Who's Morally Responsible?

(Added 01/01/2020)

Q

In your last column you described the parents caught up in the Varsity Blues scandal in which some of our most recognized universities were accused of a criminal conspiracy to influence undergraduate admissions decisions. You put all the wrongdoing on the parents. Even though the universities knew that these "gifts" were bribes to accept a particular applicant or to recruit an athlete who happened to have never played the sport, they were never held accountable or called out for such unethical systems. While they might not have broken any laws, why didn't the press or the public focus more on their willing participation or complicity in such unethical and inappropriate dealings?

A

To review: The Varsity Blues scandal involves 34 parents who were charged in March 2019 with paying money to get their children into college and to receive help to improve scores on college admissions exams. About half of the parents, including actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, the designer Mossimo Giannulli — who parted with $500,000 — are still planning to fight it out in court. For the record, Loughlin, and presumably others, claim the money exchanges were not bribes. I, as you, strongly suspect otherwise.

You are right: The universities have not been held accountable, and they should be. Universities are charitable enterprises and, as such, should be held to high ethical standards. This isn't to say that all behavior should not be driven by high standards; it's just that charities are not motivated by political or shareholder concerns. That, of course, is a naïve way of putting it, and anyone inside most charities know that, but structurally the nonprofit sector is a different animal from the government or business world.

Ten coaches — four at USC and one each at Georgetown, UCLA, Wake Forest, the University of Texas, Yale and Stanford — and seven college admissions officer and other school administrators — including Rick Singer, the "criminal mastermind" (as prosecutors put it) who pretty much headed up the scandal and who pleaded guilty soon after he was indicted — are accused with breaking the law. As you point out, though, no organizations are being held accountable even though highly positioned people in those organizations were close to what was happening.

Some might say they looked the other way. How could it not be? When coaches and admissions officers ignore obviously photo-shopped pictures and know that what is claimed does not match what is true, someone is purposefully not paying attention. The prosecutors have not focused on the institutions' liability, and that may be because the illegal acts they allege were on the personal level. To bring a whole organization to court — although it's happened before — is far more complex.

Still, from an ethical perspective, shouldn't highly placed administrators at the universities be held accountable? I don't know if this has happened because I'm not on the inside of any of the universities in question, but I would hope board members of each one has had a sober and difficult discussion with their president. Questions might include: How could this happen? What policies do we not have in place to prevent this kind of thing? What policies do we have in place that encourages this behavior? We need a good sports program, but is our quest for that more important than our integrity? This kind of board inquiry goes past the usual mode of addressing only fiduciary or, even, strategic concerns. It would go to another level yet; the board would ask what the university is really all about and what its role is in addressing existential threats. The add-on should be the sports director, not the provost.

It would be dramatic, but a strong statement of values might be made if a university president were asked to resign as a result of the scandal. Of course, it might also be a strong statement of values — as the word is a neutral term — if a president is not asked to resign.

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