Admissions

While traveling outside the USA, I've been following the breaking college admissions scandal. You know, the one in which the rich and famous used money and influence, cheating and friendly insiders to allow their very mediocre children (using the normal academic and test score metrics) to gain admission to high prestige Ivy League schools. Everyone seemed shocked by all of this. The rich and famous bribed their way into the Ivys (of course, without the knowledge of the Ivys ... yeah, right). District Attornies have promised investigations and threatened that people would go to jail for this outrage. Puleeze.

As if all of these arbiters of ethics and honesty thought that the progeny of the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Clintons and yes, the Obamas were stellar students who actually deserved admission to Harvard or Yale or Princeton and were wholly unconcerned that these same progeny took the place of a truly stellar and deserving students from high schools in Indiana or Idaho.

But now, the outrage machine wants to put people in jail, to "investigate," and to bring educational justice to a system that is ... well ... let's just say that academic excellence has relatively little to do selected modern day admissions to the prestige schools. But since they want to investigate, maybe they should start with the educational career of the past president—Barack Obama. Jack Cashill provides a summary:

In his overly friendly biography, The Bridge, David Remnick writes that Obama was an “unspectacular” student in his two years at Columbia and at every stop before that going back to grade school ...

How such an indifferent student got into a law school whose applicants’ LSAT scores typically track between 98 to 99 percentile and whose GPAs range between 3.80 and 4.00 is a subject Remnick avoids.

Obama does too. Although he has admitted that he “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs” during his academic career, he has remained mum about some reported “back door” influence peddling that may have been as useful to him as affirmative action.

In late March 2008 the venerable African-American entrepreneur and politico Percy Sutton appeared on a local New York City show called "Inside City Hall." When asked about Obama by the show’s host, Dominic Carter, the former Manhattan borough president calmly and lucidly explained that he had been “introduced to [Obama] by a friend.”

The friend's name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction had taken place about twenty years prior. Sutton described al-Mansour as "the principal adviser to one of the world's richest men." The billionaire in question was Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the same billionaire whose anti-Semitism caused Mayor Rudy Giuliani to reject his $10 million gift to New York City post 9/11.

According to Sutton, al-Mansour had asked him to "please write a letter in support of [Obama]... a young man that has applied to Harvard." Sutton had friends at Harvard and gladly did so.

Three months before the election it should have mattered that a respected black political figure had publicly announced that an unapologetic anti-Semite like al-Mansour, backed by an equally anti-Semitic Saudi billionaire, had been guiding Obama’s career perhaps for the last twenty years, but the story died a quick and unnatural death.

The point isn't so much that Obama was admitted to Harvard law, not based on excellence, but influence. Happens all the time, although the Saudi connection is telling. The point is that all of a sudden, people are shocked that's it's going on. Give me a break.