Does an apology erase the past? Of course not. But an apology still has value. A good one can help people who are hurt and angry feel better. That’s not nothing. The word “heal” is wildly overused (often by people who apologize badly, who use the idea of healing as shorthand for “hey, let’s all move on and talk about something other than my behavior!”) but a good apology actually can be restorative: to those hurt, to bystanders, to the person who did wrong, and even to the wider world.
In a grand sense, healing from the revelations of the recent college admissions payoff scandal is impossible.
Anyone who didn’t know how incredibly corrupt college admissions can be, how un-level the playing field is, how many “side doors” there are for those who know how to look for them, how much harder the path to college is for those without money or connections or white steamroller parents…well, they know now. It’s a deeply messed-up system. And for high schoolers with disadvantages of one kind or another — poor kids, kids of color, first-generation students, undocumented students, kids with disabilities — the scandal rubs their faces in something they already knew: that fancy people can work the system and circumvent the system in ways that are utterly beyond their reach. This particular incidence — involving paid-off proctors, fake test-takers, wealthy kids flown to special cheating-friendly test centers, thrilling fake action shots of non-athletic wealthy youth on athletic equipment, and little cut-out rich-kid heads digitally glued onto Olympic athlete bodies — probably showed less privileged kids that the truth is even uglier than they’d thought. There is nothing anyone can say to make this OK. (Particularly since many Americans would prefer to kvetch about affirmative action than acknowledge the huge, unfair weight that legacies, rich people, and athletes have on admissions and college life.)
So I’m not saying we should forgive Felicity Huffman for delivering a good apology last week. I’m saying that her good apology nonetheless has the power to help people feel a bit better. If they choose to. No one is obligated to accept any apology. Apologies for wrongs are morally mandatory; forgiveness is not.
Huffman’s statement:
I am in full acceptance of my guilt, and with deep regret and shame over what I have done, I accept full responsibility for my actions and will accept the consequences that stem from those actions. I am ashamed of the pain I have caused my daughter, my family, my friends, my colleagues and the educational community. I want to apologize to them and, especially, I want to apologize to the students who work hard every day to get into college, and to their parents who make tremendous sacrifices to support their children and do so honestly. My daughter knew absolutely nothing about my actions, and in my misguided and profoundly wrong way, I have betrayed her. This transgression toward her and the public I will carry for the rest of my life. My desire to help my daughter is no excuse to break the law or engage in dishonesty.
Why is this a good apology? It uses the word “apologize” (not “regret”; as we’ve said before here, regret is about your own feelings; apologies are about other people’s feelings), acknowledges and owns the offense, recognizes the harm caused, makes no excuses. A perfect apology involves making amends and offering reparations, but those things don’t belong in this statement and she was wise to keep them out of it. At this moment, we don’t want to hear about her starting a scholarship for poor kids or making a giant donation to an educational foundation; that would seem manipulative and opportunistic and cheesy as all get out. What she should be doing is working like hell behind the scenes to make amends and rebuild trust with her kids (both of them: the one she essentially called stupid and the one she essentially called smart and hard-working and not in need of subterranean parental cheating help) and considering ways down the road to help other students in a quiet, non-self-aggrandizing way, as a form of doing penance.
One of the kids swept up in the scandal also issued a good apology. Jack Buckingham, whose mother Jane Buckingham, to put it baldly, bought him an ACT proctor, gave a statement to the The Hollywood Reporter last month:
I have been advised not to speak on the matter at hand but what I will say is this: I know there are millions of kids out there both wealthy and less fortunate who grind their ass off just to have a shot at the college of their dreams. I am upset that I was unknowingly involved in a large scheme that helps give kids who may not work as hard as others an advantage over those who truly deserve those spots. For that I am sorry though I know my word does not mean much to many people at the moment. While the situation I am going through is not a pleasant one, I take comfort in the fact that this might help finally cut down on money and wealth being such a heavy factor in college admissions. Instead, I hope colleges may prioritize [looking at] an applicants’ character, intellect and other qualities over everything else. It was probably not a smart idea to say anything but I needed to get that off my chest.
This is a kid who, unlike the kids who posed on rowing machines and lied about their athletic affiliations, did not know what his mom was up to. (Many of the kids didn’t. Read the whole indictment.) Buckingham paid $50K for her son, who lived with her in Los Angeles, to take the ACT at a test center in Houston, where a proctor was being bought off. But shortly before the scheduled test, Jack developed tonsillitis and his pediatrician said he shouldn’t fly. Jack wanted to go anyway. His mother was recorded telling William Singer, owner of The Edge College & Career Network, “According to [Jack], he’s like, ‘I really don’t feel that bad.” But Jack was scheduled for surgery, and Jane was worried about him flying against doctor’s orders; Jack also wouldn’t be able to fly for two weeks after the surgery. But Jack wanted to take the test! So Singer and Jane Buckingham conspired to have a ringer take the test for him in Houston, and to give Jack a test that he was told he had permission to take at home. (Why would Jack believe that tonsillitis meant he could take the test at home? Well, no one claimed he was a rocket scientist. And kids who’ve had parents smoothing the way for them their entire lives tend to believe what those parents tell them.)
Regardless of Jack’s intellectual heft, his emotional and empathetic smarts seem good. His statement to the Hollywood Reporter indicates that he gets why the Varsity Blues scheme was morally wrong. He understands fundamental social inequities; he understands his own privilege. He apologizes even though he didn’t actually know he was part of the scheme. It’s a graceful statement; he manages not to throw his mother under the bus even though she deserves it.
