Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation the Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation This week, on To the Contrary The end of legacy admissions?, A policy not popular with many students.

Then, males, masculinity and misogyny are American men in crisis?

(MUSIC) Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe' Welcome to To the contrary, a discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

Up first, some legacy students may lose a perk.

A small number of elite colleges have announced they will end legacy admissions.

This after the US Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions and an ensuing debate developed on whether legacy admissions hurt students of color trying to gain admission to top schools.

Critics, including President Biden, charge legacy admissions, give privileged applicants even more advantages.

Polls of college students and of the population at large have found legacy admissions are unpopular.

Studies show students who are the children of alumni and particularly alumni Donors are more likely to be accepted than other applicants.

Joining us this week are Sam Bennett of the New York Amsterdam News, Carrie Sheffield, senior policy analyst at the Independent Women's Forum.

Jessica Washington, Senior reporter for The Root.

Lavern Spicer.

Sam Bennett, do you think that the federal government should be telling private schools who do accept some federal money, but certainly not most or all of their budgets are federal money, how they can fundraise and how they can how much money they can take in from different people?

I think the federal government has an incredibly important role to play in education in the United States.

I mean, think of it.

We're a nation of immigrants, right?

We're still the number one country that everyone wants to immigrate to.

And in the face of that, education is the great equalizer, right?

Where it's the most important pathway to economic and other equality measures.

So I think the federal government has an incredibly important role to play in our democracy.

And I applaud those schools that are taking away legacy, which Congresswoman Barbara Lee, I think very accurately said legacy admission is affirmative action for wealthy white people.

I think she had that one right.

All right, Jessica Washington from The Root, thank you for joining us today.

Your thoughts on this, please?

I completely agree.

I mean, there is no denying that legacy admissions preferences, people who are wealthy, who are white, who have families, who had opportunities to go to these schools that just didn't exist decades ago, years ago.

So I think it's incredibly important that schools are tackling this issue and we know that colleges are starting to think about how they can, without affirmative action, promote diversity.

And this is a really smart way to do it.

And your thoughts, Lavern Spicer.

And thank you for joining us.

Thank you so much for the invite.

One thing we know, any time you get in federal dollars, there will always be strings that are attached to receiving those funds.

And you do have to follow those guidelines.

But I believe that what even if a donor donated to a college, large sums of money or if even with affirmative action, I believe that everyone should have to work their way, do their due diligence study and apply to get to where they need to go in this country.

Because in America, the land of opportunity, especially for us women and so many other countries, we would not be able to how to achieve the heights that we are able to achieve here in this country.

All right.

Thank you.

And Carrie Sheffield of the Independent Women's Forum.

Your thoughts?

Yeah, I agree with Lavern.

I mean, I think on both sides, I agree with the Supreme Court ruling repealing affirmative action.

I think it's wrong to discriminate by race no matter what race you are.

And I agree that getting rid of legacy is the right way to go.

I think that on both sides, this is to level the playing field and have it truly be a merit based society.

I will say this the clear that has to change in all of this, though, is the universities, because they are the ones they pressure wealthy people, they coerce them, they twist their arm.

They basically say if you don't give us a sizable donation, your child will not come in.

I know several people who have had this basically happen to them where they're basically with a gun to their head said, you will give a sizable donation or your child will not be allowed, even if that child has exceptional test scores, has an exceptional GPA and profile and done exceptional things.

So I think we have to keep that in mind.

I think The Court.

I have not heard reports of that, and I actually know a couple of people who've worked in that field and where, where are you getting this information?

I'm just curious.

Directly from people who I know who have had this happen to them, people who I know.

High net worth individuals.

And that's essentially what the schools say to them.

It's there's a wink, wink, nod, nod situation.

And we just had somebody, you know, the Becky the Aunt on Full House went to prison.

Because of the fraud in this whole system.

The whole system.

But that was not a top school.

That was not her daughter was not admitted to Harvard or Yale.

Right.

But it's the same thing.

It doesn't matter if it's higher ranked or not.

She was committing fraud by doing it.

I think the whole system.

But part of it was that she felt like she had this pressure to do it and it's all wrong.

I say we get rid of the entire thing, but make the universities they need to lower tuition.

The reason why tuition is insanely high, it's because of the universities and Joe Biden's plan to try to wipe it all out magically will do nothing to stop the universities from jacking up their prices.

The schools have budgets that they're using now.

If they're going to cut by not having it be a give and take where somebody donates money and their kid gets in.

If they don't give that anymore, then fewer people are going to donate, obviously.

Right, If that's the reason they donated in the first place.

And if you're also saying that they should cut in other parts of their budget, what's going to happen?

