More than a few leaders in academia are nervous about the on-going college admissions scandal.  Rich and privileged parents, including actress Felicity Huffman, paid thousands of dollars to get their kids into elite colleges. The scandal has focused on Rick Singer, a “consultant” who employed a variety of tactics, including arranging for private proctors to abet cheating on the SAT, bribing coaches to support special admissions based  on false claims of  athletic excellence, and  using  “donations” in exchange for the waiver of admissions standards.  All pretty bad, but it might not be the biggest worry for academia. The overall admissions process is dysfunctional and in need of reform.   

Partially as a result of the Singer case, how colleges select students for admission is under increasing scrutiny.  This started long before the current scandal. Legacy admissions, a practice that gives preference to the offspring of alumni, has been under attack for more than a decade.  Other preferences, such as rewarding donors with special consideration for applicants, are also under attack.   Proposed solutions include cutting off federal funds.

College leaders, especially at elite private institutions, are watching closely. All admissions standards not based on merit are under scrutiny. These include not only legacy admissions, but preferences for athletes, offspring of staff and faculty members, and even celebrities.  In all these cases, the assumption is that the system works to the benefit of wealthy, probably white, students to the detriment of more meritorious students.

One can hope that the prosecution of Mr. Singer and the parents involved in the current scandal will increase the integrity of the process. Unfortunately, even if that happens, and even if other minor reforms are made, the bias of the current system will remain. Simply put, bright but disadvantaged students must have the same chances of winning admission to elite colleges as students without those disadvantages. 

The current system, using SAT scores, grades, and extra-curricular activities as heavily weighted criteria excludes many gifted students.  For a fair system, the weight given these criteria needs to change, by adding new criteria or adjusting current ones. The personal circumstances of individual students, such as the quality of the schools they attended, the ability of their parents to facilitate involvement in athletics or community activities, and even things like access to adequate nutrition and health care, somehow should be added to the mix.  This is not an easy fix, but one worth exploring.

Importantly, some of these issues are already on the radar screen.  Progress has already been made.  The College Board, for example, has adopted an “adversity score” to adjust outcomes based on identifiable factors that might cause students to score lower on the exam as a result.  Many colleges are also increasing the qualitative examination of applicants, a process which, if employed with integrity, will go a long way to making the process more equitable. 

Also, in considering college opportunity and success, the fact that low-income students are succeeding in college in increasing numbers should be remembered.  Many students also assume that getting into an elite college is essential to success in life.  It isn’t.  For many students there are hundreds of great colleges that in many cases may provide an individual student with an equally good or better education than they would have gotten at one of the so-called elite schools.  Examples are easy to find. 

While progress is being made, the admissions process remains in need of fundamental reform. The need is urgent.  Each year another cohort of high school graduates must live with the current system. Are there any quick fixes out there without the pitfalls inherent in developing more complicated formulas for evaluating students?  Is more radical reform worth a look?  Can it be done without increasing federal intrusion into the governance of institutions of higher education, something that could arguably undermine the uniqueness or excellence of some institutions?  For example, the “elite” nature of Harvard and similar schools is arguably as much a matter of the composition of the student body as it is of the quality of the faculty.  Would Harvard be Harvard without it’s “cream of the crop” student body?

Clearly, reform will be complicated and controversial. Despite that, one can hope that the college admissions scandal will prompt more serious, comprehensive, efforts to make college admissions more equitable. Work needs to be expedited, pursued with urgency and involve the key stakeholders, especially students, academia, and taxpayers.

It’s time to support the American Dream by making college admissions fair.   

