to the mix?

Never has respect for higher education in our country been so low. There are many reasons, including stratospheric tuition and genuine admissions scandals. (Varsity Blues, anyone?) But one serious reason is that the public no longer believes universities are engaged in the objective search for truth, that they merely spew propaganda for their preferred political tribe.

There is some truth to that, but higher education hasn’t wholly given in to a world of sound bites and irrationality yet, and it must not give in if it is to regain any authority. Every time a college or university trades reason for myth, the ivy on our walls begins to wither. The question of legacy admissions is admittedly minor, affecting extraordinarily few people. But the question of following bad arguments and political pressures is not minor: It is (or should be) at the heart of higher education.

So douse the torches, keep legacy admissions and get to work.



A few years ago, I started asking lecture halls filled with students to raise their hands if they had run out of time on the SAT. In each room, nearly every hand went up. I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been.

For decades, educators have seen speed as a marker of aptitude or mastery, forcing students to scramble to finish tests. But a race against the clock doesn’t measure knowledge or intelligence. It assesses the much narrower skill of how well students reason A under stress. As a result, timed tests underestimate the capabilities of countless students.

New evidence shows that although smarter people are faster at solving easy problems, they’re actually slower to finish difficult ones. They’re well aware that haste makes waste, and they don’t want to sacrifice accuracy for speed. You wouldn’t want a surgeon who rushes through a craniectomy, or an accountant who dashes through your taxes. Even for the many jobs in which people are judged on speed, there’s no evidence that doing algebra under time pressure is useful preparation. Although it pays to be quick, it also pays to be determined, disciplined and dependable.

Strangely, though, the tests that define students’ grades and help determine their educational and professional fates are rarely designed for deliberation. They evaluate students as if they’re applying to join a bomb squad or appear on “Jeopardy.” Time pressure rewards students who think fast and shallow — and punishes those who think slow and deep.

One fall, one of our daughters was pleasantly surprised by her grade on a math midterm. Despite being the longest and hardest test of the semester, it was her highest score. At first we were puzzled: She hadn’t changed her study habits or made a quantum leap in understanding. Then we learned that it was the first test where she didn’t feel pressed for time. Her teacher had allowed more time per question than usual.

On math tests, one of the few skills in which boys consistently outperform girls is mental rotation — turning 3-D shapes in their minds. But gender differences vary dramatically based on time pressure. Across several dozen studies, the more time students had to finish tests, the smaller the female disadvantage became. Shifting from short time limits to no time limits — or even just allowing more than 30 seconds per question — was enough to cut the gender gap in half.

It’s well known that the “girls can’t do math” stereotype can cause female students to underperform on math tests. The fear of confirming the stereotype can lead to test anxiety, draining working memory and disrupting cognitive processing. What we’ve overlooked is that time pressure can exacerbate these effects. When girls are distracted by doubts about their abilities, it takes them longer to finish problems. Having to rush leaves them more prone to choosing suboptimal strategies — and to possibly making mistakes. Even if they’re not anxious, female students tend to workmore methodically than male students. When they have more time, they can rethink their approaches and double-check their answers. They also become more comfortable making educated guesses.

I tried this out with our daughter on practice tests at home. She’s an honors math student, but when she was under time pressure, she made distracted mistakes like plugging in the wrong formula on relatively easy algebra problems. It was the math version of a typo, and we ended up coining a term for it: a matho. But when there was no time limit, she excelled on difficult algebra problems — and mental rotation, too.

Time pressure doesn’t just underrate the math abilities of girls and young women. Having to hurry can obscure the abilities of anyone who has reason to worry. That might include boys who are expected to underperform in reading, immigrants who are doubted on verbal aptitude and Black students who face a host of questions about their intellect. It also includes students with learning difficulties such as dyslexia and ADHD — or mental health conditions, physical disabilities and sensory impairments.


The SATs Will Be Different Next Year,
 and That Could Be a Game-Changer
The Federal Trade Commission, supported by 17 state attorneys general, finally filed its long-awaited antitrust lawsuit against Amazon yesterday. In a 172-page complaint, the government alleged that the e-tailer “uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power.” The use of that power, the government continued, allows Amazon “to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.”

The immediate industry reaction to the news of the suit was uniform: “What took so long?” Or, in the words of Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson, that it was “about fucking time.” An industry lawyer, who wished to remain anonymous, gave a more nuanced view in wondering why it took the government so long to act, pointing to the infamous buy button case in 2010, when Amazon pulled Macmillan’s buy buttons in a dispute over e-book terms. (The fight is detailed in former Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s new book, Turning Pages.)