My guess is the first thing that'll go is scholarships.

So it's really not going to make it easier for the the kids of color who are admitted and or whites.

I would recommend getting rid of the mid-level managers.

If you look at the administrative state of universities, it has skyrocketed the ratio of administrators to students.

There's so much waste, fraud and abuse.

Honestly, at universities.

They're also putting up insanely like, why do you have a rock climbing wall in your student union?

You don't need that.

That's something that's an excessive cost.

And then also a lot of these universities, they have multibillion dollar endowments where the system self perpetuates.

So university and in my view has become sadly a cesspool of indoctrination where the children come in and instead of being taught critical thinking, they're taught how to be taught and they're brainwashed.

Jessica, do you think the students getting into the Ivy League, let's say, and then Stanford and other universities of that caliber are being brainwashed?

No, I don't believe so.

I went to an Ivy League school.

I went to the University of Pennsylvania.

It was not an indoctrination experience.

In fact, I would say I experienced plenty of students who said things that were incredibly racist and offensive.

I really didn't feel that it was a safe, safe space, necessarily.

I did also get to interact with professors who were incredible in their field, who were able to provide knowledge.

If you wanted to seek it out, you you went after hours, you worked on these kinds of issues.

It was really a great experience.

But I will say I definitely didn't experience this bubble of students who were all indoctrinated.

If anything, I felt I experienced a lot of racism, sexism, homophobia at these universities.

And I'm glad that there are efforts to try and... that.

Well, I went to an Ivy League as well.

I went to Harvard University, and I can tell you that I had a professor who tried to coerce me to go to a rally that was about immigration policies, but I did not agree with.

And my grade was going to be on the line.

And the only reason why I was able to get out of it was because I complained and he tried to coerce me to go and to and I said, well, can I go to a rally about the Tea Party instead as an alternative?

And he said, no.

So and then I had another experience at Harvard where students were putting up paraphernalia about abortion, which as a pro-life person myself, I found to be deeply offensive.

And I said, Well, how would you feel if I put a bunch of bloody fetuses on the wall?

You wouldn't like that either.

To me, it's just as offensive.

So I don't know your experience, Jessica, But as a conservative, I can tell you that I was discriminated against by professors and administrators and I did not feel like it was a place where I could be comfortable being myself.

Well, let me chime in here.

As a Columbia alumni or alumna of undergrad and graduate Studies, I never experienced any of those kinds of things.

And some of them are so outrageous that you should have reported them at the time to try to make it sound like it.

You know, it actually happened to that degree.

But I'm not saying they they don't you know, some some professors are conservative.

I know conservatives don't like to admit that.

They say it's all liberal left.

I had conservative professors who said things I didn't agree with, but I didn't take offense at them.

I just .....

There have been numerous studies about this.

There are some, but there are multiple studies to show it's about.

In sum, it depends on the department, but it's typically at least ten or 15 to 1 liberal to conservative.

So I don't believe that either.

Not in the you know what?

What about Stanford?

What about M.I.T.?

Right.

And if I could, my my husband, who is Hispanic, was an affirmative action student who went to Yale.

Then he went to get his MBA at Wharton, you know, and worked incredibly hard, a brilliant man.

And if affirmative action wouldn't take place, he wouldn't have gotten in.

I still feel it's a great tragedy that that was rolled back.

And I was a poor state kid.

I came from a very poor background and I was a regent scholar in New York State, which allowed me to go to college because I paid for everything myself.

So I think here in America, I think the real message here is, which I think, Carrie, you agree with, right?

We want to make sure that access to high quality college education is accessible for all.

And again, to Barbara Lee's point, we legacy is just affirmative action for wealthy whites.

Let's get rid of it.

Your thoughts, Lavern?

I believe that all people created equal, education should center itself and America, business interests and whatever is need to make America right.

And one of the problems is, you know, with what Carrie was saying, when people thought are taught to think a certain way, taught to think inside of the box, people should be trained to think outside of the box.

What I see a lot with working with certain type of people when they are learn or taught by the book, they got step one, two, three.

If step four is not there, they can't figure it out.

They can never figure it out.

Well, let me ask you this as if we just saw Wesleyan and a couple of other schools drop legacy admissions this week.

Obviously, this is going to more and more and more schools are going to do this, I suppose, particularly while there's a Supreme Court case coming up the ranks that will eventually get to the U.S. Supreme Court on this topic.

So where should they cut when they lose big donors contributions?

Where should they cut?

I would argue I was actually a faculty wife in the college world for over a decade and had a lot of interaction right with those development departments.

I'm sure there are people that donate because in the hope that their their children will get in.

