RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.sarahlawrencephoenix.com/campus/2019/3/11/demands-westlands-sit-in-50-years-of-shame

“@JonHaidt (https://twitter.com/JonHaidt If you want to dispute the narrative that students are overprotected at elite liberal arts colleges such as Sarah Lawrence, you probably should not put a demand for unlimited free fabric softener in your 3rd demand (out of more than 90) to the president.”

On the morning of Mon. Mar. 11, the Diaspora Coalition entered Westlands for a 24-hour occupation:

The following is a full re-print of their demands.

““Sarah Lawrence is and must be a community that welcomes and nurtures people of all races. The college rejects all forms of racism.” — Memo, dated March 1, signed by the administration.

We students of color do not believe this statement to be true… the college community has failed to meet the liberal principles it professes. If we students of color are truly part of this community, if healing is ever to take place, there must be action. – Concerned Students of Color, 1989

We, the Diaspora Coalition, are a group of students who can speak to the injustices imposed on people of color by this institution on a daily basis. The Diaspora Coalition was established this fall in order to address the pain of marginalized students as well as to advise the administration on how to best address this pain. Each of us has seen this administration repeatedly diminish the hard work of student activists who merely want a quality education and the personalized curriculum that SLC promises. We extend solidarity to all people of color in the Sarah Lawrence Community, including international students, graduate students, faculty, and staff.

In spring of 2018, Inaugural President Cristle Collins Judd held a meeting with students of color in Common Ground where we implored she respond to the demands of #BlackoutSLC2015. Our inquiries were evaded and our time wasted. This school year, we are losing our Chief Diversity Officer, Director of Diversity and Campus Engagement, and Assistant Director of Diversity and Campus Engagement. We blame the administration’s lack of tangible commitment to diversity for these losses. There has been no word from the administration on restoring the department.

On March 11, 2019, the Diaspora Coalition, along with our allied peers, will occupy Westlands, make calls to the board, and present demands that describe not only our ideal vision for the school but also what we see as the only acceptable terms by which Sarah Lawrence can remain for the students and against hate. If the College does not accept these demands, it will no longer be hailed as a progressive institution but instead remembered for its inability to truly embody its self-proclaimed progressive ideology and support all students against an international rising tide of white supremacy and fascism. Sarah Lawrence was not founded on racial or economic equality and has not implemented sufficient strategies to dismantle systematic oppression to be sustainable or safe for marginalized people in an increasingly dangerous political climate. Low-income students should not have to question if they belong at this institution. We have worked tirelessly to make our voices heard and demands met because we believe in a Sarah Lawrence that can be for the people, by the people.

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.”

https://www.city-journal.org/college-admissions-cheating-scandal

The celebrity college-admissions cheating scandal has two clear takeaways: an elite college degree has taken on wildly inflated importance in American society, and the sports-industrial complex enjoys wildly inflated power within universities. Thirty-three moguls and TV stars allegedly paid admissions fixer William Singer a total of $25 million from 2011 to 2018 to doctor their children’s high school resumes—sending students to private SAT and ACT testing sites through false disability claims, for example, where bought-off proctors would raise the students’ scores. Singer forged athletic records, complete with altered photos showing the student playing sports in which he or she had little experience or competence. Corrupt sports directors would then recommend the student for admission, all the while knowing that they had no intention of playing on the school’s team.

None of this could have happened if higher education had not itself become a corrupt institution, featuring low classroom demands, no core knowledge acquisition, low grading standards, fashionable (but society-destroying) left-wing activism, luxury-hotel amenities, endless partying, and huge expense. Students often learn virtually nothing during their college years, as University of California, Irvine, education school dean Richard Arum writes in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. They may even lose that pittance of knowledge with which they entered college. Seniors at Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Berkeley scored lower in an undemanding test of American history than they did as freshmen, according to a 2007 study commissioned by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. College is only desultorily about knowledge acquisition, at least outside of the STEM fields (and even those fields are under assault from identity politics).

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/14/do-you-want-your-kids-to-go-to-an-elite-college-or-get-an-education-theyre-not-the-same-thing/

Do You Want Your Kids To Go To An Elite College Or Get An Education? They’re Not The Same Thing Mark Hemingway
College entrance has become the primary, all-consuming educational goal for far too many parents, at the expense of understanding what constitutes a good education and what it should accomplish.

