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I think that’s a great idea. Some other folks agree with us as well.
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I’d go further. Loughlin and her equally crooked spouse* would have to anonymously put approx. a quarter of their total net worth toward an established minority scholarship fund approved by the court would start resembling restorative justice. But this is late-stage capitalist America, where “affluenza” is considered a legit disease, so we get this non-punishment instead.
[* and any other of the entitled crooks who rolled the dice with a trial instead of pleading out]
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Incidentally, NCAA has a limit of 20 rowing scholarships at USC. I think all those were filled, and not by Loughlin’s kid, so at least there was no displacement of a financially disadvantaged student. Perhaps her place at USC displaced some other, financially secure student. There are lots of those at USC.
Loughlin’s airhead kid wasn’t applying for a rowing scholarship, but rather getting in through Singer’s “side door” by applying as a non-scholarship student-athlete on the rowing team (in competitive universities, this makes it easier to gain admission with mediocre GPAs and scores – although even there the dimwit had to cheat on her SATs). I’m sure even a crook like Singer would have advised them not to take the needless risk of trying to steal money in addition to stealing the place of a more qualified applicant through fraud.
For you and anyone else who’s unfamiliar with the mechanisms of academia that were abused by Rick Singer and his clients to commit fraud, I’d recommend the Gangster Capitalism season 1 podcast, starting here:
That’s closer to the mark in describing the nature of the crimes and those it impacted. A handful of speciality programmes for minorities aside, high schools that offer crew as a sport are usually more affluent. Still, fraud is fraud, and someone more deserving was screwed over. Contributing a substantial amount of money to a general scholarship fund for truly disadvantaged college students would go a long way toward making amends for their crimes, even if stealing scholarship money wasn’t one of them.
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This is my wheelhouse, I’m quite familiar with this, thanks anyway.
Ok. Your confusion over the crime actually committed by Loughlin (admissions fraud) vs. the crime you mentioned that wasn’t one of the charges against her (scholarship fraud) indicated that it might be worth clarifying it for others who might think that all participation in NCAA sports involve scholarships or financial aid.
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No confusion at my end. Upthread people specifically mentioned “stealing a place at a major university from a more deserving (and likely less wealthy) student-athlete” and “a path of admittance for the traditionally disadvantaged”. In the context of that it is worth mentioning that that isn’t what is happening here.
Loughlin and her husband for sure committed fraud meriting punishment, and the college officers who abetted that fraud in addition violated a trust they had with their employer and the greater university community, but in the greater scheme of things the actual damage done in this case was slight.
Yes, that was me. And that was exactly what happened here. Loughlin and her husband are a lot wealthier than even most USC parents (which is saying something), and participation in college sports – even without scholarship money – can give disadvantaged students who was ill-served by their high school and couldn’t afford SAT tutors and college counselors a chance to get in anyhow and prove themselves. As noted above, that rarely but sometimes holds true even for rowing (see the programmes discussed here).
I didn’t mention scholarships and financial fraud, and neither did anyone else except you. It’s beside the point in Loughlin’s case.
I would disagree. In addition to screwing over at least two deserving students in this particular case (for Loughlin’s two daughters), this indicates a wider systemic problem of entitlement and privilege in higher education, one that has a myriad of impacts on students from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds. But you’re entitled to your opinion about Loughlin’s crimes not deserving a real, restorative penalty.
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That has never been my opinion.
However, I am glad you agree that there is no problem with Loughlin’s daughter displacing athletic scholarship students. I agree that this is an important path for student-athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds who cannot otherwise afford the school of their choice.
Huh? She knew exactly what she was getting into. No one thinks having someone take your kid’s SAT is anything but fraud.
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In isolation, I agree with you. In the context of our judicial system, Laughlin’s sentence is an example of injustice, in contrast to what POC and poor people receive.
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Sure. It’s totally beside the point and not relevant to her case at all (and no-one claimed otherwise), but sure.
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I think it’s looking at the reality of the situation, where white, wealthy people get away with a whole host of crimes, including wrecking the GLOBAL ECONOMY.
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In the end, this college admissions scandal is a vignette in the larger story of neoliberal globalism run amuck. Take out the outright fraud and the system is still rigged in favour of the establishment and incumbents.
When that’s exposed by actual criminal behaviour, those privileged incumbents (especially affluent white male ones) get very uneasy about people questioning the “inevitability” and “default state” of the system that’s serving them so well. The more conservative ones respond with main force, while the more liberal ones respond by trying to distract and de-rail the discussion.
A good example of the latter is the Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Social Debate”, which rolled out a whole lot of intellectual dishonesty in service of maintaining their positions as cultural arbiters. They’re smart and arrogant people, so they thought everyone else was too stupid to see through their semantic games and fallacies. But smart people can be wrong, and when pushed too far for too long that behaviour can come back to bite them – not in the arse, but in the neck.
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It’s funny how people can’t see these interconnections. Or they don’t want to see them maybe.
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It’s a big-money variation on Upton Sinclair’s quote that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Even though I’m privileged enough to benefit from the rigged system, I’ve still never seen the value in studiously ignoring its existence. I see even less value in twisting myself into logical knots trying to convince others that it doesn’t exist (or by saying “look over here at this unrelated thing”).
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In the past it was easier to control the serfs who didn’t know how to read or write, but I guess in modern day serfdom it’s ideal when the common people don’t have the attention span to chew through all that legalese and fine print.
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It’s not only that they lack the attention span (no-one, even most lawyers, wants to slog their way through a EULA) but that they’re not given the tools to do so. For a country that talks such a big game about the importance of democracy and capitalism in its massively powerful cultural industry there’s no standard or widespread curricula in American public K-12 schools for real-world civics, financial literacy, and media literacy. On a meta level, education that emphasises critical thinking is often actively discouraged in many school districts (can’t have the students thinking too hard about the administrators’ policies, dontchaknow).
To give but one example of the outcomes, this is a country where the majority of workers are still under the impression that their employer’s human resources department exists mainly to help and protect them.
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This.
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