But principally, most of donors are doing it charitably, right?

They're getting big tax deductions in some cases for those donations.

They're getting building names after them.

And honestly, America has always had a very rich, historic tradition of philanthropy towards colleges.

It's one of the reasons we have one of the finest university systems in the world.

So I don't see that.

I would imagine the development departments are going to regear themselves, right.

They're going to have to make some changes.

But I would not predict any precipitous decline in donations.

I can't imagine that they won't have to cut if, in fact, all universities get rid of legacy admissions.

But let us know what you think.

Please follow me on Twitter at Bonnie Erbe'.

From college education to men in crisis?

some scholars and a slew of media reports agree American masculinity is in crisis.

Some young men, particularly straight men, are having a hard time finding their places in the world.

As women's rights and LGBT rights have progressed.

Many young men are turning to online influencers, dubbed the Manosphere, who preach a mix of common sense advice and misogyny.

However, progressive influencers have had a hard time creating an alternative vision of masculinity that reaches as many viewers.

According to a New Yorker article earlier this year.

Men are increasingly, quote, dropping out of work during their prime, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide.

Men are powering the new brand of reactionary Republican politics premised on a return to better times, end quote.

Others blame the so-called masculinity crisis for many boys of color falling behind in school, starting as early as preschool.

In one study, the California Department of Education quote called out systems of inequity that have persisted for too long for our young boys of color.

End quote.

Experts on the left blame the mass incarceration of young black and Hispanic men for their lack of equality.

But this debate isn't new.

More than two decades ago, author and social critic Christina Hoff Sommers wrote The War Against Boys blaming government and educational policies such as the decline of recess and zero tolerance disciplinary policies or turning schools into hostile environments for boys.

So, Carrie Sheffield, what's going on here now?

Is this the same crisis that Christina Hoff Sommers really brought to the world 20 plus years ago?

Or something else going on?

I agree with Christina Hoff Sommers.

She's one of my favorite thinkers on these issues.

And I think she was kind of a canary in the coal mine.

Identifying earlier.

And it's only that crisis has only grown.

I think that a lot of it started with just the way in the 1960s.

There are positive, wonderful things about the second wave feminism that allowed us, you know, the things that we take for granted now, like being able to get a car loan or a credit card without getting a man's approval.

I mean, that's ridiculous that we had to do that.

But I think the pendulum in some respects swung too far that that it became, you know, animosity toward men and marginalizing men and making them feel like they're just by their very being male, that by some magical whatever state of being that there's something wrong with them and that there's toxic masculinity.

And then there's just traditional, healthy, classic masculinity.

And I think we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater in that respect.

I think also to the point that you mentioned on young men of color.

There's a phrase that the the feminist left has put out quite often, which is to dismantle the patriarchy.

And that's basically what's happened in our particularly African-American homes.

In part, I would say, because of LBJ and the welfare programs that punish having a father in the home.

So when you have taxpayer money that is taken away from you, if you have a father in the home is deeply problematic and you just the statistics speak for themselves.

Before LBJ in the Great Society, we had about 75% of two parent homes for black babies.

And now it's the reverse.

It's only about 25%.

Sam, your thoughts about why hasn't the left been able to come up with something that attracts as many men to their version of a solution?

Then the right has.

Tellingly, we talked about education a few minutes ago.

I think a lot of this devolves down to education.

If we look at repeal, repeal the statistics aside, what we see is increasingly men who are non-college educated, who have been ever increasingly the mainstay of the Republican Party and became sort of the most vocal activated subset of Trump support.

Right.

Including, you know, the the the storming of the Capitol.

Obviously, a lot of factors are at play.

But this in the old days, it used to be like when my mother was to your point, Carrie, my mother couldn't get a car loan.

My mother couldn't buy her own home.

Her father had to buy a home for her when her my father left.

Right.

But so in the old days, you could be a man of any educational stature.

And to quote one author, you were treated as a demigod.

Right.

So as we're rich, we're changing society where women have more rights and men don't have as many automatic conferred rights or respect.

You're changing the fabric of society.

Maybe this is an inevitable consequence, but I think education is at the base of it.

The other thing I just want to point out, Carrie.

What do you see?

I mean, supposedly, I'm not sure this is true everywhere, but supposedly the public schools are failing boys and girls in different ways.

So what do you see as the solution, given that you're saying lack of education is the problem?

Well, I wouldn't say lack of education.

I think let's define that.

I've been an educational advocate in the public school systems for a couple of decades now, and this sort of evaporation of vocational training is being cited by a lot of educational experts is something we need to reverse, right.

