RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-next-battle-over-racial-preferences

Near the end of July, New York State assemblywoman and Brooklyn Democratic Party chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn took to the Daily News op-ed page to condemn the city’s eight specialized high schools, where a student’s score on a single standardized test determines who gets in—and the student bodies are disproportionately Asian. “New York City’s public specialized high schools are coveted as an equalizing springboard to success,” Bichotte Hermelyn wrote, “but in reality, they are overwhelmingly segregated, thanks to the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) being the sole admission factor.”

Of the more than 22,000 New York City students who took the SHSAT for the 2022–23 academic year, 31 percent were Asian American, 25.8 percent were Latino, 20.7 percent were black, and 17.1 percent were white. Yet just 3.2 percent of black test-takers and 5.7 percent of Latino test-takers received offers to attend the schools, compared with 52.5 percent of Asian American test-takers and 27.8 percent of white test-takers.

The racial imbalance among enrolled students is most pronounced at the three oldest and most elite of the schools—Stuyvesant High School (Stuyvesant), Bronx High School of Science (Bronx Science), and Brooklyn Technical High School (Brooklyn Tech). For the 2021–22 academic year, Asian Americans accounted for 72 percent of Stuyvesant’s student body, 63 percent of Bronx Science’s, and 60 percent of Brooklyn Tech’s. Results from previous years tell a similar story. “I propose getting rid of the current test,” Bichotte Hermelyn wrote. “It’s time to rewrite the laws in New York City and change the paradigm to end segregation in high schools.”

The assemblywoman said nothing explicitly about Asian Americans, but many within Gotham’s Asian American community viewed her proposal as tacitly anti-Asian. One day after the Daily News op-ed, the assemblywoman’s photo, along with her comments about the selective schools, appeared on the front page of several local Chinese newspapers. “AM Bichotte resurrects anti Asian racism by using the end of AA as her excuse to attack admissions to NYC Specialized High Schools,” tweeted Yiatin Chu, founder of the New York political club Asian Wave Alliance. And several elected officials released statements backing the specialized high schools, the SHSAT, and their Asian constituents, who consider a child’s admission to one of the schools as a ticket to advancement.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/a_plague_of_college_student_dishonesty.html

This is not a good time for American higher education, but as bad as this may seem, matters are even worse.  The students themselves are part of the problem when they seek admission to top schools with tactics that are at best questionable and at worst dishonest.

Dishonesty is rampant.  Students will even misrepresent their race or ethnicity.  This is hardly a surprise in today’s academic world that prizes diversity, and admissions officers willingly lower standards to achieve it.  According to one study, some 34% of white students admitted lying about their ethnic identify for purposes of admission or financial aid, with “Native American” being the most popular subterfuge and 13% falsely claiming to be Latino.  Ten percent of these whites checked the African-American ancestry box.  The deceit generally worked: 77% of those lying were admitted.  

Deceit is further encouraged by “college admission counselors” to help youngsters whose families can afford to guide Junior into a school beyond his true academic abilities.  This industry includes independent tutors charging by the hour and firms belonging to the Independent Educational Consultants Association that expertly handle tasks like choosing the best high school courses, providing specialized summer programs, and deciding where to apply, plus tips to handle college interviews and obtaining outstanding letters of recommendation among multiple other services.  

Counselors will manage all the details — even rewrites of your college application essay.  The Varsity Blues scandal that resulted in criminal penalties exposed oft-hidden tactics such as bribes and hiring others to take your exams, but other exposed tactics, notably generous donations to the school, are perfectly legal.  Top-notch consultants can be expensive — as much as $15,260.

The current heightened competition for places at elite schools has, as expected, encouraged innovation.  The online Scholar Launch offers options that start at $3,500 to connect high school students with specialists who will help them write and then publish “a scholarly paper.”  This is not outright fraud, since the students paper will appear in a journal called Scholarly Review that boasts of its thorough review process conducted by “highly accomplished professors and academics,” with the final paper being “published” as a “preprint.”  Scholar Launch is only one of 20 such for-fee sites that help high-schoolers embellish their résumés.

https://thehill.com/opinion/4337687-justifying-hamass-barbarism-on-the-sly-at-georgetown-law/

On Halloween night, a few dozen Georgetown law students gathered stealthily to listen in rapt silence to a live-streamed defense of Hamas’s Oct. 7 mass slaughter of Jews.

The speaker, a fashionably scruffy, dark-haired 25-year-old named Mohammed El-Kurd, wore a tight black T and a leather jacket. He celebrated Hamas as a “liberation movement” and called its Oct. 7 orgy of rape, murder and torture a “resistance tactic.”

Outrage over Oct. 7, he said, was a “discursive crisis” created by “Zionist propaganda” to “disrupt” opposition to Zionist colonization of Palestine.

Hamas’s hostage-taking had good “political reasons,” he said. “Contrary to the western popular imagination,” he added, the hostages are “treated relatively well” — “giv[en] nice dresses and food.” Hostages have said so themselves, in Hamas-issued videos, he told his audience, but Western media aren’t reporting it.

Two years ago, Time Magazine named El-Kurd “one of the world’s 100 most influential people.” His Georgetown Law sponsor, “Students for Justice in Palestine” (which calls Israel a “settler colony”), billed him as a “journalist,” but he leaned in to more direct action. Condemning CNN and The New York Times for “aiding and abetting…genocide,” he urged students to “think of ways that we can tangibly destroy these organizations.” 

“We are at war,” he said, “and we have a duty to engage and participate in that war.”

I had learned about El-Kurd from his appearance at Georgetown Law a year and a half earlier. It set off a firestorm. He had previously written that “Zionists” are ”fascists” and “terrorists,” “harvest organs” from Palestinian “martyrs,” and have “an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood.” Our dean, William Treanor, had allowed his appearance. Dozens of my colleagues joined in a statement calling out the dean for failing to condemn “the vilest of antisemitic hate.”