Yesterday, everyone at the U of I received some strange, cryptic emails from the Chancellor and the President. It was clear from the emails that something had happened—a newspaper story about the admissions process at Illinois that suggested some students were being admitted based on political and economic “clout” rather than merit. President White insisted that admissions at Illinois is based solely on merit. He also insisted that admissions for “patronage students” (children of wealthy or famous alumni, applicants who are politically connected) must be separately “monitored” and “tracked,” but that this does not mean that anyone was admitted who was unqualified (White claims that the article does not ever say that someone was admitted who was not qualified).

Zizek proposed that the Bush administration’s justifications for the war in Iraq were best understood if analyzed according to a joke, the joke of the borrowed kettle. A man borrows a kettle from his neighbor, but the neighbor complains that the kettle is broken when returned. The man who borrowed the kettle explains: “First of all, when I gave it back to you, it wasn’t broken. Second, it was already broken when I borrowed it. Third, I’ve never borrowed a kettle from you in my life.” Each explanation, perhaps convincing in itself, is problematized by the other explanations offered, and for Zizek, this is a sign that the unconscious is at work—there is a disturbance in manifest speech caused by a repressed latent content (such as, say, a lie). So it is with President White’s email:

Third, the Tribune makes no assertion that unqualified individuals were admitted to the University. This must always be the case.  In addition, if we have had a problem with inappropriate pressures for admission from

well-connected people, numbers from the Tribune article suggest it is a small one which does not corrupt the admissions system and which we can quickly correct.

Now, that’s some nice “borrowed kettle” logic! No students were inappropriately admitted. Moreover, the number of inappropriately students is very small. The system is pure and uncorrupted, and the corruption in it is very small and can be quickly corrected.

I’m especially intrigued by the non-sequitur in Pres. White’s email: “this must always be the case.” Read literally, the phrase means that it must always be the case that the Tribune make no assertion that unqualified individuals are admitted to the University. This is why you need psychoanalysis—this bizarre phrase can only be explained as the expression of an unconscious wish (that the Tribune would publish stories that reflect well on our admission policies). I know that’s not what White meant to say, but it is clearly what the sentence means, and even more clearly, it reflects a deeper logic at work. I also can’t help but note that the two emails—one from Chancellor Herman and the other from President White—are quite different. Herman’s email is free of this kind of gaffe—perhaps because Herman isn’t implicated in corrupt admission processes by the article (in fact, he is only mentioned in a positive light), unlike President White. 

In any event, the Tribune article can’t point to an individual student who was inappropriately admitted because Federal privacy laws don’t allow the students’ records to be turned over with names, social security numbers, and so on. What the article does show, beyond any reasonable doubt, is that numerous students were admitted who were less qualified than the average admittee, after pressure was brought to bear, in some cases by President White himself, in other cases, by state politicians, including the now-convicted influence peddler Tony Rezco. “Patronage students” had lower scores (which is interesting in itself—you would imagine that the children of the powerful and wealthy would have high scores because they got high-quality educations) on average, but higher admissions rates.

So, what are we to make of this? Almost every university does this, of course—keeps a private list of special students who receive preferential treatment from admissions committees because they provide political or economic support. It’s a bit of an ethical quandary at public universities, however, since in theory they are, well, public. And the government isn’t supposed to, you know, discriminate in favor of wealthy, powerful people.

Do we care? I mean, you’d probably be pretty pissed off if you discovered that there was a secret line with an easier test at the DMV for the kids of politicians. You’d be pretty angry if you found out that teenagers from wealthy families just didn’t have to pay parking tickets. Either of those kinds of corruption would be ended immediately if they were exposed. But I expect there will relatively little outrage over this; cosmetic changes will be made to mollify the minor annoyance, and the practice will continue in one for or another.  Why will this practice continue?

Because it is necessary. What President White did not say in his email—tragically—is this:

Frankly, the Tribune story exposes an unpleasant aspect of the modern state university that all of us who believe in state-funded higher education don’t like talking about. We don’t even like to admit that it exists. But it does. The numbers are very small, as the Tribune article shows, perhaps a hundred applicants per year, out of approximately 26,000 applications total.  It is obviously inappropriate for a public university to discriminate in favor of the wealthy and the powerful, and many Illinois taxpayers will no doubt object: “this is my university! Payed for by my tax dollars!” That would be a genuine problem—if it were true—, but it is not: the University of Illinois is a state university in name only, receiving only about 10% of its operating budget from the State of Illinois. We also depend on wealthy alumni and political connections, and our “Category I” applicants frankly help us to stay in business. The outraged taxpayers are right to be outraged, but they should be outraged at the state legislators who have cut funding for higher education year after year. If Illinois taxpayers want to own the admissions process at the University of Illinois, they should insist—in letters, petitions and at the voting booth—that their representatives actually fund it.

As I see it, the Illinois taxpayer currently funds just 10% of the admissions process, and gets 99.6% of the admissions done the way they want. That’s a pretty awesome deal. I think it’s lame that well-heeled applicants with lousy test scores get priority over poor and middle-class students with better scores, and I think it’s even more lame that Illinois administration are not taking this occasion to, well, educate the masses about the finances of the university. (And it’s unbelievably lame to say “we did nothing wrong, and besides, it was only a little corruption!”) But the President of the University can never say such a thing, because he’s appointed by… the very same Trustees and politicians who will later ask him to get their kids (and the friends’ kids, and their neighbors’ kids, and their constituents’ kids) into college! It is—as the ethics test that President White is supposed to take every year along with every other University of Illinois employee would say—a conflict of interest.