Universities don't just have ethical boundaries, ethical codes. They are supposed to be the expositors of ethics


University of Souther California
The University Village area of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles is seen on March 12, 2019.Reed Saxon/AP
A little learning is a dangerous thing (Alexander Pope) ... and it's expensive, too.

According to one summary of the news "Fifty people — including Hollywood stars, top CEOs, college coaches and standardized test administrators," and eight universities were caught up in various scams, under-the-table deals and outright bribery to get their untalented, vacant offspring into college. They cheated, lied and bought their entrance into the American system of higher education, under the same empty impulses that have some of the very well-to-do splurge on upscale cars and Prada handbags.

One of these parents is an undistinguished mediocrity from a number of numbing television presentations — the best known, Full House, a dreary, treacle "comedy," in comparison with which the one-time hit Saved by the Bell could be considered King Lear. Her name is Lori Loughlin, and now she, with a great number of other worthies, is facing criminal charges of fraud, and perhaps a long-term visit to another house, which is also full but, alas, doesn't have a studio audience. Loughlin is accused of paying half a million dollars to lubricate the enrolment of her daughter, Olivia Jade Giannulli, into the University of Southern California.

Lori Loughlin
U.S. actress Lori Loughlin is seen with her daughters Bella Giannulli, left, and Olivia Jade Giannulli at the Teen Choice Awards in Los Angeles, Calif., on Aug. 13 2017. Adriana M. Barraza/WENN.com
The daughter, whom we may firmly dismiss as a budding Madame Curie, is what is now called a "social media influencer" (a category I shall leave unexplored) and judging from some of her posts, which are as numerous as they are vapid, has the intellectual resources of a bumble bee of the drone class but without the compensatory work ethic of that insect.

A hail of irony hangs over Olivia Jade as, on the first week of the classes her mother had spent half a million to allow her to attend, she was instead on a yacht owned by a top University of Southern California official when the news of her mother's indictment in the federal investigation into college admissions fraud came out. She further made it clear that it wasn't dreams of late-night discussions of The Republic, or puzzling the mysteries of quantum physics that was drawing her to higher education. "I don't know how much of school I'm going to attend, but I'm going to go in and talk to my deans and everyone and hope that I can try to balance it all ..." — this from her YouTube channel. She continued, "But I do want the experience of game days, partying — I don't really care about school, as you guys all know."

"The daughter we may firmly dismiss as a
budding Madame Curie"

Clearly her idea of university did not coincide with, say, that of Cardinal Newman, who wrote expansively of its civilizational impulses, expansion of the human spirit and the engagement with what a later sage referred to "as the best that has been thought and said." Young Olivia Jade probably thinks, assuming that is a function she is familiar with, if she has heard of the Cardinal at all that he's a rapper, and the best that has been thought or said is to be found exclusively on TMZ and Twitter.

Add all this and it's puzzling why either mother or daughter wanted to get to university at all, since education — which is the sine qua non of university — is the only element neither of them wish to become acquainted with. Olivia Jade wanted the parties and presumably the T-shirts and hoodies with the university's name ... like buying luggage for the signature logo, or a pair of sneakers. And she and her mother were willing to pass along half a million dollars and displace a real student to just have the accessories.

Lori Loughlin at Courthouse
Actress Lori Loughlin exits the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse in Boston on April 3, 2019, after facing charges for allegedly conspiring to commit mail fraud and other charges in the college admissions scandal. Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images
That's not the real story here though by a long shot. Nor is the bribery — though that is a full scandal. It is that a university was willing to harlotize itself, admit an incompetent brainless internet hobbit, knowing that she and her mother only wanted university to wear as a logo, a status tag, a prestige trinket.

Universities are not like other institutions — corporations, government. They don't just have ethical boundaries, ethical codes. They are the expositors of ethics. They instruct in why ethics are necessary. They are in the best and true understanding of them, the source pool of all secular thought on why morality and ethics are both necessary and foundational for every given society. Or at least they were. But here — and elsewhere — it has been shown that giddy Hollywoodites, millionaires of any provenance, anxious to add a BA to some mulish offspring, can purchase a university's stamp and prestige in much the same kind of exchange in which Ms. Giannulli and her mother can purchase some upscale brand of shoes.

"She and her mother only wanted
university to wear as a logo, a status tag,
a prestige trinket"

It leads me to wonder if there is any aspect of university education that isn't open to self-degradation, to the ruin of the once genuine prestige that accompanied graduation from what was always referred to as an "institution of higher learning." In many of today's university offerings, the "higher learning" has long been jettisoned, the politics of grievance, feminism, "white privilege" and the plague of various "studies" their meretricious replacements. In reality these are not studies, but exercises in predetermined and fixed mini-ideologies, meant to ratify "identity," under the iron laws of political correctness.

There is the other plague of shutting down free speech on campus, so-called de-platforming of visiting speakers who offer any point of view other than the ruling consensus, and the craven submission of faculty and administrations to the howling of righteous student activists. Courage and truth are precariously present in today's higher education, and now with the Lori Loughlin example, we can see that honour and fair dealing are having a hard time of it, too. A university degree, under the circumstances that Loughlin and her status-obsessed confrères view it, is in no way to be distinguished from a sales slip.

About Rex Murphy

Rex Murphy has wandered the wide open spaces of journalism since the early 70s. He began at VOCM radio during an heroic period in Newfoundland politics when a (virtually) tied election left Joey Smallwood premier with one seat less than the opposition who were intent on ousting him. He joined CBC Newfoundland's Here and Now program when it was launched as a nightly supper hour news program. There have been dips into politics and magazine writing since then, and currently he writes and reports for CBC's The National and hosts Cross Country Checkkup.