RUTHFULLY YOURS

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?

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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/donald-trumps-campus-free-speech-order-and-our-cold-civil-war/

In principle, I strongly support President Trump’s plan to issue an executive order to protect freedom of speech on campus. Yes, there are many potential problems with federal intervention, but there is really no good alternative.

I don’t know what will become of our ever more bitterly divided nation, but I do know there’ll be no peaceful coexistence for our warring camps without a cooling of the campus free-speech crisis. It’s no use looking to universities for a resolution. They are caught in a quicksand of their own creation and are well past the point of self-extraction. This isn’t just a university problem either. The extremism of our politics; its historical naïveté; the bitter mutual recriminations that dog our every debate; the country’s rising divisions along lines of religion, ethnicity, sex, and race; and the endangered liberties even of Americans well past college age; are all outcomes of the noxious spirits the academy has been injecting into the body politic for nearly six decades.

There are certainly good reasons to be wary of federal intervention in matters of local concern. We would much prefer our campuses to heal themselves. Yet it is foolish and blinkered at this point to believe that they will. That does not remove the dangers of ham-handed, biased, or counter-productive federal action. Yet it is equally mistaken to treat campus free speech as just another case in which unfettered markets will flourish in the absence of outside interference. The campus is the opposite of a free market. It’s protected from market forces by tenure, and further insulated from public dismay — and bursting economic bubbles — by hundreds of billions of dollars in annual government subsidies.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/10/a-million-dollar-punch/

President Trump on March 2 announced he would issue an executive order addressing free speech on college and university campuses. The order itself hasn’t been issued, and so far there has been little indication of what it might say. That hasn’t stopped a torrent of criticism aimed at what Trump might do. The higher education establishment is worried. The president’s words suggest that significant funding could be at stake.

This is what President Trump actually said about the executive order during his two-hour speech at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual convention. First, he made some general comments:We reject oppressive speech codes, censorship, political correctness and every other attempt by the hard left to stop people from challenging ridiculous and dangerous ideas. These ideas are dangerous. Instead we believe in free speech, including online and including on campus.Then, after introducing Hayden Williams, the young man who had been punched while distributing conservative pamphlets at UC Berkeley, Trump continued:Today I am proud to announce that I will very soon be signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars.If they want our dollars, and we give it to them by the billions, they’ve got to allow people like Hayden and many other great young people and old people to speak. Free speech. And if they don’t, it will be costly. That will be signed soon.

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

Another hate crime hoax has convulsed an expensive private college and yielded a mass demonstration by “more than 100” black students (out of a student body of 1,450), and the predictable list of seven demands, including race-based hiring favoring blacks and brainwashing (AKA mandatory “cultural competency” training).

So far as I can tell, no national media have picked up the story of the arrest of Ajani Arthur, a black student at Goucher College (tuition: $43,440) who allegedly created graffiti that “depicted swastikas, the letters ‘KKK’ and appeared to include the last names of four black students, including Arthur.” A previous incident last November, one floor below where the current graffiti were found and attributed to Arthur, said, “all ‘n——‘ on campus would be killed.”

The U.K. Daily Mail is doing the job that the American national media refuse to do, with the most extensive coverage of the fraud (though local media, including the Baltimore Sun, Washington Times, and the alleged perp’s hometown paper, along with the College Fix, managed to take notice). A Google search for Goucher College yields no note of the incident at all:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/classics-departments-threatened-race-gender-politics/

A professional association rebukes a scholar for suggesting that a colleague got his job because of his merit, not his race.

What would Livy think? The ancient historian had a high regard for facts. The field in which Livy now lives, however — classics — is finding facts more and more of a nuisance.

In January, a classicist named Mary Frances Williams stood up at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies and asked about the strange views that several panelists had promulgated on “the future of Classics.” One of the panelists, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an assistant professor at Princeton’s classics departments, inveighed that the whole discipline was guilty of “the systemic marginalization of people of color in the credentialed and accredited knowledge production of the discipline.” Professor Padilla said much more in this patois of “critical race theory” all to the effect that white people should shut up and get out of the way.

Williams, an independent scholar with a Ph.D. from the University of Texas, decided to speak up for the merit of teaching students works by the great authors of the past. Thrown off stride by one of the panelists, Williams responded, pointing to Padilla, “You may have got your job because you’re black, but I’d prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”

It was a maladroit sentence, though perhaps not a great deal more maladroit than Padilla’s response, “I hope the field dies, that you’ve outlined [sic], dies, and that it dies as swiftly as possible!”

The outcome of this exchange is that Williams was ejected from the meeting and the Association of Ancient Historians fired her as an editor of its newsletter. Padilla, by contrast, received a public “affirmation of his value to our department and the future of classics” from the chairman of the Princeton department.