The Bidens, The Ivies, And The Chosen

This piece at the Washington Free Beacon outlines Joe's and Hunter's efforts to get Hunter's underperforming daughter Maisy (shown with Joe in the photo above) into the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania:

Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, show how Joe and Hunter Biden worked behind the scenes to get a subpar family member into one of the most selective schools in the country.

"I applied early decision to Penn today!!" Maisy Biden texted Hunter Biden on October 31.

Just two days later, Maisy asked her father for an update on her application. In the coming months, Hunter and Joe Biden would mount a full-court press on university administrators to get Maisy's application over the finish line. The Bidens took their case directly to the top: University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann.

On December 13, 2018, the elder Biden texted Hunter that he was "going to try to see [University of Pennsylvania] Pres GUTMANN tomorrow." Two days later, Joe Biden told Hunter Biden that he "had a great talk with Guttman [sic]."

It's worth noting that in 2018, Joe was out of office, while in October of that year, as Maisy sent her application to Penn, Hunter, well into his four-year crack-and-hooker binge, was in the middle of the gun-in-the-dumpster incident with Hallie in Wilmington. By December, Joe and Hunter were working hard with President Gutmann, and Hunter had an inspiration:

Hunter also suggested that Maisy could see her chances improve if she expressed interest in playing lacrosse at Penn. Although it's unclear whether the lacrosse tip was from Joe Biden's conversations with the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Hunter was peeved that the counsel came so late.

This reflects Jerome Karabel's insight into the position of recruited athletes in Ivy admissions in The Chosen, as well as his remarks about them in the Slate piece I linked yesterday where he noted of Harvard,

Even more striking is the extraordinary preference granted to recruited athletes; 79.5 percent of such applicants with a mediocre academic rating of 4 (on a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 highest) were admitted, compared to an admissions rate for non-athletes with the same academic rating of less than 1 in 6,000.

It looks as though Penn has a similar policy. The 2019 Varsity Blues scandal suggests that getting an applicant designated a recruited athlete, even if the applicant doesn't even play the sport, is a common admissions dodge:

Thirty-three parents of college applicants were accused of paying more than $25 million between 2011 and 2018 to William Rick Singer, organizer of the scheme[.]

. . . Singer primarily used two fraudulent techniques to help clients' children gain admission to elite universities: cheating on college entrance exams and fabrication of elite sports credentials.

. . . Singer also bribed college athletics staff and coaches. At certain colleges, these personnel can submit a certain number of sports recruit names to the admissions office, which then views those applications more favorably.

. . . In one of the most notable cases, actress Lori Loughlin, famous for her role on the American sitcom Full House and the drama When Calls the Heart, and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli of Mossimo fashion, allegedly paid $500,000 in bribes to arrange to have their two daughters accepted into USC as members of the rowing team, although neither girl had participated in the sport.

As I've noted here before, the problem with the Varsity Blues scandal was not that applicants could use their putative status as "recruited athletes" to bypass the admission process, but it was simply that bribes were paid to the wrong people to accomplish this. It was perfectly legal for Joe Biden to twist President Gutmann's arm to do precisely what Lori Laughlin did -- the only difference was that Joe didn't bribe anyone to do it.

Joe was present at Maisy's graduation from Penn just this past May. I noted yesterday that it will be far more problematic to eliminate this type of privilege in elite-school admissions for the wealthy and powerful than it was to eliminate affirmative action.