A NEW SCANDAL – OR NOT?
Isn’t the admissions scandal just a new variation on a long time practice of the universities? Wealthy, legacy children have gained entrance to the Ivy Leagues and other top schools since the 19th century, despite lack of qualifications.
The difference here: the wealthy families in this current scandal don’t seem to be old money, and the children not legacy. In a twist, Loughlin/Gianulli’s YouTube-star daughter is complaining because the scandal has cut into her business.
BLUEPRINT FOR HUMANITY
Internationally acclaimed Yale professor Nicholas Christakis and his wife Erika, a child-development expert, were victims of contemporary student hysteria back in 2015:
“Perhaps you saw the video. It became a viral sensation in the fall of 2015, Exhibit A in the tension, on so many campuses, between free expression and many minority students’ pleas for an atmosphere in which they feel fully respected and safe. Christakis’s wife, Erika, who also taught at Yale back then, had circulated a memo in which she questioned a university edict against culturally insensitive Halloween costumes, suggesting that students could police themselves and should have both the freedom to err and the strength to cope with offense. She wrote that her husband concurred.
“And all hell broke loose. Hundreds of students signed an open letter denouncing her and hundreds demanded that the couple be punished. There were protests. And when, in that courtyard, Christakis apologized for any pain that the memo had caused but refused to disavow its content, he was pilloried.”
Despite all that, Christakis latest book, Blueprint, focuses on
how cooperative and peaceful humanity can be. But the review doesn’t indicate
if he realizes that this is the genius of capitalism, made possible by the
integration of self-interest with the interest of others through trade.
It’s in the line of recent books like Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now! It
seems as if some of the left liberals are recognizing that they have to defend
civilization!
