We’re not sending our best

We’re not sending our best (to top tier universities) and it is because of legacy admissions policies and generational wealth. OK, fine, people with money can send their kids to any university they choose… nothing wrong with that, even though “generational wealth” is a biased privilege. But the people lucky enough to have had their ancestors go to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, get another super leg up (in addition to the money thing). Their marginally competent offspring get preferential admission. Legacy admissions might be one of our worst problems in America. When an incompetent wastrel scion of a businessman runs their father’s company into the ground, the company suffers, the employees go south, but ultimately, the wastrel suffers as well. That’s a level of feedback that is lauded by our free market, competition, and the red, white, and blue American capitalistic way. It is part of the self-regulating “floating all boats thing.” Really conservative goodness. But what happens when a lawyer, judge, banker, or member of Congress fails due to incompetence? They are all playing with somebody else’s money. They may suffer but their clients suffer more. What happens when most of the lawyers and judges are in their positions due to generational privilege? Legacy admissions at our finest institutions of learning are allowing nepotism to overload our most educated and prestigious class of people (and the important positions they hold) with the sons and daughters of the sons and daughters of the lucky ones who got through the door years ago. Now it's not other people's money; it's their freedoms and our democracy. Forget meritocracy; think royalty. We can just all eat cake... or something. The solution? Maybe the Supreme Court could declare legacy admissions to be unconstitutional, thereby eliminating this type of “affirmative action”. I believe that it was Carl Sagan who suggested that, if given a fair playing field, an average Filipino street urchin would probably triumph over most of our privileged American youth. We have our own “urchins” here already, why not give them an even chance?

Alito’s “rebuttal”

Please, please, please, will a professor of logic at any level of academia; please take out your red pencil and diligently parse Supreme Justus Alito’s “rhetorical rebuttal” to the statements (that were not yet even published) by ProPublica? Regardless of your opinion of what Justus Alito did, if his “rebuttal” (which he preemptively printed in the Wall Street Journal), is an indication of his understanding of logic and the Aristotelian elements of fallacious rhetoric; we are all in a great deal more trouble than we have even begun to understand. If he applies this level of critical thinking to his day-to-day SCOTUS duties, our problems are not political; they are cognitive. I believe he would fail Logic 101 at a community college.