Monday, June 22, 2009
News / Chicagoland Forget it Jake, it's Champaign-Urbana
Posted by Whet Moser on Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 12:55 PM
Steve Rhodes rounds up some tone-deaf shrugs about the Trib's outstanding series about clout and the U of I. I'm a bit confused; if you need some help getting outraged, perhaps the attempts by trustees and lawmakers to get underqualified applicants into the U of I med school (!) might set you off.
Legacy admissions and their ilk, of course, are a longtime scourge across academia, which may account for the lack of surprise in this specific instance. Legacy pundit Jonah Goldberg, still inexplicably employed by TribCo despite being a shining example of the incompetence that nepotism encourages, has a hilarious defense of why it's not nearly as bad as affirmative action:
"People say, 'well, why should we be neutral on race when people aren't neutral about whose family gave more money to a school and all the rest?' And there's a longer answer, but a short answer is simply that, you know, we fought a civil war over race. We amended the constitution a couple of times because of race. We had the civil rights act because of race. Seems to me that race is different, and that we've learned from bitter experience with lots of dead people that government getting in the business of picking winners and losers by race is a bad way to go."
So, yeah: if you find yourself ambivalent about the U of I scandal, just read a Jonah Goldberg column. It'll fix that.
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Maybe I'm thick, but can you tell me what is wrong with the Goldberg quote here?
Ha! One of the best post titles ever.
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