At last we can agree with Alec Baldwin on something. He recently tweeted:
"I don’t think anyone involved in the college fraud cases should go to prison. That includes past cases as well. Community service, fines, yes. But prison time, no. My heart goes out to Felicity, Bill Macy and their family,' the actor said in a tweet Wednesday."................
Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
The admission process had become corrupted long before this most recent scandal. Historically, big donors have always gotten their children into a particular university but the numbers of those admitted in such a manner have insignificant–and the university got a new wing for its hospital. However, on a far greater scale has been the admission first of blacks and then “Hispanics” and the denial of admission to white applicants with far higher grade point averages and SAT scores. To compound the corruption the under qualified students have then been kept in school by creating “Black Studies” and “Chicano Studies” majors, whose professors gave a letter grade of A for C work. D work earned a B and F a C. This compensated for poor performance in courses outside the major–and as the years went by fewer and fewer courses outside the major were required. I watched this university subculture grow exponentially during my many years of college teaching until it became a beast that intimidated into submission the few faculty members and deans who did nothing more than raise concerns over the legitimacy and quality of courses in those “studies” and the concomitant grade inflation. The mainstream media will not touch the topic.
Mr. McGrath,
What was certainly the case at the “university” I attended. Nearly every minority student majored in some kind of minority study program. The math and science classes were all white and the social sciences were mostly white, except where the class had an overlap with some nonsense major like Black or Chicano studies. My only interaction with the president of Black Student Union was during a forum on reparations. David Horowitz had given a talk. I asked a question that I now can’t recall, and the president of the BSU stood up and screamed “Why all you white people so mad ’bout reparations. It ain’t your money, its the governments money.” Half the crowd erupted in cheers.
Of course it was the Red Diaper Baby Horowitz who made money denouncing his father as a Communist, showing the truth path of modern conservatives.
Yes. I recall Horowitz prefacing his talk by laying out all of his progressive credentials in an attempt to show how liberal he was, then launching into a top ten list of why reparations should be rejected. As far as I can tell, Horowitz’s only value is in confirming that all of the “movements” of the 60’s were not organic or legitimate, but that they were founded, funded and directed by communists.
These days every one of those “universities” caught in the fraudulent admissions scandals takes large sums of money off government, a good deal of it going, one way and another, towards the subsidizing of student fees. Consequently, those Hollywooders were defrauding government as well as the colleges, and they’re lucky not to have had swat teams plus CNN at the door at 4.00 in the morning.
Two anecdotes. In the 70s colleges decided to stop educating the people they were founded to educate, and to start educating everyone else instead, starting with women, blacks, and hispanics, and going on to include Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Pakistanis, Russians, Koreans–the whole United Nations, in fact. The college I had recently joined was hawking its scholarships in the black ghettoes in the effort to attract black students, & I found myself faced with a frightened student who knew simply nothing. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked an older colleague. “You,” he said, “are supposed to make bricks without straw.”
A year or so later Smith College inaugurated a Black Studies major, and I asked a distinguished philosophy professor there how they had justified that. “Look,” she said, “we allowed the social scientists in fifty years ago, and haven’t had a leg to stand on since.”
Mr. McGrath is of course correct. I worked with a law student from an Ivy League university (which I won’t name). In my constant contact with him, I never once saw him open a book during a break or heard him talk about studying after work. Never talked about going to classes at night either. This was because he didn’t go to class and never did open a book to study. He didn’t have to as his father was Deputy Chief of Police in the same big city as the university. I imagine it was a favor or a payoff to the police. I assume he did have to study for the Bar examination.
He “graduated” and got a pre-arranged job with the District Attorney. He started as a paralegal, learned the ropes and last I heard he got promoted.