...It's how the people view Harvard and the rest now, which contributes to our sense of profound dislocation as we find they've been letting in rioters in quantity, seem to be educating India and China for those countries, etc. I think the mission of the Ivies in particular has become badly confused. The death of free speech and the criminal behaviors of too many of their students show that they can certainly no longer be considered elite. Not even safe.
??? What student riots are you referring to that took place at Harvard?
Sure. I would think the Ivies especially should LIKE to go back to that! For one obvious thing, it doubles and trebles the endowment: if families go to Dartmouth, as my stepfather did, for many generations, they give a LOT. But the screeching black students who invaded the library at Dartmouth yesterday, shouting obscenities at students who were studying and working instead of "supporting them" in their mob protesting ---- yow. Did Dartmouth really do the right thing accepting these instead of legacy students? I'd say not at all. Bad move, big mistake.
Red:
No matter the extent to which giving is boosted by one's having multiple ancestors who attended a given school, or the collective giving attributable to a single family's name because there it has multiple members who graduated from a given school,
those contributions are not the cause of the growth in institutional endowments. As will all things money-related, every little bit helps.
Blue:
What happened yesterday?
I'm aware of last week's events at the Dartmouth library.
As reported by
The Dartmouth: (the school newspaper)
Chants of “We shall overcome” and “Black Lives Matter” echoed through the Green yesterday evening as more than 150 students, faculty, staff and community members dressed in black, walked from Novack Café to Dartmouth Hall in a demonstration of solidarity with the black communities at University of Missouri and Yale University and the larger Black Lives Matter movement…
A group first met at the Afro-American Society then headed to Novack Cafe. The group walked to the lawn in front of Dartmouth Hall, where several students shared their feelings and experiences. At that point, the official protest ended, but many students wanted to continue moving throughout campus, (Jonathan) Diakanwa said. As an organizer, he moved with the group to provide supervision and direction.
… Some students who were at the library at the time said they felt uncomfortable with the disruption caused by the protest. Some of the demonstrators called out specific students who were studying for not standing up and joining the protest or not wearing black. One student said at one point he was concerned over the possibility of violence, while another said that he called Safety and Security because he was annoyed by the disruption.
As reported by
The Dartmouth Review: (not the school's newspaper; not on campus)
Watching these events (University of Missouri, Yale, etc. — Ed.) unfold from Hanover, no one could have doubted that the (Black Lives Matter-backed campus protest) movement would make its way to Dartmouth within the week. But the particular form that our own iteration took on the night of November 12 was a shock, even to the by-now seasoned souls of students who have witnessed the past years. The tactics, tone, and words of the Black Lives Matter protesters eerily mirrored everything they claim to stand against. The long list of their clear oversteps should spark a moment of reckoning for every honest onlooker, and especially those who have sympathized with their movement to this point.
The Protest…
Black-clad protesters gathered in front of Dartmouth Hall, forming a crowd roughly one hundred fifty strong. Ostensibly there to denounce the removal of shirts from a display in Collis, the Black Lives Matter collective began to sing songs and chant their eponymous catchphrase. Not content to merely demonstrate there for the night, the band descended from their high-water mark to march into Baker-Berry Library.
“F*** you, you filthy white f***s!” “F*** you and your comfort!” “F*** you, you racist s***!”
I found it strange that the very same event can be so differently depicted by two campus newspapers. Strange enough that I don't feel certain that either representation is particularly accurate. Indeed, the reporting struck me as little more than a mirroring of the slanted presentation of details that we see daily in the commercial press.
Why do I think that's about all there is to say about the whole thing? Because a careful reader will observe that this issue has been jumped upon by the conservative press and nary one even mentions the coverage of the event from
The Dartmouth, even though that paper is the oldest student newspaper in the country, and it happens to be Dartmouth's official student newspaper.
Instead, the "big league" conservative press refer only to
The Dartmouth Review, which is an off-campus publication that has no official connection with the school.
If there's any one thing to complain about re: the Dartmouth events, it's that for all the clamor about "crying" and "assault,"
there's not been so much as one official report alleging harm to any law enforcement organization. I suppose even the most disturbed people know that making someone cry is hardly cause for doing so, but it's not enough to keep the popular conservative press from making a mountain out of a molehill.
Other:
Therein lies what I think of as another "dirty secret" about "elite schools." From what I've gleaned anecdotally, in the past, though the education they imparted was first rate, they were considered elite largely because damn near everyone there -- perhaps one or two folks per class year were not -- was in the Social Register. The reality then, as now, was that an equally fine education could be had at "less elite" institutions. That this is so can be seen in the scores of blacks who attended Howard University and been very high achievers. It's also seen in the high achievers who attended non-elite schools. From what I can tell, what made elite schools elite is that everyone there was very well connected -- politically and in business -- and those connections fairly well ensured that so long as one could find one's calling -- the thing one enjoys and is good at -- one would do well after college.
This is being replaced by unpaid internships: a system of apprenticeships for young people that only families well off enough to support their children entirely in other cities at non-paying jobs can take advantage of. My niece has spent two summers this way meeting high-level pols in Washington. Never made a cent.
Green:
"This" what is being replaced by internships?
I was all in favor of meritocracy in the old days, but now they simply aren't doing it, so that's that. I mean, hey, letting in blacks with bad SATs resulting in all these riots and purges and censorship, and keeping out Asians with better scores because they would swamp the system -------- well, there is one seriously failed meritocracy! It's dead, bury it. I'm up for that, I hate hypocrisy, pretending they are a meritocracy when everyone KNOWS they aren't. They are a business, they have admissions like country clubs and pro sports teams, let them take whomever it suits them to take. They want rioting mobs, let 'em have them. We simply need a whole new system for higher education: it's broken in a lot of ways, and this admittance issue is only one of many. I bet you didn't take out loans for your undergraduate educations, and nor did I, for one problem out of many.
Purple:
I don't see a causal relationship between admitting blacks having any particular SAT scores and "riots and purges and censorship." Please provide some sort of credible evidence that establishes that relationship.
Pink:
Colleges and country clubs often have selective admissions policies, but unlike clubs that do rely quite heavily on their admissions and ongoing dues, for the colleges of which we are speaking, tuition is not their main source of funding.
Percentage distribution of total revenues at degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by institutional control, level, and source of funds: 2012–13
Source:
The Condition of Education - Postsecondary Education - Finance and Resources - Postsecondary Revenues by Source - Indicator May (2015)
There's no question that tuition is a significant source of revenue at elite institutions, but at just over 30% that's all it is, significant, not controlling. Here are some annual reports that report essentially the same thing for a handful of schools.
Looking at a few elite liberal arts colleges, one sees a different financial picture:
Orange:
??? I'm not even going to ask what inferences you have made that led you "wager" as you did about how I paid for school. What I do want to know, however, is what does whether you or I used loans (or didn't) to finance our educations have to do with doing well on the SAT or in college, particularly given that none of the elite schools I know of (owing to my three kids who visited about a dozen of them, I spoke with some key people at each of them) use "ability to pay" as a basis for offering admission.?
Privilege is fine with me. (Well, it would be.) As long as people are obeying the law, that's the main thing, and having good manners is the next most important thing. After those two, privilege away at will, I'd say. If you've got it, flaunt it.
Really?
Brown:
The thing about the law is that it has a "letter" and a "spirit." What matters and what people of integrity do is uphold both, and not just when it's convenient for their own circumstances, at the moment or in general. I really don't see that among many people these days, and yet that sort of character is exactly what distinguished the people of my parents' generation and the people of my own age -- especially the ones of them/us who went to elite schools.
