That's weird that the Trump administration is taking on the bump that children of alumni & major donors get in college admission. Oh, wait..
— Bethany Albertson (@AlbertsonB2) August 2, 2017
Another craven reversion to the original Gilded Age, when Ivy alumni like Teddy Roosevelt worried publicly that “our” (their) “best young men” were being crowded out of the finer American academies by grade-grubbing, tenement-raised offspring of immigrants. Young men who lacked the capacity to understand that the true value of the college experience was not mere credentialism, but the nuturing of the “best classical traditions” in an environment removed from the populist fads of the moment. In other words, what we now call networking in a high-value environment…
Trump administration wants to investigate colleges for discriminating against white applicants, document suggests https://t.co/w5xnB03XYF
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 2, 2017
… The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”
The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.
The document does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions policies. But the phrasing it uses, “intentional race-based discrimination,” cuts to the heart of programs designed to bring more minority students to university campuses…
Roger Clegg, a former top official in the civil rights division during the Reagan administration and the first Bush administration who is now the president of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, called the project a “welcome” and “long overdue” development as the United States becomes increasingly multiracial…
Mr. Clegg said he would expect the project to focus on investigating complaints the civil rights division received about any university admissions programs.
He also suggested that the project would look for stark gaps in test scores and dropout rates among different racial cohorts within student bodies, which he said would be evidence suggesting that admissions offices were putting too great an emphasis on applicants’ race and crossing the line the Supreme Court has drawn…
Seeking: Aggrieved, underqualified white people willing to serve as plaintiffs https://t.co/YBi4QHWz4w
— Dave Jamieson (@jamieson) August 2, 2017
Given the semi-surreptitious release of this “document,” it may have been intended as one of the Trump mis-administration’s trial ballons; they may have wanted to see how bad the pushback is. Or it could just be intended as a sop to their “economically anxious” basket of deplorables, even if many in that group would bitterly reject any of their own kids who betrayed Heartland values by so much as applying to an institution full of soft-handed globalists and probable sexual deviants…
Open Thread: Trying to Reclaim the “Best” Colleges for “the Elites”Post + Comments (228)