J.E. Dean of Oxford is a retired attorney and public affairs consultant. He is a former counsel to the House Committee on Education and Labor.  For more than 30 years, he advised clients on federal education and social service policy. He is the former chairman of the National College Access Network (NCAN), a group promoting success in higher education among underrepresented groups, and KnowledgeWorks Foundation, a national leader in strategic foresight and education innovation 

I have a plan for Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential campaign: Drop out before you guarantee the re-election of Donald J. Trump. Give me a moderate candidate, someone able to win the midwestern and southern states that went Republican in 2016. Maybe, if she exits sooner rather than later, before she vilifies more opponents with better chances of being elected President, she will get a plum post in the new Democratic administration. Maybe she could get the job that she once coveted, Director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and spend four years torturing Wells Fargo, student loan servicers, and credit card companies.

Senator Warren has mastered appealing to a group of self-interested voters who view their votes as a tool for economic gain. These are voters who might identify student loan forgiveness, free college, Medicare for All, or one of her other give-away programs as the most important issues facing America. These are voters who evidence little interest in “traditional” issues such as foreign or military policy. These voters agree with Warren that the government and economy are corrupt. They appear to share Warren’s belief that for America to be fair, a revolution dispatching both the governmental and economic order is needed.

Warren’s message, while arguably effective for some voters, is poison to others. Voters with a minimum sense of personal responsibility for their economic station in life and for assuring good government by getting involved themselves, are justifiably skeptical of an angry candidate with a plan for everything. Consider the source of Warren’s plans. Are these plans the product of a national listening tour? Were they perfected through discussions with voters? I don’t recall hearing of such discussions. And Socrates taught that intellectual humility is the only effective method of seeking truth. Who would describe Warren as intellectually humble?

Warren is a know-it-all. She has figured out how the world works and is on a mission to change it. That is a scary thought, even if you find appeal in her “plans”. The concept of a President who is grateful for the opportunity to serve does not fit Warren the way it does Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Bennet, Biden, and some of the lesser known candidates running, such as Delaney. All these candidates, to a greater or lesser extent, show evidence of intellectual humility. Such a disposition contributes to the type of listening skills, openness to compromise, and empathy that are essential to effective leadership. It also makes attacks by one Democrat on another less likely.

If Democrats want to win, the circular firing squad approach to debates that has seriously winged Biden and already turned off many independent voters must be abandoned. The party also needs to wrestle with the question of whether the general electorate is ready to adopt what many view as a Democratic Socialist approach to government. To date Bernie, who at least has the courage to accept the label with pride, is burning out. Warren, who disingenuously claims to believe in capitalism, is no more of a capitalist than her Vermont Senate colleague. When voters focus on this, which they will after it becomes a major Trump theme in the general election, Warren risks becoming as radioactive as Hillary was in 2012.

It takes a courageous leader to make sacrifices for the good of his/her country or even party. Warren’s withdrawal can benefit both. Will her ego prevent this? Lets’ hope not.

Worries about Warren do not stop at the possibility of her throwing the election to Trump. A Warren win could be a bigger problem. Warren as Commander-in-Chief? Inconceivable. So far, she also appears to avoid all foreign policy discussions except for her call for the U.S. to unilaterally abdicate “first-use” of nuclear weapons. Warren would have the U.S. wait until after New York, LA or Washington was destroyed before striking back. Putting it politely, military and foreign affairs issues are not in her wheelhouse. Electing Warren, following four years of the clueless Trump, could make the dangerous deterioration of America’s status in the world permanent. Allies that admit to being confused now might very well give up on America. We cannot afford to let that happen.

Warren needs to quit. The sooner the better.

J.E. Dean of Oxford is a retired attorney and public affairs consultant. He is a former counsel to the House Committee on Education and Labor. For more than 30 years, he advised clients on federal education and social service policy. He is the former chairman of the National College Access Network (NCAN), a group promoting success in higher education among underrepresented groups, and KnowledgeWorks Foundation, a national leader in strategic foresight and education innovation.

