Fair’s fair—throw the bums out

The recent University of Illinois admissions scandal has the Chicago Tribune in a tizzy, but most of the reports I’ve seen are missing the critical ethical point. The press seems to be riled by, gasp, the fact that patronage and privilege has entered into college admissions. Next we’ll see headlines about rich kids doing better in school than poor kids. Or that the sun rose in the east this morning.

Influence, money, and where daddy or mommy went to school have always had a profound influence on where junior gets in. But not at STATE universities. Those are the ones that are supposed to be fair—that striving, hard working kids who are smart, get good grades, and test scores above a certain level can rely on admission (barring getting arrested, having a known drug habit, or plagiarizing someone else’s novel—which, by the way, don’t seem to bar you from some Ivies.)

If you were smart enough to get into Harvard, but your family had 8 kids and you spent your summers working on the loading dock, the University of Illinois was always a place you could depend on for a solid education, one that you might be able to pay for. Sure, maybe the dorms have the hardest mattresses on earth, and many of your classes will be taken with 200 of your favorite freshmen, but the instruction’s fine, the libraries extensive, and sooner or later you’ll cut the herd experience down to size via all the campus groups available. When we toured the U of I, it bothered me more to see the extensive tutoring facilities for athletes and the attention paid to them than the quality of the student digs. Sports bring in money and alumni loyalty, I guess. Never been a big factor for me at the University of Chicago, and maybe I’m wrong, but studying at the Sorbonne probably doesn’t have a big athletic component, either.

The University of Illinois has always been the place for smart strivers, a place where you could be certain you could get in on your own merits, not because you knew someone. It was pretty easy to figure out the rules—right GPA, right test scores, you’re in. No sucking up to daddy’s law partner, no beating yourself into meaningless volunteer activities just to look good. No wondering what you said wrong in an admissions essay read by a snooty admissions officer five years older than you. You got in based on what you had achieved, not whom your family knew.

The trustees and politicians who put the fix in have destroyed something good and true, fair and dependable, something truly democratic. If I were a University of Illinois graduate, I’d be organizing lanterns and pitchforks rallies in front of their homes.