The Basket Theory Of Ivy Anti-Israel Protests Confirmed

This came up in the news after I made yesterday's post (click on the image for a larger copy):

Pro-Hamas protestors on the campus of MIT were warned that if they didn’t disperse -- they were violating campus policies that prohibited interfering with academic activities and the free movement of students and staff --they would be suspended. The protestors were warned several times and failed to disperse.

Jewish students were prevented from entering the campus through the main entrance and were rerouted.

Once the protestors finally dispersed the administration decided to not follow through on their threats to punish the students for violating the policies of the school.

It was a bit of a surprise because MIT President Kornbluth seemed ready to follow through on her threat.

So why didn’t she?

The piece cites a subsequent letter from President Kornbluth:

After exhausting all other avenues for de-escalating the situation, we informed all protesters that they must leave the lobby area within a set time, or they would be subject to suspension. Many chose to leave, and I appreciate their cooperation. Some did not. . . . Because we later heard serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues, we have decided, as an interim action, that the students who remained after the deadline will be suspended from non-academic campus activities. The students will remain enrolled at MIT and will be able to attend academic classes and labs.

John Hinderaker, who raised the original questions that led to my post here yesterday, posted at the Power Line blog in response to Kornbluth's letter:

There you have it: the pro-genocide students (or many of them, anyway) are non-Americans, most likely from the Middle East. They have brought their unAmerican attitudes with them to this country. MIT doesn’t want them to be deported, likely in part, at least, because they are rich kids who pay full freight. Foreign students are a cash cow for universities, often being nearly the only ones who pay the university’s sticker price.

Foreign students are just another admissions basket for a good many elite universities, for the specific reason Mr Hinderaker gives: they pay full freight. The university likes them even more than, say, the children of big-donor billionaires, because various departments can target them for special programs like English courses at extra cost, which flows to the coffers of the English Department and justifies faculty positions.

Degrees from prestigious US universities like MIT are status symbols for the wealthy third-world families that send their offspring there. In that, they function in exactly the same way that Sam Bankman-Fried's MIT degree functioned: it was a status symbol that gave Sam the cachet of merit that, as a hyperactive adolescent unable to concentrate on routine scientific or mathematical tasks, wouldn't have gained him competitive admission to MIT and thus the credibility he needed to run a financial Ponzi scheme. In this, MIT was complicit.

Like the foreign students who are able to buy their way into an MIT degree, Sam's parents got him in via a special basket, presumably using a network of faculty and administrative insider favors and obligations, that allowed him to hitchhike on the prestige of the very different students who came in via the meritocratic basket.The question continues to be, what are the relative sizes of the different baskets? MIT and other elite schools are selling their prestige and giving the purchasers preferential treatment based on the reputation of an entirely separate applicant group that's admitted on merit.

The first link above continues,

Let’s be clear: nobody at MIT could be considered a member of an oppressed class. They are in the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. An MIT degree is a ticket to the top of the economic ladder, and chances are you are close to being there already.

This applies even more to wealthy families from African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries who send their offspring to MIT for status symbol degrees.

But this raises, or at least ought to raise, another set of questions. There's a significant population of US middle-class families whose lives are preoccupied with the elite-school admissions rat race. Will those students or their parents ever be up in arms that their efforts are exploited by the elite schools that can merchandise their reputations to domestic billionaires or wealthy foreign families to let them buy admission for their offspring because it will give the impression that the wealthy kids have competed for it with the domestic kids working their tails off for an Ivy admission?

They ought to, but they won't. I'll get into this.