RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/an-american-dilemma-stuyvesant-high-school/

This article in the New York Times is getting attention, understandably. It highlights an old, painful issue, involving “merit,” race, and ethnicity. The headline over the article is “Only 7 Black Students Got Into N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots.”

That high school is Stuyvesant. As the Times reports, students get into such schools “by acing a single high-stakes exam that tests their mastery of math and English.” This leads to racial and ethnic outcomes that are deemed undesirable. At Stuyvesant, 74 percent of freshmen next year — call it three-quarters — will be Asian.

New York mayor Bill de Blasio, among others, has called for the scrapping of the entrance exam and the overhaul of the admissions process. I have a memory, from 2001. Indeed, via the power of Google, I will quote the Times:

Contending that standardized college tests have distorted the way young people learn and worsened educational inequities, the president of the University of California is proposing an end to the use of SAT’s as a requirement for admission to the state university system he oversees, one of the largest and most prestigious.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/elite-universities-ignore-merit-advance-progressive-agenda/

Higher-ed institutions have long ignored merit and squelched freedom, all while failing to educate.

A number of liberal bastions are daily being hammered — especially the elite university and Silicon Valley.

A Yale and a Stanford, or Facebook and Google, assume — for the most part rightly — that each is so loudly progressive that the public, federal and state regulators, and politicians would of course turn a blind eye to anything questionable that these social-justice institutions did.

And they have done a lot of quite questionable things — cynically (and in medieval fashion) using their progressive veneer to exempt themselves from the consequences of their actions, so that they may do what otherwise would earn scrutiny and worse for most other American institutions.

Our nation’s marquee universities, such as Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown — with dozens more no doubt to be named — recently got caught selling admittances. Or rather a few of their employees somehow freelanced under administration noses and sold entrances for cash. That is apparently our modern version of crooked 14th-century clerics putting out to bid penances to thieves and fornicators who wished to buy their way into heaven.

At some of our “best” universities, renegade coaches in minor sports took bribes in exchange for lies claiming that otherwise likely unqualified students were actually “athletes” and thereby could be greased into their colleges by middlemen who helped doctor résumés and test scores.

The irony is rich. The offenders were not the children in Dayton or Great Falls of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” or of the late John McCain’s “crazies,” or of Barack Obama’s “clingers” — it was not they who were using their “white privilege” to break the law as they virtue-signaled their racialist disdain of the working classes (who were without white privilege). What a strange psychological mechanism: Wealthy white liberals apparently squared the circle of their own private and insider privilege by fobbing “white privilege” off on those who don’t have it — as they used their privilege cynically for their own children.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/triggered-by-weinsteins-harvard-lawyer-11552950103

Harvard has opened an investigation into law professor Ronald Sullivan, who earlier this year joined Harvey Weinstein’s criminal-defense team. Some undergraduates complained that Mr. Sullivan’s decision to represent Mr. Weinstein, who is charged with rape in New York, puts them at risk. By taking the complaint seriously, Harvard puts its commitment to identity politics above the core tenets of due process.

Student backlash was immediate when the New York Post reported in late January that Mr. Sullivan would be representing Mr. Weinstein. A visual and environmental studies major started an online petition to remove Mr. Sullivan from his position as faculty dean of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s 12 undergraduate residential houses. Mr. Sullivan’s choice of client was “deeply trauma-inducing,” and shows that Mr. Sullivan doesn’t “value the safety of students,” the petition announced. Would Winthrop residents “really want to one day accept [a] Diploma,” the petition asked, from someone who “believes it is okay to defend” Mr. Weinstein?

Six Harvard dorms held “listening sessions” attended by emissaries from the university’s Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, whose website urged traumatized students to seek mental-health services and other help from Harvard’s massive Title IX bureaucracy. Harvard’s dean of students and its lead Title IX coordinator attended a student protest outside the main administration building, where the ubiquitous Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response doled out hot chocolate.

Still-unidentified vandals spray-painted #MeToo slogans such as “your silence is violence” on Winthrop House. The record reveals no condemnation from Harvard officials and requests for comment were not returned at press time. The Association of Black Harvard Women complained that Mr. Sullivan (who is black) had “failed” female African-Americans at Harvard and had compromised his ability to support “survivors . . . as they deal with their trauma.”