RUTHFULLY YOURS

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?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/feds_bust_coaches_and_parents_for_25_million_in_college_admission_bribes_.html
The Justice Department issued indictments across 6 states in a $25 million college admissions bribery and racketeering scandal that implicated nine top college coaches, three performance test administrators, and at least 33 very wealthy parents.

The indicted parents include the television star Lori Loughlin and her fashion designer husband Mossimo Giannulli; the actress Felicity Huffman; and TPG private equity mogul William E. McGlashan Jr.

Justice Department prosecutors for the District of Massachusetts revealed that the fraud and bribery schemes were run by Newport Beach, CA college preparatory consultant William Singer’s Edge College & Career Network and nonprofit ‘Key Worldwide Foundation,’ referred to as “The Key.”

The Key website called referred to itself as “the nation’s largest private life coaching and college counseling company.” Singer was described as a coach and dedicated father who empathized with the stress families endure regarding college acceptances.

Singer has pled guilty to bribing ACT and SAT test administrators, and college coaches from such prestigious schools as Stanford, USC, Yale, Wake Forrest, University of Texas at Austin, Georgetown and UCLA. The scheme involving the creation of phony athletic credentials to justify the recruitment of unqualified applicants, has not ensnared any of the elite university administrators.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/professor-samuel-abrams-spoke-the-truth-he-still-pays-the-price/

Dissenters from campus orthodoxy often need a rare kind of personal fortitude.

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias — in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things — a larger problem has gone mostly unnoticed. Abrams’s research revealed that college administrators are more uniformly progressive even than college faculties. “Liberal staff members,” he wrote, “outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one,” making them the “most left-leaning group on campus.”

At the conclusion of his piece, Abrams made an argument that rang true to my more than 20 years of litigation experience — “ideological imbalance, coupled with [administrators’] agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas.”

This is exactly right. Administrators draft and enforce speech codes. Administrators are responsible for creating campus kangaroo courts. Administrators kick Christian student groups off campus, and administrators often take the lead in designing campus programming that features overwhelmingly progressive voices. While conservative media often focus their ire on random radical professors, administrators are busy engaging in the overwhelming majority of campus censorship.