Buying Into the System

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

There are two types of people who buy into the system, specifically the higher educational system.
     There are the average people, "the little people", as Leona Helmsley had once derisively called them, who figuratively buy into the system and its ceaseless, jingoistic diktats that hard work, diligence and a faith in that system will one day pay off, that luck and pluck will win the day, by gumbo! Granted, it'll involve working like a draft horse to get a decent scholarship and/or onerous student loans that often take decades to pay off but by Horatio Alger's sweaty balls, it is within reach!
     Then there are people like Laurie Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, for example, who literally buy their way into the system. With their husbands Mossimo Giannulli and William H. Macy (who wasn't indicted), respectively, they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to get three of their four daughters into USC and an unnamed college. For Huffman, who played a character on Desperate Housewives who paid a bribe to get her kids into a private school, it was especially ironic because she and her character both paid the identical sum of $15,000, this time to have her daughter's SAT scores corrected.
     It all started out here in the Bay State as an accident, really. The scandal-spattered Boston FBI just stumbled over the cheating scandal while investigating an unrelated matter and then it finally bloomed in something officially called "Operation Varsity Blues." (Kudos, btw, to our G Men for picking that fantastic name). 50 indictments and arrests later, the scandal finally burst upon the national spotlight like a rancid, festering boil long overdue for a lancing, pushing Donald Trump and his spawn (albeit too hastily) off the front pages. And, granted, I have not seen the names and faces of all 50 people who have been charged in Operation Varsity Blues but, from we've seen thus far, all of them are lily white, including William Singer, the head of this $25,000,000 Great Pyramid of fraud.
     When the story first surfaced, the optics looked horrible in at least one aspect: Olivia Jade, Loughlin's daughter, was on a yacht belonging to a USC board of trustee official named Rick Caruso (whether or not he was one of the university officials who were bribed remains to be seen). Since the scandal erupted, Sephora, a beauty company, has already cut ties with the 19 year-old who basically has made a handsome living being the daughter of someone who was once famous.
     The primary takeaway from this, one sure to give satisfying ripples of schadenfreude to anyone coming from a solidly middle or lower class background, is the spawn of the rich are stupider and less athletically gifted than those from less affluent households. Part of the scandal arose when parents had Singer lie to the schools that they were, in fact, getting athletes when the students were no such thing. In the case of Loughlin's daughter Olivia, fake action shots were even staged to make it look as if she was on USC's crew team of which she'd never been a part.
     So, to go by this, the wealthy produce children that are stupider, less athletically-gifted and less motivated to even go to and excel in college than disadvantaged homes. This automatically betrays as a bald-faced lie that the rich are smarter, more athletic and more beautiful than those produced by "the little people" who have to labor to get whatever little the system offers them and have oodles of motivation to succeed. But that's not where we ought to stop analyzing.

The Varsity Blues and the Green-Eyed Monster

 

Making this scandal even more galling is the fact that some of the most prestigious colleges and universities are named. They're household names at least in the households of teenagers filing letters of intent to these institutions of higher learning they'd bust a gut, and do, to get accepted into. Among them were USC, UCLA, Georgetown, Yale and Wake Forest. And yet. according to Howard University counseling psychologist Ivory Toldson, this ought to be a blanket indictment of the entire system. Yet (even though it's still too early to tell), that's not how this investigation is shaping up.

     In a strange inversion of the usual way the DOJ and FBI conduct their business, they've only gone after individuals such as wealthy parents, school officials and Singer himself and not the institutions. No Deans, Chancellors or Presidents have been named in this scandal much less being placed into custody or under indictment. And, as anyone who knows anything about the DOJ and FBI knows, they conduct their business the other way around in going after entities and institutions and not individuals.

     Let's call a spade a spade: Singer may be a scumbag who'd diluted the academic and athletic talent pool in our schools of higher learning but he's obviously not a stupid man. And a stupid man would not invest five or six figure sums of money in companies owned by crooked soccer coaches or admission officials unless he knew those bribes were guaranteed to be efficacious.

     To use a (technically) unrelated story from 2017 that was updated yesterday in light of the scandal, the Daily Mail resurrected the hoary old story of how Donald Trump Sr bribed University of Pennsylvania's officials to the tune of a cool million and a half bucks to shoehorn his son Don Jr. 23 years ago and Ivanka into UPenn, another Ivy League School, 19 years ago. In fact, "after years of minimal involvement", Trump Sr suddenly got more financially involved the very same year Fredo matriculated into Daddy's old alma mater Wharton and donated $100,000 to the Penn Club.

     Of course, that didn't stop Daddy Warbucks' favorite irony-challenged, ambulatory hair product storage facility from blundering into, on Twitter of course, a culture of corruption from which he and his family had benefited so greatly. (Of course, showing that ever-present and famous Trump humility, Daddy sicced his shyster Michael Cohen on UPenn to threaten them with a lawsuit if they released his own grades from Wharton.).

     One would have to be a Pollyanna to believe that Singer is the only college admissions broker in the country and that this isn't a systemic failure on the part of collegiate America. We've known for decades that elite athletes got academic passes just to keep them on the teams for which they played. But this is the first time in US history that we've learned that the spawn from the 1% who are neither gifted athletically or academically nor even motivated to attend classes have been benefiting from the 1% version of Affirmative Action.