The strange fishing season on the Chesapeake this summer has served as another reminder about the importance of Eastern Shore Land Conservancy’s vision for a Delmarva Oasis. This initiative would protect half of our beautiful region for wildlife, farming and continuing the traditions like fishing in the waters of the Wye River. Clearly, fishing is important to me and many of

my strongest relationships have been built by quiet time together in a boat or on a shore or canoeing a river. Some of my fondest fishing memories are with Marquis Roberts – one of my closest friends since we were paired together in Easton’s Big Brothers program in 1994. Back in those early days our favorite outing was a summer evening skiff ride from Bellevue to Benoni Point near Oxford to wrestle with some white perch and stripers while watching a beautiful sunset. But times – and weather – are changing.

As most are aware, it was incredibly wet in this region over the last year. We had so much rain between the springs of 2018 and 2019 that the Chesapeake Bay freshened to a level that freshwater fish species typically locked by salt water into the upper reaches of our rivers suddenly were free to move about the Bay. This summer we have caught our share of perch and a few rockfish, but for the first time our catch has been overwhelmingly dominated by catfish. In one evening of Wye River fishing we caught over 40 lbs. of catfish equally divided between Blue and Channel Cats. The invasive and non-native Blue Catfish is the largest catfish in North America reaching over 100 lbs. – and they eat a lot of everything with potentially serious impacts on Blue Crabs and Menhaden – two species critical to a healthy Bay.

The other fish to benefit from the heavy rains is the Northern Snakehead – another non-native and invasive freshwater fish that is now spreading Bay wide. Like something out of a horror movie, Snakeheads grow large and with big teeth, they feed on anything including small mammals and birds, they can walk across land on their fins and live out of water for up to four days, they lay up to 15,000 eggs several times per year, and their favorite prey is white perch. Yikes!

Extreme precipitation and warming temperatures are also causing changes on land. Since I was a kid the ospreys returned from their southern wintering grounds on my birthday every year – March 12. Over the last decade or so the return date has crept earlier in March and now there is usually at least one spotted in February each year. Many bird species that I record on my annual Christmas and spring songbird counts are staying later in the fall and returning earlier in the spring due to the milder winters.  These changes and many others caused by a warming climate and increasing weather extremes are playing out across our lands and waters with mostly unknown consequences.

With these worrisome changes underway I find great comfort in ESLC’s Delmarva Oasis initiative to help our region adapt to change and even thrive long into the future. In striving to protect half of Delmarva by 2030, our approach is to build out our system of hubs and corridors of wildlife habitat to both protect our water quality and allow plants and animals to migrate and evolve as the climate warms. We also will secure our best farmland for growing our food.

Personally, my plan is to keep learning from observation and robust science, to adapt our conservation strategies quickly, and to get outdoors and enjoy the natural world in old and new ways – including fishing for stripers and whatever other species show up in the Bay. I talked with Marquis the other day about Snakeheads and Blue Cats and we both agreed – delicious!

Rob Etgen
President, Eastern Shore Land Conservancy

When the moral perversity of the Hollywood culture-crats is bemoaned by modern liberals, I can’t help but exclaim, in the same way, Dionysus replied to Pentheus in the classic play The Bacchae: wisdom is foolish—most especially to a fool.

How foolish it was to think the very same men who gave us Magic Mike and Bad Moms—obscene filth with degraded trash on nearly every scene—could be paragons of moral virtue. Sleaze is what sleaze does. Only the fool fails to see.

Yet, mugged by recalcitrant reality (to paraphrase Irving Kristol), liberalism’s leading lights now denounce the predations of Harvey Weinstein and similarly sleazy scoundrels. But, I hasten to ask, how can liberals denounce with moral or intellectual consistency the depraved actions of Weinstein and his Hollywood hoodlums yet still praise the vile porn these men push in the malls and cineplexes, from Seattle to Sarasota? They can do so only by becoming even greater fools.

The greatest of fools, in fact.

Indeed, it was Chelsea Clinton’s favorite hack-site, Common Sense Media—a Hollywood-celebrating “review” rag purporting to “improve[e] the media landscape for kids and families”—that suborned moms to see the disgusting skin flick Bad Christmas Moms 2 with their teenage daughters. Yet Chelsea Clinton lionizes the (often quite necessary) #Metoo advocacy ascendant in the cultural zeitgeist.