The Biggest Higher Education Scam Isn’t Hollywood Fraud, It’s Academia Itself By Inez Feltscher Stepman

The justifications for propping up universities, which often act as little more than elite sorting mechanisms as well as left-wing indoctrination centers, are growing thin.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/14/biggest-higher-education-scam-isnt-hollywood-fraud-academia/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-college-admissions-racket-11552519849
Coming soon to a theater near you: The movie about wealthy and famous parents who paid a California fixer to cheat their child’s way into universities. Many readers have heard about the charges against 50 or so people on Tuesday for this real-life fraud that is a political and cultural indictment of the racket known as college admissions. The details feature William “Rick” Singer, who ran a college-admissions outfit in Newport Beach. Among the portfolio of illegal services he’s admitted to providing: Helping students cheat on standardized tests, sometimes by paying a proctor to correct answers later.

Actress Lori Loughlin allegedly paid a $500,000 bribe to pretend her daughters were recruits for the University of Southern California crew team. The fake-athlete line seems to have been popular and has ensnared coaches at Yale, Stanford and elsewhere. Prosecutors say more indictments are possible.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/the_bigger_scandal_in_college_admissions_is_what_is_legal.html

Alleged fraud marks the explosive indictments relating to college admissions practices revealed yesterday, but a much bigger scandal consists of all the legal ways ruling class privilege replicates itself through the vehicle of higher education.

I am grateful to the U.S. attorneys who pressed ahead with their investigation of the alleged criminal acts underlying the college admissions scandal rocking higher education today. And I await further indictments that apparently will be forthcoming. But I know that the people who got caught, including those whose indictments may come later, are the tip of the iceberg (in Alan Dershowitz’s phrase) and were foolish in committing actual crimes, when completely legal ways of accomplishing the same ends are so widely available.

Both U.S. attorney Andrew Lelling and Alan Dershowitz, the emeritus professor of law who spent half a century at Harvard Law School, acknowledged yesterday that those with enough money to donate a building can perfectly legally gain preferential entrance to elite higher education for their kids.

Appearing Fox News yesterday, Dershowitz explained:

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/13/celebrity-college-admissions-scheme-hurt-good-kids/

This month, millions of high school seniors will open emails and envelopes to find out if they were accepted to the colleges of their choice. Thanks to Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin, and others who allegedly participated in admissions fraud, these college seniors will all wonder if they truly got a fair hearing before the admissions board.

Huffman, Loughlin, and dozens of others are accused of knowingly paying tens of thousands of dollars to a sham charity run by William Rick Singer, who then apparently used the money to bribe admissions test administrators and college sports coaches. The fraud involved bribing test proctors to “help” specific students or having someone else take the SAT in a student’s place, as well as pasting the faces of these kids onto photos of people playing sports. According to U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling, Singer’s sham foundation received $25 million to get the children of wealthy parents into schools like Stanford, Georgetown, Yale, the University of Southern California, and the University of Texas.

Traditionally, wealthy parents have had two options for using money to boost their kids’ chance of admission at elite schools. The first is slapping their last name across a university building for a hefty donation with unwritten expectations attached. This route is only open to families with hundreds of thousands of dollars to spare. A hefty donation benefits the college and ideally allows the school to devote more resources to helping students, but it doesn’t make the donor’s child more qualified than other students in the applicant pool.The other method is far more accessible, and entirely ethical: Pay for private tutoring, intense sports training, or coaching in some other extracurricular activity. This method benefits the kid, because it’s geared toward expanding his or her abilities.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-magic-talisman-of-a-degree-from-one-of-the-best-schools/

The Felicity Huffman/Lori Loughlin college-bribery scandal is one of those stories that look weird when you see the first headline, stranger when you read the details, and utterly otherworldly when you think about it.

For example, Loughlin’s daughter Olivia Jade Giannulli posted a video in which she said she was only interested in attending college for the parties: “I don’t know how much of school I’m gonna attend but I’m gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all,” she said. “But I do want the experience of like game days, partying . . . I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”

Giannulli is one of those child-of-a-celebrity “social-media influencers” whom we’ve never heard of but who is apparently popular with some younger online social-media demographic.

How pervasive is the mentality that everyone needs to go to college? Apparently so pervasive that even celebrity parents believe their “social-media influencer” children need four years at a good school. “Look, honey, you’ll never be the next Kim Kardashian without at least an undergrad degree, and maybe grad school.”

These kids already had the giant advantage of wealthy parents! Their parents were wealthy and/or famous or both! Did these parents believe their children wouldn’t achieve their dreams if they had gone to one of the top 50 or 100 schools in U.S. News & World Report rankings instead of one in the top 25? Was the option of applying to a lesser school really that unbearable to these families?