[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]
Last month I asked whether the Chicago Tribune was purposefully misleading or merely incompetent for running an article under this headline: New U. of I. board eliminates preferential admissions. “The assertion in the headline is, of course, not true,” I noted.
What the new board eliminated was only the preferential admission of friends of politicians and other well-connected people, as discussed here and here.
Preferential admissions of favored racial and ethnic groups remains alive and thriving at the University of Illinois (“College admissions should be race-conscious,” said then University Chancellor Nancy Cantor).
Now another Illinois head has fallen.
Beleaguered University of Illinois Chancellor Richard Herman announced his resignation Tuesday, marking a near-wholesale turnover of the university’s most senior leadership. University and state leaders lauded Herman’s departure as a significant decision that will allow the university to move beyond an admissions scandal that rattled the Urbana-Champaign campus….
Herman’s resignation follows that of President B. Joseph White, who will step down at the end of the year. Six university trustees also have been replaced after revelations by the Chicago Tribune of preferential admissions practices that let applicants connected to trustees, lawmakers and other powerful people get admitted over more qualified students.
I think it would be terrific if people in Illinois became outraged at all discriminatory programs that resulted in less qualified but politically favored applicants being admitted over others who were more qualified and fired everyone responsible for it. What an example that would set!
But friends and defenders of preferential admissions need not fear. Preferential treatment remains alive and well in Illinois.
Query: Has any intrepid investigative reporter compared the qualifications of those admitted under the scandalous political preference program with the qualifications of those admitted under the unscandalous racial preference program? Has anyone in Illinois demanded (now this would be a scandal!) that all applicants to the University be treated, you know, equally, and judged by the same standards?
UPDATE [22 October]
Now, according to an article in the Chicago Tribune today (pointed to by Inside Higher Ed), a rejected applicant to the University of Illinois has filed what he and his lawyer hope will be a class action suit “on behalf of all ‘non-clout’ applicants who had been denied admission from 1999 to 2009. The suit seeks more than $5 million in damages.”
[Jonathan] Yard was ranked in the top 15 percent of his high school class, scored a 29 on the ACT and was a varsity athlete, said the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Chicago.
After applying for admission in 2008, he was wait-listed, then rejected. The lawsuit notes that the university catalog cited academic record, ACT scores, leadership and communication skills among its admissions criteria. “Notably absent from this list of admission criterion is any mention of one’s political clout,” the suit states.
An ongoing Tribune investigation found that subpar candidates were admitted to the university based on political influence. The university president and chancellor have resigned because of the scandal.
I would like to see the complaint and the brief supporting it. Let us grant that that UI’s now-scandalous and hence former policy of giving preferential treatment to applicants with “clout” is unfair, but what provision of the Constitution or federal law does it violate? Given the peculiar tribal values and behavior of Chicago politicians, now so well displayed on the federal stage for all to see, surely friends and members of that tribe could provide much needed “diversity” to Illinois students who arrive in Urbana from more mainstream cultural backgrounds.
Because the University of Illinois also has affirmative action admissions, some “subpar” students were admitted because of their race or ethnicity, something that has somehow escaped the notice of the Chicago Tribune and all those legislators and others scandalized by this one rather narrow category of preferential treatment.
There’s also been talk about preferential treatment for out-of-state students vs. in-state students. This cropped up a few years ago – I think some U of I bigwig was on record stating that they wanted the out-of-state students for student body “diversity”. Most cynics, myself included, looked at it as a grab for those that were willing to pay higher tuition…
“I think it would be terrific if people in Illinois became outraged at all discriminatory programs that resulted in less qualified but politically favored applicants being admitted …”
Hope and change? Don’t you think you “hope” too much after we have just elected a less qualified but politically favored candidate for president?
Preferential admission students tend to fail and drop out at a higher rate than students who entered soley on merit. They need more remedial training and tutoring than merit-based students. And of course some ethnic groups with higher academic scores get crowded out of (limited) college slots because they’re not targeted for preferential treatment. All in all good intentions badly implemented.