It’s high time liberals not only decry the sexual perversities of the men who run the Hollywood movie houses, but also decry the very filth these men spew in theatres across the country. To condemn one without the other is to be blind to the toxic culture Hollywood pedals—and the negative consequences the smut they merchandize has on our nation’s moral conscience.

The pop-Media moguls and all the politicos dependent on their ill-gotten cash will no doubt cast me a prude for asserting a tight nexus between the smut these men pander and the vice these ogres live. However, the social science data on mainstream smut is staggering. Social psychologist Ross O’Hara, for example, has documented that highly sexualized content—especially when created or viewed in a mainstream setting and in the normalized context of a close circle of friends—has a powerful impact on one’s sense of propriety and forges sexual scripts in the minds of makers and viewers that heighten risks for aggressive and offensive behavior.

These men on the tops of the Hollywood Hills scarcely do much more than rehash smut upon smut upon smut. That that they should be smutty scumbags themselves only heightens a truism we all used to know, before these Titans of Titillation convinced us otherwise: “monkey see”—your mother, your minister, your teacher knew too well—“monkey do.” Indeed, it was no unctuous preachiness that led St. Paul to instruct all individuals of moral seriousness to “set one’s eyes on higher things.”

Proverbs, moreover, tells us that “doing wrong is like a joke to a fool.” “Oh, it’s all escapist fun; it’s simply raunchy humor”:

The last refuge of a Hollywood porn pusher—and a sexual harasser—or worse. Proverbs, however, also reminds us that “the wise will inherit honor, but fools only get disgrace.”

Better words scarcely have been spoken.

Joseph Prud’homme is a professor at Washington College, and founder of the school’s Institute for the Study of Religion, Politics, and Culture. He lives with his wife and family in Easton, Maryland. 

If you’re not yet worried about Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s abandonment of Smart Growth, you might want to read a new study on how Dumb Growth could cost Frederick County taxpayers some half a billion bucks.

First, a brief Smart Growth primer (which was once available on the Maryland Department of Planning’s website — until the website and department became a joke under Hogan): Smart Growth is the antithesis of sprawl, which is development outside areas planned and built for growth. Sprawl gobbles open space, increases air and water pollution, and costs more in new services than it ever offsets with taxes from new residents.

Sprawl, or Dumb Growth, can work politically, though, at least for a while. You just call it Economic Growth, or just Growth, which sounds fine to many people, especially bankers and developers and pavers and homebuilders — all of whom are good at electing candidates who’ll butter their bread.

That’s the way it worked in Frederick County for several years, until a more progressive slate of county officials took over in 2015 and began toting up the cost of “progress” under the former regime.

An August 2017 report done for Jan Gardner, the county executive, examined developments in the pipeline that will create 21,000 new housing units in the county, adding 50,000 new residents, 10,000 of them school age.

The fiscal bottom line: Taxpayers will fork out $340 million for roads and another $167 million for schools beyond anything that was planned or budgeted for, the county spokesman said.

A number of these developments also lock the county into agreements for up to 25 years, so that even if zoning gets stricter or developer fees are raised, the presently approved growth remains exempt.

The Frederick experience illustrates the perils of poorly planned residential growth, as well as the fallacy of believing it generates enough new revenue in property taxes to outweigh the demands it makes on government services.

This was one of the reasons that Maryland, under Gov. Parris Glendening in the 1990s, became a pioneer in pushing Smart Growth. Martin O’Malley, who preceded Hogan as governor, added teeth to Smart Growth in 2012 with a landmark law sharply limiting new development in areas that are predominantly farm and forest.
That law did not literally usurp traditional county power over land use; rather it dramatically curtailed, across rural landscapes, the use of septic tanks, on which sprawl development depends.

