RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-admissions-scandal-and-racial-preferences/

Peter N. Kirsanow is an attorney and a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

The recent revelation concerning college admissions is disconcerting, but not any more than racial preferences in admissions.As Roger Clegg notes below, the Left, never letting a scandal go to waste, immediately leapt on the admissions scandal as a justification for racial preferences. The disingenuousness of their argument is matched only by its incoherence.

Ever since Grutter v. Michigan, the lie about racial preferences is that a college applicant’s race is only considered as a flexible “plus” factor, a mere “feather on the scale,” in the admissions process. The truth, however, is that in nearly every case race is not a feather on the scale, but an anvil. At some universities race renders a black or Hispanic applicant not 10 percent more likely to be admitted over a similarly situated white or Asian comparative; not even 15 percent more likely to be admitted. Rather, at some selective schools the racial preference makes black and Hispanic applicants up to 500 times more likely to be admitted than similarly situated white and Asian applicants.

As Stuart Taylor notes, during the discovery process in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard  (the pending complaint brought by Asian students alleging racial discrimination in Harvard’s admissions program) documents produced by Harvard showed that the average combined SAT scores of Asian students admitted between 2010 — 2015 were 218 points higher than those of black admittees.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/college-admissions-scandal-bankrupt-elite/

These people aren’t interested in the common good. They are interested in themselves.

Every element of the college admissions scandal, a.k.a “Operation Varsity Blues,” is fascinating.

There are the players: the Yale dad who, implicated in a securities-fraud case, tipped the feds off to the caper; a shady high-school counselor turned admissions consultant; the 36-year-old Harvard grad who sold his talents for standardized testing to the highest bidder; the comely actresses from Full House and Desperate Housewives; the fashion designer; the casino magnate. Who would have thought that one of the major headlines of 2019 would be “Lori Loughlin released on bond”?

There are the children: the social media influencer (yes this is a thing) who was told of her parents’ arrest while vacationing on the yacht of a USC trustee; the mom who submitted doctored photographs to USC to portray her son as a championship pole-vaulter; the place kicker for a high school with no football team; and the rap artist from the Upper East Side who defended his mom and dad to the press while smoking a blunt.

There are the means: paying tens of thousands of dollars to Rick Singer, Trinity ‘86, who bribed athletic directors and coaches, doctored student résumés, and arranged for clients to take college-admittance exams alongside a “proctor” who answered the questions for them. The icing on the cake: Some payments were made to a charitable foundation so the parents could get the tax write-off. What a country.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/thomas-jefferson-john-adams-friendship-liberal-education/

The Founders’ friendship can save our paltry civics education.

Citizenship in America is in a troubling state. In 2015, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni conducted a survey of college graduates which found that only 28.4 percent could name James Madison as the father of the Constitution. Thirty-nine percent did not know that Congress had the war power, and roughly 45 percent did not know the length of congressional terms. In 2017, the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that 37 percent of Americans could not name any of the rights in the First Amendment, and that only 26 percent could name all three branches of government. Gallup poll results from 2018 reveal that young Americans’ views of capitalism and socialism have switched since 2010, with only 45 percent of respondents now professing a positive view of the capitalist system. A November 2018 YouGov poll revealed that Americans’ patriotism and knowledge of civics was troublingly low. More recently, in January 2019, Gallup released survey results which showed that 30 percent of younger Americans, a record high, would like to permanently leave the U.S. Unfortunately, these results are not shocking. Each new poll extends the long line of depressing findings.

The answer to this crisis of civics and citizenship is a renewal of America’s commitment to liberal education. A consensus is growing among many on the left and right that a reinvigorated system of liberal education is necessary if we want a society of active, engaged, and informed citizens. As an article published in the Association of American Colleges & Universities’ journal Liberal Education noted, liberal education “is the best means to the desired end of having a citizenry with the knowledge, skills, and wisdom necessary to participate in democratic governance.”