Where if you're not going to go to college, not everyone is meant to go to college, but you should be receiving some training to help you in your professional to build a professional career for yourself.

So I would present that there's a lot of body of research that vocational training is ready to be brought back, and maybe that will help alleviate the situation.

But I just want to point to something Carrie said.

The biggest driver of Non-male headed households or two parent headed households has been the mass incarceration, incarceration of black males by our society.

And that's the biggest factor going on here.

Jason Riley has an amazing book that explains how the mass incarceration started, the genesis of it.

And he has a really great book.

He's an African-American conservative writer at the Wall Street Journal, and his book is called Please Stop Helping US How Liberals Make It Hard for Blacks to Succeed.

And he actually traces if you actually look at the data, what the mass incarceration it was, the the drug culture that was created, in my view, by the 1960s drugs, sex and rock and roll and and the normalization of drug use in America started by white liberals.

And they normalized that sort of drug culture.

And so the drug and the crime and the violence that preceded the mass incarceration, look at this story.

Violence there.

(Inaudible) There is a body of research that shows it's actually the laws that are on the books that unduly criminalize minor incarcerations.

And for the same incarceration, a white will be fined and the same incarceration of black will be in prison.

So there's a lot of research there on that one.

So but as.

Something about violent crimes, I'm not talking about minor crimes.

I'm talking about violent.

Or even violent crimes, the way.

There was a spike in rape, sexual assault, murders that occurred in the sixties that predated the mass incarceration.

If you look at the data, you'll see.

So we can talk about the fact that mass that there was a there was a spike in violent crime, that it predated mass incarceration.

But what we also saw is mass incarceration continued to increase even as violent crime was decreasing.

So those things, you can't explicitly link them.

You can link part of the fear that maybe drove some of the mass incarceration, but you cannot say that mass incarceration was a direct result of a rise in violent crime when those things were actually delinked.

And we continue to talk about fears of violent crime that are not linked to actual statistics.

And that's a huge part of the problem.

But let's give some time here to Lavern, please.

Your thoughts.

Thank you so much We started changing the fabric of society.

When we took God out of school, we put God out of school and we replaced them with Satan and drag queens.

And that's where we at now was started the.

Division What do you mean Satan and drag queens?

I you know, there may be problems in public school education, but Satan and drag queens, They are pushing us to (inaudible), a satanic agenda.

They want to drag queens at school.

But wait a minute.

I'm a go back.

Satanic agenda where, what' site are you are you referring to?

What happened was just what Carrie said when Lyndon Baines Johnson created the projects that destroy the black family and itself because they gave the black woman a free place to stay, a welfare check, the only thing she had to do was take the black man out of the home.

That's why this division started.

And you don't think slavery?

Slavery had that was perpetrated by white conservative Southerners had anything that would spell families apart from each other.

Once you took the black man out of the home, he was no longer there.

So what we are seeing today is the domino effect of that.

They destroyed the black, the black families.

What we're seeing is that the black father no longer feel the need to be in the homes these days.

That's part of the problem.

In the sixties, we had strong black families that believed in putting God first.

They believed in working to take care of their homes, having a home for their kids.

When you saw them kids, it was, yes, ma'am, No ma'am, people were taught respect.

We dress with respect and we treated people with respect.

All of that is down to the bucket of hell in today's world.

I would quibble with this idea that the black family has been destroyed.

I think I would I would start with that.

I think that that's way too harsh of the critique.

I would also say that we can definitely pinpoint mass incarceration.

And I think there are areas in which I would agree that the social welfare system that it can be it does penalize like I can agree that it does penalize certain behaviors that it shouldn't.

And I think that it's way too much paperwork.

We know that people are struggling to access these systems.

I think we can all agree that there are ways we could change the system so that more people could access it.

I have no problems with that.

And then you had 30 generations of black families on the welfare system, let me add in 30 generations.

So my argument would be we actually could expand the welfare system and we could make it so that more people could join.

And we don't have all of these penalties that exist within the system that I have no problem with.

I would also argue that some of the issues that we're talking about, masculinity are actually about the economy.

They're about the fact that it is more difficult to buy a home.

They are about the fact that wages are not the standard of living is not improving in the way that it should with productivity and wages are not matching that.

And so some of these issues that we're hearing about when people are saying, you know, masculinity is dead, that people cannot provide for their families and they are noticing that and they're feeling that in a very real way.

And that's borne out by a lot of reporting that I've done that just people do not feel as if they have a standard of living that they had hoped or that their parents generation had.

And sometimes it spills out in different ways.

All right.

Thank you all.

Very good contributions by all.

That's it for this edition.

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Funding for To the contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

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