Even with Amazon’s dominant position over the sale of e-books and print books, the suit doesn’t mention books, which, of course, were Amazon’s first line of business. The suit does, however, highlight Amazon’s hold over the companies who use its online marketplace to sell a range of products, including books, to consumers.

Jed Lyons, CEO of Rowman & Littlefield, was skeptical about how the case will play out, pointing to the government’s “sketchy” track record in lawsuits against major corporations. But even though the FTC lawsuit is more about third party sellers, Lyons said, if “it shuts down unauthorized sellers of new books, which we know are not new books, then that will be a win for book publishers.”

Independent booksellers, which were the first physical retailers impacted by Amazon and the steep discounting on books it employed to attract customers, praised the FTC’s long-awaited action. The lawsuit, said ABA CEO Allison Hill, “is good news for indie bookstores and good news for all small business. ABA applauds the FTC and states’ effort to release Amazon’s stranglehold, and we look forward to the transparency this lawsuit will provide into Amazon's business practices.”

In a letter to members, Hill pointed to ABA’s long struggle to get the government to investigate ABA’s policies. Those efforts included a recent trip to Washington, where she and other ABA officials met with the government to discuss Amazon’s anticompetitive behavior. Other industry groups, including the AAP and Authors Guild, have also long advocated that the government investigate many of Amazon's practices. 

No bookseller has been more active in attacking Amazon’s book practices than Danny Caine, owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kans., and author of How to Resist Amazon and Why.Caine acknowledged that, “while the suit doesn't go after Amazon's book business in particular, it can still do a lot to level the playing field. For one thing, it can prove that Amazon is acting illegally or anti-competitively via tactics like preferencing its own products, placing unfair pressure on sellers who list their products for lower prices elsewhere, and forcing sellers and customers onto their Prime platform.”

The head of one independent publisher, who wished to remain anonymous, said that if the government prevails, “it could be very beneficial to publishers.” She then laid out the many challenges publishers face in dealing with Amazon: “I think [the suit] could affect tactics around the negotiation of discounts and fees, etc., with publishers. This would also be a good thing. The negotiations over the years between publishers and Amazon have been brutal. At first, Amazon got big discounts since they were buying non-returnable. Then, predictably, they started returning books and kept the discounts."

She continued: "Publishers were simply too fearful and too powerless to stand up to their biggest customer. And then Amazon started added all manner of fees, effectively increasing their discount even further. To the extent that Amazon was able to discount books to lure customers away from other booksellers, publishers were effectively subsidizing Amazon's growth and dominance while watching their margins erode.”

Melville’s Johnson made many of the same points, lamenting that the government’s lack of action up until now and allowing Amazon to use books as a "loss leader" got the company to where it is today. The government further strengthened Amazon’s hand, Johnson maintained, when it sued the major publishers over their e-book pricing policies. That decision “really pounded Amazon's suppliers, and thus altered the business of making and selling books, probably irrevocably.”

While Johnson holds out hope that the government might prevail, he wonders what action it can take to reverse the damage already done. "I can't imagine Amazon being so crippled as to allow for a serious competitor to arise, at least so far as the book business is concerned," he said.

Caine had a more hopeful point of view: “By limiting Amazon's anticompetitive toolkit, all retailers will feel the benefit of a more level playing field, including booksellers. But no matter what happens, today's suit is great news. Best case scenario? Amazon gets broken up to ensure they have to fairly compete with rivals. Worst case scenario? Even if the suit doesn't go very far, Amazon self-regulates due to increased government pressure, and discovery exposes data to confirm information about their tactics that we've long suspected. Though not ideal, even that would be good news. A big day for people who believe in a level playing field!”
The FTC, along with its state partners, are seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that would prohibit Amazon from engaging in what the government called its "unlawful conduct," and would "pry loose Amazon’s monopolistic control to restore competition.” Amazon has denied all charges, and in a blog post sent to its partners contends that if the government prevails, consumers will suffer.

Federal Anti-Trust Suit Filed Against Amazon
In the first weeks of the war between Israel and Hamas, Nancy Andrews read about American college presidents under fire and something nagged at her.
Why, she wondered, did it seem like so many of those presidents were women?

Dr. Andrews, who was the first female dean of Duke Medical School and until last year the board chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, looked up the list of federal discrimination complaints filed against colleges and universities since the start of 2022. The vast majority — 80 percent — were against universities led by women, even though just 30 percent of colleges and universities nationwide have female presidents. Of the seven complaints filed in the weeks after the war began, all were seeking investigations of schools led by women.