The law in recent years has begun to make a difference, and a major reason was the vigilance and “jawboning” of the Department of Planning, combined with the assistance it provided to counties in complying.

That threatens to unravel under Hogan, who announced in August to the Maryland Association of Counties that “Plan Maryland,” as O’Malley’s version of Smart Growth was called, “is off the books.” He was putting land use “back into the hands of local authorities,” Hogan said to applause.

The governor has also made it easier to develop using septic tanks again and given Cecil County a pass on complying with the 2012 anti-sprawl law.

He has not overtly tried to repeal the law itself, but in addition to Cecil, at least three more of Maryland’s 23 counties — Wicomico, Allegany and Queen Anne’s — have adopted plans or are pushing developments counter to the law.

But nothing is stopping any county whose citizens want to grow smartly. Charles County in Southern Maryland is a shining example after a six-year campaign to overturn a ruinous development plan.

As of 2016, Charles finalized a plan that stopped an estimated 339 major subdivisions on septic across 88,000 acres of open space. It also stopped about 123 new subdivisions in watersheds designated high water quality.

The new plan finally protects Mattawoman Creek, one of the Chesapeake’s best fish habitats; saves an estimated $2 billion on new roads; and cuts projected population growth in the next 30 years from 75,000 to 37,000.

Several Maryland counties have excellent compliance with the anti-sprawl law, while several others remain a mixed bag. For information on your county, contact 1000 Friends of Maryland, a statewide environmental land use group.

Rating Gov. Hogan environmentally is complicated by the reality that he is a tree hugger compared with national Republicans and the Trump administration, which set the lowest of bars.

He’s been good by any measure in important areas like Program Open Space, the state’s premier land preservation effort, and in aspects of air quality, such as greenhouse gas reductions. His transportation programs, though, remain far too road-improvement oriented, as opposed to pushing mass transit and mobility.

His environmental secretary, Ben Grumbles, gets high marks from environmentalists. His natural resources secretary, Mark Belton, might be good if nastier Hogan appointees would butt out of managing Bay fisheries.

The governor got a “needs improvement” grade on his 2017 report card from the Maryland League of Conservation voters; that’s the next to lowest of five ratings the group gives.

Hogan remains popular and has a good shot at re-election in 2018. But if the housing economy picks up, I fear a return to major sprawl development. In his re-election bid, the governor will face tougher questions about Smart Growth than he’s gotten so far.

Tom Horton has written about Chesapeake Bay for more than 40 years, including eight books. He lives in Salisbury, where he is also a professor of Environmental Studies at Salisbury University. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the Bay Journal.

But how did we get here?

Despite the hardships they may have faced, our nation’s settlers could be compared to lottery winners. Land ownership was a measure of our wealth, and the Land Ordinance of 1785, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 promoted “an empire of liberty” through broad land ownership at bargain prices. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered land at no cost, and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1865 doubled the acreage.

Opportunity was ours, and we owe our forefathers a large debt of gratitude. Aristocrats claimed title to the land settled in South America. Our founding fathers revolted not only against taxation without representation, they made a revolutionary departure from a tradition of aristocratic oligarchy, and the United States of America would become the greatest nation on earth.

There were bumps in the road. From the ashes of our Civil War, we would transition from a predominantly agrarian society into an industrialized society. Our wealth doubled during the Industrial Revolution, but fewer winners made it into our Gilded Age. Labor unions gained ground following WWI, but market speculation ended in the Crash of 1929. We suffered our Great Depression.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal of 1933 included public works and financial reform. There were objections to government intrusion and an 8 percent increase in government spending, but WWII would increase spending by 52 percent. We also experienced levels of economic growth only dreamed of today, and would elect more Democrats and only a Democratic Congress over the next 3 decades.

Our veterans worked hard and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but were offered a hand up at the starting line. Their education was free. VA mortgages made homes affordable, and wages supported a family. Our middle class became the wealthiest on earth during our nation’s Golden Age.

