Fair enough rundown of the indictments. The piece could also be titled
something like, Amorality and Entitled Wealth. We saw something happening in
our ™ movement community of the 1980’s 90’s, & ‘00’s with the grooming of
access, quid pro quo, of the monied class. The moral dissonance was a lot, too.
Jai Guru Dev.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, wrote :
This article by The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan is one of the most perceptive
and deliciously written I have ever had the pleasure to read. At the very
least, please savor the first two paragraphs!
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/what-college-admissions-scandal-reveals/586468/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/what-college-admissions-scandal-reveals/586468/
They Had It Coming The parents indicted in the college-admissions scandal were
responding to a changing America, with rage at being robbed of what they
believed was rightfully theirs.
APR 4, 2019 CAITLIN FLANAGAN
https://www.theatlantic.com/author/caitlin-flanagan/ is a contributing editor
at The Atlantic. She is the author of Girl Land
http://www.amazon.com/Girl-Land-Caitlin-Flanagan/dp/0316065986 and To Hell With
All That
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0316736872/theatlanticmonthA/ref=nosim/.
Felicity Huffman leaves a federal courthouse on April 3. GRETCHEN ERTL /
REUTERS
Updated at 5:23 p.m. ET on April 9, 2018.
Sweet Christ, vindication!
How long has it been? Years? No, decades. If hope is the thing with feathers,
I was a plucked bird. Long ago, I surrendered myself to the fact that the
horrible, horrible private-school parents of Los Angeles would get away with
their nastiness forever. But even before the molting, never in my wildest
imaginings had I dared to dream that the arc of the moral universe could
describe a 90-degree angle and smite down mine enemies with such a hammer fist
of fire and fury that even I have had a moment of thinking, Could this be a bit
too much?
This was before cellphones and laptops, and in the chalk-dusted eternity of a
42-minute class period, there was such a thrumming, adolescent need for
stimulation that when I opened whatever book we were reading—all of them great,
all of them chosen by teachers far more thoughtful and experienced than I—and
began reading aloud, the stream of words was the only thing going, and many of
the students couldn’t help themselves from slipping into that stream and
letting it carry them along.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert …. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies
I did not come from a religious family, but we had a god, and the god was art,
specifically literature. Taking a job teaching “Ozymandias” to a new generation
was, for me, the equivalent of taking religious orders.
And so when a job opened in the college-counseling office, I should not have
taken it. My god was art, not the SAT. In my excitement at this apparent
promotion, I did not pause to consider that my beliefs about the new work at
hand made me, at best, a heretic. I honestly believed—still believe—that
hundreds of very good colleges in the country have reasonable admissions
requirements; that if you’ve put in your best effort, a B is a good grade; and
that expecting adolescents to do five hours of homework on top of meeting
time-consuming athletic demands is, in all but exceptional cases, child abuse.
Most of all, I believed that if you had money for college and a good
high-school education under your belt, you were on third base headed for home
plate with the ball soaring high over the bleachers.
I did not know—even after four years at the institution—that the school’s
impressive matriculation list was not the simple by-product of excellent
teaching, but was in fact the end result of parental campaigns undertaken with
the same level of whimsy with which the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor.
Every parent assumed that whatever alchemy of good genes and good credit had
gotten his child a spot at the prep school was the same one that would land him
a spot at a hyper-selective college. It was true that a quarter of the class
went to the Ivy League, and another quarter to places such as Stanford, MIT,
and Amherst. But that still left half the class, and I was the one who had to
tell their parents that they were going to have to be flexible. Before each
meeting, I prepared a list of good colleges that the kid had a strong chance of
getting into, but these parents didn’t want colleges their kids had a strong
chance of getting into; they wanted colleges their kids didn’t have a chance in
hell of getting into. A successful first meeting often consisted of walking
them back from the crack pipe of Harvard to the Adderall crash of Middlebury
and then scheduling a follow-up meeting to douse them with the bong water of
Denison.
The new job meant that
