Landry Lies

November 30, 2018 5:11 PM

Unfortunately, sometimes feel-good stories of academic achievement are built on lies and abuse. SL New York Times. Tw for racism, child abuse, and general awfulness.
posted by Alensin (19 comments total)

The ending of this was such a horrifying gut-punch. I also cannot believe these people are opening another school rather than, you know, serving jail time for abuse and fraud.
posted by TwoStride at 5:48 PM on November 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

To be honest, I wondered if the ending was entirely accurate. It read as a bit... Theatrical? The fraud and abuse charges should certainly come, of course.
posted by Alensin at 5:51 PM on November 30, 2018

@whstancil: Hey, you know what the scandal is here? It's that HARVARD AND YALE AND PRINCETON AND BROWN AND DARTMOUTH AND STANFORD, in their hunt for the Perfect Black Miracle Student, got taken by this OBVIOUS FRAUD. ... Despite this.. an amazing number of graduates seemed to be doing fine. Not all by any means, but plenty. Turns out a low-income black kid doesn't have to be a 1-in-a-million child prodigy to thrive in elite higher education! Which raises the question of "why aren't more admitted" (Of course, we knew this, right? That everyday students can go to Yale, do fine, and maybe get launched into the stratosphere? We know it because rich kids do it all. The. Time.)

I mean, the abusive guy who runs the school is obviously the more pressing issue at the moment, but this is a good thread asking why we keep demanding miracle schools and the lies we tell ourselves about colleges in this country.
posted by zachlipton at 5:52 PM on November 30, 2018 [41 favorites]

I'm not sure that a lot of students are doing fine. If you're graduating students with fraudulent credentials who can't read and write, or possess essential numeracy then you've basically wasted their childhood. For example, the one kid who was excited about trying to get into MIT and now doesn't even have a GED and is taking remedial high school classes while he works to support himself. A lot of the students who are succeeding appear to have come from his recruitment efforts at other high schools, and already have an actual education elsewhere.
posted by codacorolla at 7:02 PM on November 30, 2018 [16 favorites]

What kills me inside reading about stuff like this happening is the collateral damage that you don't see, that you can't see, just from the reporting in the article.

Remember that every single one of these kids ended up taking away a spot at each of those colleges that, that year, could have gone to someone else. It might even have been someone of similar socioeconomic or maybe even ethnic background, facing all the same challenges...but their school didn't cheat as effectively.

For those kids, a completely different future lies ahead now. Maybe it's still a great one. Maybe it's frustratingly limited though. Maybe one of them commits suicide. We don't know. We'll never know, but at least I'd like to think most of us at least care.

The folks who profit off these kinds of schools though? They don't care at all.
posted by trackofalljades at 7:04 PM on November 30, 2018 [6 favorites]

The everyday rich kids don't get launched into the stratosphere by Harvard. They were already in the stratosphere. Harvard just lets them leverage their intergenerational ties to wealth into lateral ties to wealth, and, without the intergenerational ties, the lateral ones are much harder to get. (You're probably not going to be selling overpriced financial products to your lax team bros one day if you'd never heard of lacrosse before you got to Princeton.) But even the most everyday rich kid at Harvard or Yale had a fundamentally better education than the one this school offers. An education focused on ACT prep and little else is not going to prepare you for any school with even modest standards, or, possibly more importantly, using your brain throughout your life.

For this kind of institution, with its fixation on loyalty and the personal "charisma" of the founder, if the current college students were actually happy with their overall experience, you can be sure they'd be coming forward to defend the place. The silence is very telling.

The convergence of about eight different malignant strands in American culture into a locus to torture these poor kids is just awful. I feel a lot worse for them than I do for the kids who "had to" go to their second choice of school. These days, due to population pressures, a zillion highly qualified candidates don't get into their school of choice, and do just fine even if they have to go to the next tier "down." There's definitely a point at which there's a real drop-off in quality in the American post-secondary system, but it's not "just below the Ivies."
posted by praemunire at 8:04 PM on November 30, 2018 [16 favorites]

the primary purpose of admission to undergraduate programs at ivies isn't "quality education".

it's networking and credentialism.
posted by lalochezia at 8:07 PM on November 30, 2018 [8 favorites]

Mr. Landry said the word “kneel” meant “I love you” in his own language, “Mike-a-nese.”