We were also paying down an enormous war debt, and likely complained about taxes as we piled our families into our new cars and headed out to dinner and a movie. I had wondered at this phenomenon at a family gathering, but those taking these complaints seriously had Frederich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.” The “conservative bible” warned against government intervention.

Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” soon followed, also rejecting “collectivism.” Rand Paul was named for Ms. Ayn, but by 1973 journalist Irving Crystal had become the “godfather of neoconservatism.” Embracing supply side economics and the concept that tax cuts pay for themselves, he would later acknowledge a “cavalier attitude toward budget deficits,” but prioritize “political effectiveness over government accounting deficiencies.”

In other words, trickle down hadn’t worked, but one might claim it does. That message would persist, and the party that had led us into our Great Depression would create 2.5 times more debt as a share of our economy, advise us “deficits don’t matter,” and lead us into our Great Recession.

Since WWII Democratic administrations have, without exception, reduced budget deficits. Yes, even President Obama.

Jobs and wages top our list of concerns, though. Plowing through government data, we also find that since WWII nearly 3 times as many jobs have been created during Democratic administrations, wages and median household incomes increased more and faster, and minimum wages were up 16 cents annually versus 6 cents.

We’re all about business by now, and our bottom line is that our economy has grown more and we have all done better during Democratic administrations. Economists Blinder and Watson made our job easier by presenting undisputed government data, acknowledging economic cycles, and confirming that since WWII our economy has performed better by every positive economic measure during Democratic administrations.

This outcome may have been foretold in 1792. Record keeping was spotty then, but we chose the “tyranny of democracy” over the tyranny of aristocratic oligarchy, and our bill to revive our cod industry required everyone from the cabin boy to the captain to share in the profits.

Examining the eternal struggle between personal freedoms and a civilized society, William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” was published in 1954 and remained on required reading lists in 1980; yet we would be led into the Republican Revolution. We got tax cuts, and while our government is spending less as a share of our economy than other industrialized nations, it is not yet “small enough to drown in a bathtub.” We are being promised our “biggest tax cuts ever.”

As CEO compensation is reaching hundreds and even thousands of times the wages of average employees, and McDonald’s CEO recently tripled his multi-million dollar compensation package in just one year as taxpayers supplement employees’ wages, it’s hardly surprising to find that the 1 percent of us that amassed 40 percent of our nation’s wealth heading into our Great Depression is closing in upon than level once again.

We’re angry, and perhaps understandably have elected a president who is embracing the politics of division, tweeting “alternative facts,” and taking credit for deals made before he took office, magazine covers that don’t exist, phone calls he hasn’t received, and a nation called “Nambia.”

President Trump has advised, “When the president says it, that means it’s true.” We have no idea how frequently his “great friend” Carl Icahn is visiting, though. The White House visitors’ log has been done away with.
President Obama apologized for his misstatement, the one quoted so frequently, and advised, “Democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.” We have his birth certificate, his White House visitors’ log, records of those meetings, his tax returns, and millions more of us are at least seeing a doctor.

Accountability would be timely. William Jennings Bryan observed over a century ago, “There are those who believe that if you legislate to make the well-to-do prosper, their prosperity will leak through onto those below. The Democratic idea, however, is that if you legislate to make the masses prosper, prosperity finds its way up through every class.”

That’s what we have experienced in the United States of America. We all do better when we all do better, and achieving the highest level of income disparity in the industrialized world isn’t serving us well.

Thomas Jefferson feared an “aristocracy of our monied corporations,” and advised us to “leave no authority existing that is not responsible to the people.” He may have sensed that while capitalism is vital to our economy, working together for a strong middle class nets positive results, while moving in the opposite direction results in the dysfunction we’re experiencing today.

Our forefathers did their part to promote the general welfare. Now it is up to us.

Carol Voyles is the Treasurer of the Talbot County Democratic Central Committee and Board member of the Talbot County Democratic Forum