A three-pack of Trojan latex condoms is $5.99, while a Trojan sheepskin is $299,300. The better value, regarding family planning, is the one without a Trojan Family Weekend, scheduled for Saturday, November 2, 2019, at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. Also, the person who pays $5.99 shows more responsibility than the head Trojan whose public letter is an attempt to avoid responsibility.
That actress Lori Loughlin allegedly paid $500,000 for her daughters to become Trojans—to win admission to the University of Southern California—is more cringeworthy than criminal. And yet she was more honest in her dishonesty than any dishonest expression of honesty by Wanda M. Austin, the interim president of USC.
Instead of acknowledging the absurdity of the university’s admissions process, instead of admitting that an 11 percent acceptance rate represents the triumph of luck over logic, instead of conceding that its 23 admissions counselors, of whom 20 look like future staff members of the Office of Independent Counsel, instead of confessing that it cannot do justice to 67,000 applications, President Austin says USC is a victim of deceit.
More like a perpetrator of deceit, since it is easier to defend the 1946 Soviet Union legislative election—in which Josef Stalin received 81 percent of the vote—than it is to justify USC’s rejection of 89 percent of applicants for the class of 2023. One made no claim of fairness, no case for openness, no call for inspections. The other spoke about the depravity of deprivation, of how liberty was impossible in a land with more bills (of and about rights) than bread.
If President Austin does not speak Russian, she should nonetheless try to lie as convincingly as the worst Russian in history. The university she leads is no worse an offender than similar institutions. But USC is offensive just the same. It relegates education to the ash heap of history, as it writes its own history about the death of education at USC.
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