I just can't with this. I mean... no. No.
posted by sysinfo at 8:09 PM on November 30, 2018 [9 favorites]

Wasn't for me, lalochezia, sorry if that was your experience.

That extremely instrumental view, by the way, is one of the malignant strands of thought I identified above and, I would bet any amount you like, is part of how the founders justify what they have done to themselves.
posted by praemunire at 8:14 PM on November 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

This is a horrifying story, but also viral because it's an excuse for everyone to vent cheap anger at the Ivies. That thread by whstancil mentioned above is a perfect example, and I wonder to what degree his (and other people's outrage) is part of the right-wing attack on affirmative action.

Stancil huffs and puffs about how awful is it that Ivies consider difficult family backgrounds in their admissions process. Is that really a problem? Fraud is fraud, but fraudulent grades don't suggest people should ignore grades, and fraudulent charities founded during high school -- another bit of fraud the owners of this school committed to get kids into college -- shouldn't make people disparage charities.

I'm not sure what Stancil expects colleges to do -- send out detectives to verify the reports of high schools? Fraudulent operations like this get exposed fairly quickly, either by district attorneys or by the press (as happened here). Turning this into "how awful that Ivies like to admit kids from underprivileged communities with tough life stories" doesn't seem to help anyone but rich white kids and anti-affirmative-action conservatives.
posted by msalt at 8:50 PM on November 30, 2018

Turning this into "how awful that Ivies like to admit kids from underprivileged communities with tough life stories" doesn't seem to help anyone but rich white kids and anti-affirmative-action conservatives.

How did you get that from what Stancil said? He seemed to me to be quite clearly arguing that the Ivies should admit fewer rich white kids and more minority students
posted by asterix at 9:00 PM on November 30, 2018 [4 favorites]

I don't think that's what stancil is saying in that linked tweet (though I think his analysis is wrong, for reasons I mentioned, and also he seems to think Ivies expect applicants to wear bow ties???), but I do think people of bad faith will take it in that direction, so care is required in formulating responses lest they play into that.
posted by praemunire at 9:58 PM on November 30, 2018

How did you get that from what Stancil said? He seemed to me to be quite clearly arguing that the Ivies should admit fewer rich white kids and more minority students

Well, for example in the first tweet of his thread. What do you think "Perfect" means in this case? He doesn't think the scandal is the fraud, or the institutional advantages of affluent white students. No, in his view:

Hey, you know what the scandal is here? It's that HARVARD AND YALE AND PRINCETON AND BROWN AND DARTMOUTH AND STANFORD, in their hunt for the Perfect Black Miracle Student, got taken by this OBVIOUS FRAUD

His complaint is "how incredibly effective their narrative was." Their narrative was individualized in each fraudulent college application that they helped craft: "here is a kid who overcame tremendous challenges to do great in school, while forming a non-profit to help other children of alcoholic parents." I think that is a narrative that colleges should reward (unless it's fraudulent). But his complaint is with the narrative itself, not the fraud.
posted by msalt at 10:20 PM on November 30, 2018

If you read the whole thread, it's clear that he means that black kids don't need to be Perfect Miracle Students to do well at the Ivies, and so expecting that narrative of their black applicants is bullshit. That is, he thinks the fraud exposes the inapplicability of the admissions standards (which are stacked against minority applicants) generally, since, if the kids did fine at the schools despite their applications being faked, that must show that the standards don't reflect the qualities required to do well. The problem with his argument is that there's not much evidence in that article that the kids, especially the ones whose education was primarily at Landry, are doing well.
posted by praemunire at 10:47 PM on November 30, 2018 [7 favorites]

I did read his entire thread and IMHO there are several problems with it:

-- as you note, the evidence doesn't show that these kids are doing well; the article shows kids struggling, depressed, dropping out. One is doing "fine," but a better student might have contributed more to the college. Students give as well as get.

-- he just assumes that a narrative of a tough family life or other obstacles is needed only by minority applicants. Specifically, he makes this ridiculous statement:

The real takeaway of this story is that no one thinks twice about letting in a white kid with a decent transcript if they seem like a hard worker...."

Harvard (recently sued by conservatives for considering a student's life history and attitude) has a 5.6% admittance rate. And he thinks random white kids are getting waved through? The school gets more applicants with perfect grades and test scores each year than they have seats in the freshman class.

