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Make way for Snowplow Parents
Helicopter Parents, step aside and make way for Snowplow Parents, Snowplow Parents don’t just supervise their children’s lives: they clear away all obstacles to their children’s success. They do whatever it takes—lawful or unlawful.
The leading cohort of Snowplow Parents is the group of 33 people, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, charged with bribery and related federal offences in seeking to have their children admitted by subterfuge to prestigious universities. A Canadian from Vancouver is also among those charged.
The tactics used include having impostors write SAT tests and making up fake sports resumes to get candidates admitted as athletes. So with the connivance of corrupt coaches, football players whose high school didn’t have a team got in as athletes, as did rowers who had never rowed, and water polo players who hadn’t ever water poloed.
The investigation (dubbed operation Varsity Blues) by the FBI, uncovers staggering sums of money changing hands. Three people, including a former Yale women’s soccer coach who took over $800,000 in bribes and was on the lookout for more, as well as the alleged mastermind of the scheme, have pleaded guilty and face stiff prison sentences.
The universities involved have begun expelling the students and firing the staff responsible. But that will not stop them from facing class action lawsuits brought by those who say their university degrees are cheapened by the admission of otherwise unqualified students; and by those who didn’t get in and claim they would have done had the unqualified students not been admitted.
The scandal is forcing universities across the US to review their admissions practises. Their reputations are compromised. Donors may turn away. It’s a major, major mess.
I realize you are never going to be able completely to level the playing field on which the rich and the not rich seek to enter university. A rich kid’s parents can always hire extra tutoring assistance for him. Or they can make a large donation to the university and hope to see him admitted with lots of ‘friend of the university’ points.
But there is something about these allegations, if they are proven true in court, that goes way over the line and sticks in the craw. They reinforce the cynic’s view that the rich play by their own set of rules. Did they truly think that if admission to a university could be reduced to a transaction with a financial value, it was okay because they had the means to do so, or because it was their children? Or did they not appreciate that what they did was wrong? Are people so without a moral compass that they failed to appreciate what effect their conduct would have on those students who play by the rules and discipline themselves to hit the books?
Even if they hadn’t gotten caught by Operation Varsity Blues, whether those parents have done their children any favours by boosting them in this fashion is doubtful. It doesn’t exactly sound like it does much to bolster a sense of self-reliance or selfworth. And where does the snowplowing stop? Do the parents next bribe the personnel departments of major employers to get their children ahead? Or send impostors to apply for jobs on their children’s behalf?
It’s surprising to me how many issues of the day boil down to a question of ethics. Whether it be the SNC-Lavalin affair, the hiring of an OPP commissioner, the running of a straw candidate for the leadership of Alberta’s United Conservative Party, or the conduct of family business through the office of President of the United States, we are prompted to remark “if only they had some better sense of the appropriate ethical limits on their actions…”
I hope that the parents charged have an innocent explanation for their part in this mess. If they don’t, I hope they are made to listen to philosophy professors lecture them on ethics, going all the way back to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. I hope they are given uncomfortable chairs to sit on. And that there is an exam afterwards—one they can’t hire a ringer to take for them.
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