Boy Scouts aren’t what they used to be

Get dissed by the president for “The View”, boo his taped speech:

[YouTube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAWsy7VV8oE"]

So, the alma mater graduates ignoramuses

It’s sad, but it’s true.

As Kathy Shaidle points out, via Stacy McCain, a Princeton senior at Newsweek could not do the elementary due diligence necessary to find out that The Road To Serfdom was a popular best-seller in its time, although it had to be — as was the case with almost every bit of intellectual thought of the time that was not on the radical left — filtered through Reader’s Digest.

As a matter of intellectual history, Reader’s Digest was the premier American anti-Communist journal of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

Given what we now know about those decades, you would think that this would be a matter of shame for the more prominent intellectual journals of the day, but … the only people who know it either were the guilty ones on the left, or the few intellectually honest sorts who look into it. (See, Princeton redeems herself with Fleming!)

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Oh well.

I didn’t read Hayek till a couple years after college — but I’ve never met an easier read.  I read The Road to Serfdom in a couple of hours.  Reads like Tolstoy — like a hot knife through butter.

I’d advise that college senior to read Fleming’s book — she might learn something.

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Incidentally: Glenn Beck is a bibliophile.

Any semi-regular listener or viewer knows that.

Listening to girls in glasses

Am still fascinated by the guy who snuck into Harvard and almost got away with a degree.

Was chatting with a college friend, and she and I could clearly come up with a better fake resume than his — but then, we know the real thing.  (Still, he should have, too — went to class with all these people for years…)

More on living lies

This is actually fascinating.

He crafted an elaborate web of lies to con his way into Harvard University, authorities say, but Adam B. Wheeler wasn’t content to graduate quietly and get away with just a degree.

After two years of blending into campus life and racking up academic prizes and tens of thousands of dollars in grants and scholarships, Wheeler allegedly upped the ante: The 23-year-old senior applied for the prestigious Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships last fall using falsified credentials, including a fake transcript and work he plagiarized from a Harvard professor, said investigators.  …

In court documents, authorities laid out the intricate life they say Wheeler concocted to gain admission to one of the world’s most selective universities, where he enrolled as a transfer student in 2007. In his Harvard application, he said he had graduated from Phillips Academy, an elite prep school in Andover, and attended MIT.

The MIT transcript he submitted indicated perfect grades from his first year there, according to the documents. In addition, he submitted letters of recommendation from four MIT professors and the director of college counseling at Andover, essays discussing his time at MIT, and official documents from The College Board indicating he had received a perfect SAT score of 1600 in March 2005.

He also included a full transcript from Andover that indicated he had graduated and held a diploma from the school.

Well, if you’re going to lie, go big.

I’d heard of people doing it in decades past, but being able to get away with it now…

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The thing is, if you’re smart enough to get away with stuff like that, you’re probably smart enough to get in on your own merits — you can usually find a way.

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Another Harvard alumnus says shame on Harvard.

I agree somewhat: for transfer students, which is typically where this sort of skulduggery is done, the numbers are small enough that one staffer can spend an afternoon doing due diligence on credentials — viz., calling offices, or even just doing Google searches.

People who are impressive enough to be Harvard material will have at least a few traces — local news clips, team records, school newspapers, articles written, etc. — that can be found.  If they’re not found, why then, that’s a person to look a little deeper into.  And, of course, use standard procedures like requiring official transcripts to be mailed directly from the institutions in question.  (Use unofficial ones to make timely decisions, but get the numbers confirmed from official ones sent properly.)

In 2010, given how much technology is out there, no-one should be able to do something like that.

It’s hilarious that he managed it, and that if he hadn’t gotten so greedy he would have gotten away with it entirely.  (I wonder how many have?  You just have to know when to walk away with your winnings.)

See also another amused person.  And two admirers.

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Me, I admire (and am amused by) his chutzpah.  And I’d still send him to jail for fraud.  (Though I might give him an out, and offer him a job doing slightly sketchy things for our government overseas while he serves out his sentence.  We need more like him out there.)

Update:  From a wag in the comments section –

Look, he got into Harvard. Once he got in, it shouldn’t matter how he got there. He should be allowed to remain and continue to pursue his dream. To persecute him over this is just mean-spirited and anti-American.

After all, why should we treat is undocumented scholar any differently than we treat an undocumented worker who finds his way into this country?

J.

Ha ha.  (un-American, he means.)

Update again:

That comment got a lot of angry responses, both from the people who didn’t get the joke, and from the people who did and replied, “THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION!!!”

And they’re wrong, it’s a totally analogous situation.

I admire Adam’s ingenuity, and still would toss him in jail; I admire the illegals’ ingenuity, and still would deport them when they’re captured.

There are rules, and you have to uphold them.

Perspective

Have been reading more about the HLS kerfuffle.

One article that caught my eye was this one.

I found it interesting because, well, it just goes to show how things change depending on your mindset.

When I look at Harvard Law School, I don’t see a bastion of white privilege.  I see a community of a bunch of people who got 3.8s as undergrads or 175+ on the LSAT, with all the pathologies that come with that.

It’s pretty left-wing, as almost all top universities tend to be, and it’s kind of over-sensitive on the issue of race, as are almost all institutions that are both very hard to get into and engaged in the use of racial preferences in their admissions processes.  [Hint: if you want the white and Asian students to stop looking at their black and Hispanic classmates funny, admit the black and Hispanic students on the same basis.]

Anyway.  Aside from a new dean who seems rather clueless — I doubt that Dean Kagan would have responded the way she did — HLS seems to be in pretty good shape.  (Well, except for all that “living tree” stuff.  But that’s not a problem with HLS specifically — that’s a problem with a whole generation of legal academics.)

Let 100(0) Flowers Bloom!

Ever heard of the 100 Flowers campaign?  (Known popularly in the West as “let a thousand flowers bloom.”)

In 1957, the Chinese Communist Party encouraged its citizens to speak out about what the Party and the government were doing wrong — the idea being, it would encourage better governance, etc., etc.

Predictably, the authorities did not like what they heard.  What happened in the year after?  There was a purge of “reactionaries” in the population — the people who had conveniently revealed their views to the party the year before.

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Treat race and gender in that light.  Whenever someone — especially someone in authority — encourages open discussion, never, ever, ever take them at their word.

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Given that advice, and that history lesson, I present to you the Stephanie Grace e-mail controversy.

Update:  Second bit of advice — avoid anyone named “Yelena” from the HLS class of 2010.  Especially if she’s a libertarian.