Then four presidents were summoned by Congress, under threat of subpoena, to answer for what Republicans called the rampant antisemitism engulfing their campuses. All were women: Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Minouche Shafik of Columbia, who escaped to a prior commitment outside the country.

“Four women presidents, all new in their roles, far too new to have shaped the culture on their campuses, called before Congress? Of course there’s a pattern,” Dr. Andrews said. “The question is, What’s the agenda? Is it to take down women leaders? To attack elite universities through a perceived vulnerability? To further a political purpose?”

Privately if not always publicly, other women in the academy described a similar reaction to the spectacle around the hearing on Dec. 5 and the fallout since: Ms. Magill and Dr. Gay resigned, their critics made it clear they were coming for Dr. Kornbluth, and last week, prominent male donors demanded the ouster of Cornell president Martha Pollack, too.

Almost invariably, the women will run through a list of qualifiers and questions. Yes, there might have been plagiarism, in the case of Dr. Gay, and the issue of race to consider. Yes, the presidents sounded so lawyerly, so coached, at the hearing: Why couldn’t they have more passionately declared their opposition to slogans encouraging genocide? 

But then there are the suspicions in the other direction: If the question was safety, why didn’t Congress summon the (male) presidents of Yale and the University of Chicago, where pro-Palestinian groups occupied quads and administrative offices? Underlying all the conversations was the most maddening, familiar and ultimately unanswerable question of all: Would a man have been treated the same way?

Nancy Gertner, a law professor at Harvard and a retired federal judge who filed some of the earliest lawsuits on behalf of women denied tenure in the 1980s and 90s, said the measure of discrimination in those cases was whether women were subject to stricter scrutiny, or held to a different standard. To her mind, both were true for the female presidents.

“Had there been three men at that table,” Ms. Gertner said, “it would not have gone from ‘bad performance’ to ‘you’re not qualified.’”

To some women in the academy, merely having to ask the question was especially frustrating, as the school year had started with more female leaders than ever in higher education — a third of all presidents, six out of eight in the Ivy League. 
“This is a momentous change in and of itself,” said Daphna Shohamy, a neuroscientist and director of the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia. “Of course, we would expect that women, like all leaders, be held to the highest standards.” Still, she said, “It’s striking that the only leaders that were condemned to this degree were women. How do we know how much of this is simple accountability and how much is the effect of the same biases that held women back from leadership positions for so long? At the moment, I think it is difficult to disentangle these issues.”

The Problem of Perceived ‘Fit’

The increase in female presidents coincides with a crisis in the academy. Polls show a sharp drop in Americans’ trust in higher education, and a rise in the share of those, predominantly Republicans, who agree that the institutions have a negative impact on the country. College presidents worry about drops in enrollment and in alumni donations. The women leading have become the face of diversity, equity and inclusion policies, which are criticized by left and right.
If there is concern about gender discrimination on campus, it’s lately been about the question of what’s happened to young men, whose enrollment has been dropping since the 1980s. Women now outnumber them, roughly 60-40, among undergraduates. As for female presidents, the proportion looks positively egalitarian when compared with the Fortune 500.

But those numbers can obscure the stubborn disparities for women in academia. They make up only about 45 percent of professors on the tenure track, and around 33 percent of full professors, below what would be expected given that women have long earned more than half of all doctorates.

The big jump in the number of female presidents came between 2021 and 2023, rising to 33 percent from 20 percent at what the American Council on Education distinguishes as the nation’s top research institutions. It was a shift that seemed overdue, given the representation of women among students. But trustees also looked for a different kind of leader for the post-Covid, post-George Floyd moment.

Presenting Ms. Magill as the new president of Penn in 2022, trustees cited her warmth and compassion, her “unusual humility” and “genuine care,” as well as her experience promoting D.E.I. The announcements went on to list some of her extensive accomplishments as well, including how as dean of Stanford Law School, her role before she became provost of the University of Virginia, she had pulled in the biggest-ever alumni donation and hired roughly 30 percent of the faculty. Yet even there, they noted that she had made time to teach and host students at her home.

Pitching her as “campus mom” had its appeal, but it didn’t fit the traditional expectations of what it takes to run a university. “You have to be kind of an asshole to be president of Harvard,” Larry Summers told me in the summer of 2017, as Harvard began its search to replace Drew Gilpin Faust, its first female president, who had succeeded Dr. Summers. 

Campus politics are famously vicious, even more so as universities have simultaneously become a political target and a big business. All the shareholders — students, parents, faculty, lawmakers, donors, alumni — think their demands are the most important. Managing budgets and egos requires projecting decisiveness, a quality expected from men and often bristled at in women. “People do expect you to be more nurturing,” said Ana Mari Cauce, the president of the University of Washington. 

