"How Did They Get Into MIT, Penn, Etc.?"

John Hinderaker asks good questions in a brief post at the Power Line blog:

Where do these people come from? How did thy get into MIT, Penn, etc.? . . . I don’t think these educational institutions have any idea how terrible they look to the general public. And I don’t think we can begin to calculate the long-range consequences of the utter moral failure of higher education that we are now witnessing.

But let's keep in mind that before the Hamas issue put the Ivies in the forefront, they'd already drawn public attention in recent months for bringing us a series of con artists, crooks, and incompetents like Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, Stockton Rush, and Alissa Heinerscheid. Jeffrey Epstein, who never graduatrd from any four-year institution, nevertheless hitchhiked on Harvard's and MIT's prestige by involving them in his philanthropic hustle. And I've talked about the Ivy admissions problem, for instance here. where I noted that the most recent crop of Ivy sociopaths not only attended elite schools but came from privileged backgrounds as well.

In fact, the Ivy admissions system itself has the resources to answer Mr Hinderaker's questions, although I can't imagine it ever undertaking such an effort. Keep in mind that in the elite-school admissions process, every applicant falls into a "basket", categories including students coming from favored "feeder schools", recruited athletes, legacies, children of major donors and public figures, and favored minorities, all of whom take implicit priority over the "basket" of white and Asian public school kids, who must compete entirely on the basis of grades, test scores, and extracurriculars (Jews not in other baskets are effectively in this basket as well, unless they're subject to an additional Jewish quota).

Although the existence of the admissions baskets is generally acknowledged, the relative sizes of each basket at each university are closely guarded secrets, so this is the first obstacle to getting a serious answer to Mr Hinderaker's questions. But we can at least start with the recognition that every student at every elite school came in with a basket ID that can be interrogated in some way.

The second question is whether we can identify the students who are demonstrating against Israel or otherwise harassing Jews on campus, or at least a significant subset of them. It might be possible simply to attach names to faces in photographs, although this wouldn't differentiate students based on their individual motives or relative commitment. A better indicator might be to identify students who were arrested or otherwise disciplined for conduct at the demonstrations, but there are several obstacles here, too: the universities have so far been generally lenient, and few students have been singled out this way; in other cases, disciplinary measures may be confidential.

But we can at least conduct a thought experiment and ask which members of which baskets might be likeliest to participate in anti-Israel demonstrations or anti-Jew harassment. I suspect that among the least likely would be members of the meritocratic basket, the ones, some of whom are Jews themselves, who competed for admission based entirely on grades, test scores, and extracurriculars. Among other things, those students could well be too busy hitting the books to go to anti-Israel protests, since many of those will still be competing for admission to law and medical school when they graduate from college.

Based on my own experience as an Ivy undergraduate, when I look back on which of my acquaintances occupied the administration building to protest the Viet Nam war and were subsequently arrested, I would say they were predominantly legacies, preppies, and budding minority activists. They'd be less affected by an arrest record, since their family connections would fast-track them into careers irrespective of that record, or in other cases, they could build on the arrest to further an activist career.

The problem for the elite schools hasn't really changed since the days of Viet Nam protests, and it's similar to the emerging problem of the students from privileged backgrounds whom the Ivies are enabling to become crooks, con artists, and famous incompetents: the Ivies started as, and continue to be, institutions of wealth and privilege. The meritocratic basket was forced on them during the post-World War II period, but they continue to maintain baskets of significant but highly confidential size for the privileged, now augmented by new baskets for favored minorities.

Anti-Semitism has always been a component of social elitism, so that's one explanation for why it's found at the Ivies. Another has been the newer tendency to fetishize minorites as victims, what Anti Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt characterized as the "oppression Olympics":

These college administrators — and you know, it’s the oppression Olympics, . . . where you either play oppressor or oppressed. And in this victimology madness, Jews are somehow put at the bottom.

The real answer to Mr Hinderaker's question is that the Ivies have lulled the world into believing they're meritocratic. This works in their favor, because they serve a significant market, those already wealthy and privileged, who can, as figures like Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, Stockton Rush, and Alissa Heinerscheid recently have, use the meritocratic aura of their elite-school degrees to convince their marks that they got into Stanford, MIT, Princeton, and Harvard on their intelligence and hard work, when the real Ivy system ensured this was not in fact the case.

There are very few competitive universities, such as Caltech, that do not use a "basket" admissions system that effectively favors wealthy and privileged applicants -- but even in a system that also favors designated victim groups, as Mr Greenblatt points out, in that oppression Olympics, the Jews wind up at the bottom. Alan Dershowitz sensed this in Chutzpah as well. Without some sort of basic reform, there's always going to be an effective Jewish quota and all the other baggage that goes with it.