It didn’t touch us. But it did.
You no doubt know by now 50 people—most of them every rich people, people reeking of privilege—were charged by the feds earlier this week with straight-up cheating to get their kids into elite colleges.
Cheating by spending, in some absurd and obscene instances, hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so.
Not to plaster the family name onto a campus building or endow a scholarship or an expensive faculty position—things privileged folks have been doing for generations to get their kids into elite colleges.
No, this is new-age, short-cut privilege exhibited by folks maybe not quite ready to handle it.
It’s the-law-be-damned privilege laced with arrogance and entitlement.
Privilege we saw recently exhibited by teenagers here who thought their ignorant and hateful words, spewed on video and posted for all the word to see, would not trump their privilege.
The college scandal folks allegedly spend bags of money to produce forged SAT and ACT tests (often supported by forged documents saying their kid had a disability and thus needed more time to, well, not take the test), or to bribe a college coach into telling the institution’s admissions office their kid was an athlete (wink) when they’d never, ever, ever played the sport.
The scandal didn’t touch us here in Alabama (unless, like me, your alma mater got caught up in it; ex-Stanford sailing coach John Vandamoer is now up a creek without a sail, having pleaded guilty to accepting more than $100,000 in bribes to say two prospective students were competitive sailors when they didn’t likely know their port from starboard. Neither student ever enrolled at Stanford.)
None of the people indicted appear to have ties to the state.
Alabama grade changing scandal: Grades corrected, but questions remain
A new valedictorian and salutatorian will be honored at the at W.S Neal High School's May 21 graduation.
But their egregious misdeeds touched us, still.
They touched every parent here whose kids, like mine, studied tirelessly on myriad nights when they surely desired to be doing something else and practiced and performed in their respecting sport until their bodies and minds were drained of fuel.
Then they got up and did it again, day after day—until they earned their way to college.
They touched students at colleges and universities across the state who may be struggling to pay for an education they hope leads to life better than the one they left behind, even if it saddles them with mortgage-like debt.
They touched our high-school students, too—particularly those with parents barely able to keep them fed and clothed and living under roofs in a neighborhood where success is, just being frank, not always celebrated.
Students burdened by the plethora of racial and economic disparities that plague our educational system and too often stymie our children.
Teachers and counselors encourage them every day to study hard, to strive for top grades and achievement-test scores, to participate in band or dance or sports or something outside of the classroom and to contribute to the community—all so: You, too, will be able to go to an elite college.
Unless someone cheats.
Unless someone rich buys your spot.
Unless someone bribes a test administrator to change their kid’s answers—even as you sit alongside them (or in the room next door because they bogusly got to take the test alone because of their bogus disability) trying to do your very best. Or brides a coach to say their kid plays a sport when they don’t even know the rules.
That’s what privilege smells like, and it stinks.
This scandal’s stench is even more wretched because part of the scam was to have parents “contribute” to something called the Key Worldwide Foundation, a bogus non-profit scam mastermind William “Rick” Singer claimed was created to benefit poor students.
Last year, according to prosecutors, Singer called fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, the husband of actress Lori Loughlin—both of whom are among the indicted for allegedly spending $400,000 to help their two daughters get into the University of Southern California—and said:
"So, I just want to make sure our stories are the same ... and that your four-hundred-k was paid to our foundation to help underserved kids.”
“Uh, perfect,” Giannulli supposedly responded.
Uh, perfectly privileged. And perfectly wrong.
Roy S. Johnson’s column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Hit me up at rjohnson@al.com. Follow me at twitter.com/roysj or on Instagram at instagram.com/roysj/
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