(2 articles) Why do colleges have legacy admissions? It started as a way to keep out Jews. | How Bach Will Save Your Soul: German Philosopher Josef Pieper on the Hidden Source of Music’s Supreme Power

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Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Why do colleges have legacy admissions? It started as a way to keep out Jews.    Standardized tests. Interviews. Extracurricular activities. In the early 20th century, universities used these tactics to ensure their students were predominantly Protestant. Should college students gain admission based on academic merit—or who their parents are? That question has become more pertinent than ever with the U.S. Supreme Court’s invalidation of affirmative action and the Department of Education’s announcement of a civil rights investigation into Harvard University’s preferential treatment of “legacy” students with family connections. Although it may seem like a modern problem, it’s only been about a century since U.S. colleges and universities began factoring family relationships and other criteria like extracurricular activities, interviews, and standardized test scores into their admissions decisions. These policies, it turns out, are rooted in anti-Semitic attitudes that aimed to keep Jewish students out of elite schools. Continued here You Might Like � � � � � � � � � How Bach Will Save Your Soul: German Philosopher Josef Pieper on the Hidden Source of Music's Supreme Power    Some of humanity’s greatest and most fertile minds — including Oliver Sacks, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Aldous Huxley, and Friedrich Nietzsche — have contemplated the power of music, and yet the question of why music moves us so remains unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable. Why is it that music can permeate our deepest memories, help us grieve, and save our lives? Four years after his increasingly timely case for shedding the culture-crushing shackles of workaholism, the German philosopher Josef Pieper (May 4, 1904–November 6, 1997) explored the abiding puzzlement of music’s power in a speech delivered during intermission at a Bach concert in 1952, later published under the title “Thoughts About Music” in his small, enormous posthumous essay collection Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation (public library) — a set of reflections titled after Augustine’s beautiful assertion that “only he who loves can sing” (which Van Gogh echoed in his insistence that art and love are one), exploring what Pieper argues is the “hidden root” of the richness of all music, fine art, and poetry: contemplation. Piper begins his Bach speech by examining our age-old preoccupation with pinning down the elusive source of music’s singular enchantment: Continued here

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