RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/16/cuny-college-disgraces-giving-honorary-degree-al-sharpton/

The indictment against Al Sharpton is public record. For more than 35 years of public life, he has proven himself a charlatan and a race hustler. The evidence is irrefutable.

The City University of New York is a lifeline to the examined life and the middle class for generations of poor and working-class students, from Irving Kristol to Colin Powell to me. Medgar Evers College, a senior college within the City University of New York system, intends to confer an honorary degree on Al Sharpton at its June 5, 2019, commencement. Sharpton is many things; a doctor of humane letters is not one of them.

Medgar Evers was a World War II veteran who organized fellow Mississippi NAACP members to obtain the civil rights being denied to black Americans in the 1950s and ’60s. As dangerous as it was noble, he coordinated voter registration drives and boycotts of segregated businesses. Thurgood Marshall said Evers had “more courage than anybody I’ve ever ran across.” Evers gave his life for the advancement of black Americans when a Klansman shot and killed him in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 12, 1963.

By contrast, Sharpton’s greatest achievement has been avoiding criminal prosecution. Sharpton has spent a public career enriching himself under the banner of advancing civil rights. He didn’t calm racial tensions; he inflamed them. He didn’t work for racial healing; he rubbed the wounds raw. Evers was a genuine civil rights leader; Sharpton played one on TV. Simply put, Sharpton is not a good man. He is unworthy of this honor.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sat-to-give-students-adversity-score-to-capture-social-and-economic-background-11557999000

The College Board plans to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT to try to capture their social and economic background, jumping into the debate raging over race and class in college admissions.

This new number, called an adversity score by college admissions officers, is calculated using 15 factors including the crime rate and poverty levels from the student’s high school and neighborhood. Students won’t be told the scores, but colleges will see the numbers when reviewing their applications.

Fifty colleges used the score last year as part of a beta test. The College Board plans to expand it to 150 institutions this fall, and then use it broadly the following year.

How colleges consider a student’s race and class in making admissions decisions is hotly contested. Many colleges, including Harvard University, say a diverse student body is part of the educational mission of a school. A lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants by holding them to a higher standard is awaiting a judge’s ruling. Lawsuits charging unfair admission practices have also been filed against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California system.