-- he also says They just need something - anything - to show them that this isn't a Normal Black Kid. They need to know this black kid is special. That's absolutely true for elite schools -- but it's just as true for kids of any race or ethnic background. (unless the kid is a legacy or his parents gave millions to the school, which is bad, but there's no indication that it's any less true for POC.)
posted by msalt at 1:08 PM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

a better student might have contributed more to the college

Really, really, really reconsider what you are saying here.

Harvard (recently sued by conservatives for considering a student's life history and attitude) has a 5.6% admittance rate. And he thinks random white kids are getting waved through?

Random white kids who are legacies, play sports (many of which, at these kinds of schools, are expensive and/or uncommon sports played much more by rich kids), or have parents who are considered to have major development potential do get waved through. By the magic of expensive schooling from day one, such kids are often superficially "better qualified" than the equivalent poor black kid, but they aren't competitive with their classmates and many "just not quite qualified" by the regular standards poor minority kids are certainly brighter.

there's no indication that it's any less true for POC.

What you are not getting here is that white people are infinitely more likely to be in the privileged categories I just enumerated than POC are. Meaning that those options aren't available to them, and the standards thus effectively higher.

Exhibit A: Jared fucking Kushner.
posted by praemunire at 3:25 PM on December 1, 2018 [5 favorites]

What you are not getting here is that white people are infinitely more likely to be in the privileged categories I just enumerated than POC are.

I do get that, and I'm the one who brought up legacies & donors in the first place. Not so true about sports, though.

Really, really, really reconsider what you are saying here.

Maybe I'm not making myself clear. Here's my angle: Harvard is under legal attack as we speak for its affirmative action program, precisely for letting in POC and people from underprivileged backgrounds. They go out of their way to give a break to people whose scores and grades have been disadvantaged by all sorts of social and personal issues, specifically including underfunded schools, rough family histories, etc.

They do that because a student who has succeeded to a considerable degree despite major disadvantages is a good prospect to succeed, and enriches the college experience for their fellow students as well. These are the applicants I'm describing as "a better student" than some kid who just up and lies about having this background and these achievements.

What I'm saying is that a student who has done well despite these disadvantages -- if perhaps not as well in terms of tests and grades as fully advantaged students -- will contribute more to the college than a student who, with the help of a fraudulent HS, lies and pretends to have overcome challenges.

Is there something there that you would warn me against?
posted by msalt at 11:35 AM on December 2, 2018

Yes. The suggestion that a student who may be struggling academically isn't contributing sufficiently to their school. It's a shitty thing to say.

Harvard is under legal attack as we speak for its affirmative action program, precisely for letting in POC and people from underprivileged backgrounds. They go out of their way to give a break to people whose scores and grades have been disadvantaged by all sorts of social and personal issues, specifically including underfunded schools, rough family histories, etc.

This isn't an accurate description of the issues in the Harvard case.
posted by praemunire at 10:28 PM on December 2, 2018

The suggestion that a student who may be struggling academically isn't contributing sufficiently to their school. It's a shitty thing to say.

Uh … your issue is that it's shitty to say that students who are struggling academically because they lied about their qualifications aren't contributing as much as students who really are disadcantaged and who actually did achieve nonetheless?

I'm going to stand by my comments. It's possible that a given fraudulent student who doesn't belong in the school academically might be really good at sports or socially adept or a wonderful DJ or whatever, but I think that in the aggregate my generalization will bear out.

This isn't an accurate description of the issues in the Harvard case.

If you accept the statements of Edward Blum, the 66-year old conservative activist who launched the lawsuit, it might not be accurate. And yet even he admits that he is opposed to all efforts to admit students of color whose grades are not as good or better than fully advantaged wealthy white students.

“That’s the goal of these lawsuits, is to eliminate the consideration of race or ethnicity,” he told the Houston Chinese Alliance in 2015. “So, I needed plaintiffs. I needed Asian plaintiffs.”

Blum is also the guy who took the Abigail Fisher vs. University of Texas - Austin case to the Supreme Court twice. He sought out Asian-American clients only after his efforts directly on behalf of white students failed.
posted by msalt at 9:20 AM on December 3, 2018 [2 favorites]