What really happened at Cornell

This is an account of the first student assault on an elite university: Cornell 1969.

I think this conservative narrative while factually correct is fundamentally wrong. It blames the radical black students and the cowardly Administration and faculty. But I don't think that's what drove this explosion. Key points:

1. This followed Cornell's admission of academically underqualified black applicants. "Window Dressing"

2. This preceded the creation of black and other cultural studies programs that give elite schools' "window dressing" a place to hide.

3. Brought there under condescending but false pretenses the unqualified and unprepared students immediately began floundering in an institution that had decided to use them but hadn't thought through the consequences.

4. The underprepared black kids, realizing this and realizing that weren't going to get asked back next year much less graduate decided to take a page from their cousins on the street. 

5. The administration and facuty, shocked and not sufficiently cynical to not feel accountable for their selfish actions folded not because they were cowards but because they were in the wrong.

6. They and the rest if academe then went full cynical and made sure that henceforth window dressing kids had window dressing departments to get them their window dressing degrees.

7. The problem today is that the (politicized) window dressing parts of these universities keep expanding. The mean grade at Harvard us now an A-. The mode or most common grade is an A.

Is Harvard's answer to racial inequality simply to stop trying to truly educate anyone? After all the hard bit is clearly getting in, not getting out.

And how unequal is this? Because it simply transfers the competition earlier ,  placing massive burdens on 15, 16, 17 year olds when many kids don't mature that early emotionally or intellectually. But Rich kids and parents have even more massive advantages at this stage.

And the conveyor belts of privilege keep chugging on.