It can be hard for women to win: During racial justice protests in 2020, student-made posters on campus portrayed Dr. Cauce as moody and angry, and insincere for meeting with students but not agreeing to all of their demands. “The stereotype of being a woman is different from the stereotype of being a leader,” she said. “You’re either good at one and bad at the other, or vice versa.”

It’s conventionally recalled that Dr. Summers himself was forced to resign after he mused that the lack of female STEM professors could be attributed to women’s lesser “intrinsic aptitude” in math — a lawsuit accusing Harvard of antisemitism cites this as evidence of the university’s hypocrisy. But the actual chronology suggests that it is more an example of the leeway granted men. Dr. Summers had clashed with prominent Black scholars four years earlier, and he did not resign until more than a year after his comments on women in science. The immediate prompt was a faculty revolt over revelations that suggested he had protected a friend implicated in a federal fraud investigation that Harvard had paid $26.5 million to settle.

A long line of research talks about the problem of perceived “fit”: Prestigious fields are dominated by men, so men in those fields are considered the norm, especially as leaders. Women are perceived — by men and women alike — to be “at least slightly unsuited to that profession,” as Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at CUNY, wrote in her book “Why So Slow: The Advancement of Women.” The same goes for anyone else who does not look like the norm; Black women get caught in what has been called the “double bind.”

Ruth Simmons, the former president of Smith, Brown and Prairie View A&M, recalled the resistance she faced when she proposed that Brown adopt need-blind admissions, as every other Ivy had already done. Board members worried it would break the bank. Dr. Simmons, the first Black president in the Ivy League, told them it was the right thing to do, and that she could raise the money to pay for it. But she remains convinced that the reason they let her do it was that she was also on the board of Goldman Sachs. (Students, by contrast, complained that her Goldman affiliation brought shame on the university.)

Board members and big donors can pose particular challenges for women, coming as they often do from the male-dominated world of finance. The first rumblings of trouble for Ms. Magill, over a Palestinian literature festival featuring speakers with a record of antisemitic statements, came in the financial press. Male donors, several who are prominent hedge fund managers, went into activist shareholder mode, taking to CNBC and social media to declare the presidents who testified incompetent. 

Following Ms. Magill’s resignation, Marc Rowan, the chair of the board of advisers at Penn’s Wharton School of Business and her loudest critic, sent trustees a letter urging them to consider exercising more power over decisions traditionally reserved for presidents, such as tenure and free speech policies. After the congressional hearing, Mr. Rowan and Ronald Lauder, another prominent Penn donor and Magill critic, held a fund-raiser for the Republican congresswoman who ordered the college presidents to testify.

‘A Lethal Error for a Woman’

Are women more likely to end up in vulnerable positions? Social psychologists have proposed the idea of the “glass cliff” to describe the phenomenon of women who become leaders in times of crisis. In institutions not used to female leaders, they are seen as weaker. Subject to greater scrutiny, they tend to fail sooner. 

“It’s not clear whether they’re selected because it’s a difficult time and people think women can make it better when things are bad, or if women are really set up, inadvertently or advertently,” said Madeline Heilman, an emerita professor at New York University who has conducted decades of experiments on sex bias in the workplace. Whatever the case, she said, “if they both start well and a man does poorly, people offer excuses and other reasons before they see it as indicative of what he’s like. For a woman, it fits into the stereotype of not being qualified. What is seen as a mistake for men is a lethal error for a woman.”

Decades of experiments show other ways that stereotypes disadvantage women. Men and women alike are too stingy when evaluating women and too generous when evaluating men, whether what’s being judged is their height or the strength of their C.V. Studies of millions of scientific papers find that those with women as lead author are far less likely to be cited than those led by men. Reports on the status of women on individual campusesand from national organizations document marginalization and persistent disrespect. Taken in isolation, such episodes can seem small, but they add up, leaving female professors earning less and taking longer to be promoted, irrespective of productivity. Fed up, many “senior” women leave.

Some women who went on to become presidents say they persisted by putting on blinders to discrimination. That may be harder to do now. Presidential search firms report that candidates are withdrawing their names from consideration for the many open presidencies — including women and people of color.

“It kind of amazes me that people want to become a president,” said Dr. Simmons, who left Prairie View early after the chancellor of the Texas A&M system attempted to curb her authority over hiring. “What madness, really.”



The Campus Wars Aren’t About Gender … Are They?
By Kate Zernike