One day in my ninth-grade year at my private day and boarding school, I heard shocking news: A student whose last name adorned one of our dormitories would be kicked out of school. His crime? Breaking the school’s alcohol and drug use policy. I went home that day and told my parents, dismayed at what had just happened: The child of one of my school’s biggest benefactors was being expelled. For many years, I had believed that certain students with important last names would be above the rules. But I was wrong. My high school tried its best to apply rules equally to students. Going into university, I suspected that I would similarly find this equal application of school rules. But I was wrong again.

At Northwestern University, I would not be surprised if the progeny of mega-donors experience leniency when it comes to breaking the rules. What does surprise me, however, is how another group of students receives preferential treatment thanks to a different immutable characteristic: their race.

This past month, news came out that the pair of students who copied our campus newspaper’s designs would be facing Class A misdemeanor charges. The newspapers featured a headline accusing Northwestern of complicity in the supposed genocide of Gazans and poked fun at Jews who take their birthright. When news of these charges circulated campus, there was enormous public backlash. Why? The Student Publishing Company (SPC), which oversees The Daily Northwestern, supposedly engaged in clear discrimination by pursuing these charges because they happened to be against black students. In accordance with the university’s values of anti-racism, there was no other conceivable explanation for the SPC’s decision to press charges aside from its deep-seated hate of Northwestern’s black community.

Unfortunately, the SPC obsequiously bent the knee to students’ demands that the charges be dropped and decided to intercede with the state attorney. The SPC issued a letter, saying: “It’s only been in the last four days that we learned more information about the people charged: that they are students; that they are Black. Some may disagree, but these facts matter to us.”

This recent incident is not the only one in which a particular group experiences preferential treatment because of its melanin content. This past spring, our student government announced the distribution of $29,000 with $11,000 of it going to a single student group: For Members Only, Northwestern’s premier Black Student Alliance. On a campus with hundreds of student organizations, one group receiving over a third of distributed funds is blatantly unfair. But such complaints about fairness raised by a single courageous ASG senator were dismissed by declaring that lowering FMO’s funding would be the real unfair action. And what was FMO spending this money on? A spring break trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to “learn about and engage with a landmark of Black history.”

I have now learned that it is not just mega-donors’ children who experience a double standard of justice; groups that are the subject of white guilt do as well. Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald has summed this up in two words: black privilege. I repeat this phrase with great trepidation, however. It is clearly not true that all blacks experience preferential treatment or double standards. But when one attends an elite university, the privileges that were once exclusively bestowed upon extraordinarily wealthy WASPs are now being granted to particular racial groups.

The creation of a quasi-racial spoil system in academia is emblematic of a much larger problem facing The Great American Nation: the absence of an individualistic spirit that tempers the collectivist desire to favor some at the expense of others. Given that the university serves as a harbinger of intellectual fads that eventually trickle down to the masses, a change in society’s attitudes about race will be limited by the extent to which universities move away from this new spoil system and toward a universalist framework that does not put group identity at the forefront of decision-making and discipline.

Still, as bad as things sound, I hold a lot of hope that eventually the tide will turn and the university will be made great again.