Of course, it may not be his statement at all, even though the voice really sounds like that of a teenage boy. At least one family caught up in Operation Varsity Blues has hired a crisis manager, Juda Engelmayer, who works at “distancing the student from the alleged criminal activity of the parent.” Engelmayer works to create a different narrative for the kid (“online reputation management and search engine optimization”), pushing the scandal down in Internet searches on the kid’s name and making sure their hobbies, charitable work, and wholesome photos show up on Instagram and Facebook apart from any mention of the parents’ actions. He charges $15-30K a month. He works for all kinds of rich people getting bad PR — one of his clients is Harvey Weinstein. If Engelmayer wrote Jack Buckingham’s statement, he’s really good at his job. This is demoralizing.
Or maybe Jack Buckingham actually wrote the statement himself! Who knows! Anyway, here is something that is factual and not demoralizing: De-emphasizing testing seems to be the way of the collegiate future. The University of Chicago, Bowdoin, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Bates, Colby, GW, Holy Cross, Clark, the New School, Emerson, Bard, Middlebury, Sarah Lawrence, Lewis & Clark, NYU, Mt. Holyoke, Brandeis, Worcester Polytechnic, Pitzer, Whitman, Franklin & Marshall, Temple, Loyola, Connecticut College, Fairfield, Mills, CalArts, Bennington, and many more are now SAT- and ACT-optional. More schools are joining that list every year. There are still a zillion inequities in education to wrestle with, from pre-K to grad school, but one hopes that soon ultra-wealthy people with non-academically-inclined children will go back to buying buildings and making huge unrestricted Kushner-esque donations as in days of yore. Something they’ve never apologized for.
Sorry, I can’t get over Jack Buckingham thinking it’s perfectly OK to take the SAT in your own home, with your mother as proctor. Where did they even get the test? Was it an old practice test? But then it wouldn’t have an official answer key… too many questions.
And I am lol ing at his ‘hope’ that now wealth and power might not mean as much on college applications. That’s a good one, coming from someone whose mother spent 50K on this scheme alone, let alone what she spent on legitimate test prep and (assumingly) private school.
The irony is that his mother is some kind of parenting expert with books to her name. I can only wonder what advice she would have given to someone who asked her about cheating her kids into college. Probably would have said “good idea”!
It is not difficult to get a previously used OFFICIAL SAT Test. And those tests will have both answer keys and a chart to convert raw scores (The number you actually get right) into standardized scores for the cohort that took them (The 200-800 point scale for each section). ETS spends years and millions of dollars developing and pre-testing test items. No test question is ever exactly replicated (though many of the concepts are utilized repeatedly). The College Board is not concerned about people having old tests, and even publishes them (Look for practice test collections published by The College Board in your local bookstore). When I did test-prep tutoring, I always encouraged my students to use them. Why practice on tests created by someone else when you can easily practice on actual SAT exams? Of course, this was over 20 years ago, but I’d be surprised if things were much different today…
Back when I was a high schooler looking at colleges, it came to my attention that the parents of a peer of mine made no attempts to skirt the fact that their son got into the University of Pennsylvania because, in no small part, of their check-writing abilities.
My Dad, who was a Penn grad, told me that it was a common thing (he had gone to Penn on the GI Bill after his military service, as did his entire class in Electrical Engineering, and that certain incidents and attitudes during his attendance caused him to limit his check-writing to his alma mater. He said that in the long run, I would be better off getting into a college on my own credentials.
As matters turned out, I did not go to Penn, but did get a full scholarship to another school on account of being a National Merit Finalist.
I did not push my son into Law, and my wife did not pressure him to go into Medicine. Turns out that he decided that the college route was not for him, so he went along a different route. Looking at some of his high school classmates who were pushed to go to college, he is grateful that we did not force him to the collegiate track. He is now taking on the responsibilities of a family breadwinner with his own business.
I compare my attitude (and my wife’s) to those of the parents of some of students I taught when I was teaching college, many of whom tried to get me to be lax with their children. So it is not only the college admissions where the parents try to pull their levers; it continues throughout the college years (and probably beyond).
I can’t buy the legitimacy of Jack Buckingham’s letter. If anyone knows the importance of a crisis manager, it’s Jack’s “marketing guru” mom. The letter appeared just days after the scandal broke and hits all the necessary points— including “I was unknowingly involved [i.e. ‘not my fault!’] in a large scheme [i.e. ‘I’m just a little fish in a big pond’],” etc., etc., etc.
The letter does, as you say, sound perfectly teenagery. Self-consciously so, IMHO. “I have been advised not to speak…but I will say this”—in other words, I’m just a regular ol’ teenager rebelling against the grownups, but for a really good cause!
Many of the scandal indictees have probably hired crisis managers. We won’t hear about it, though, because the good ones will stay quiet. They know that mentioning their involvement—a la Engelmayer, who seems to have used the scandal for a bit of free advertising—makes the crisis worse.
Even though they have been publicly shamed , their punishment will still be less than what a non affluent person would be given. Every criminal arrest is publicized so that isn’t a form of punishment. These are serious charges : wire fraud, bribery , falsification of official documents,etc. Fourteen days is not punishment for a multiple felon. In addition , they will not go to prison for such short sentence. They will also be in the privileged wing of the jail.
Felicity Huffman got sentenced to 250 hours of community service.
I’d like to know what that was, what she’s doing, and how it’s coming for all involved.