SINCE THE ROBERTS court will dismantle the rest of affirmative action, probably using Harvard or the other Ivies to do it, I have a better idea of how the Harvards, Yales, Princetons, etc. can be made to serve the goal of equal opportunities for those who are still living with the generations long after effects of both legal, Constitutionally permitted and encouraged slavery, the second unofficial form of it in post-Reconstruction American apartheid, the revival of that after the passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights act and, now when the Rehnquist and Roberts courts are doing pretty much the same thing that Rutherford Hayes did when he, making his corrupt deal with the slave-power, began the long period when Jim Crow ruled a majority of the country.
There should be a sliding range of very high taxes put on elite educational institutions, universities, colleges, prep-schools, based on a. their obscenely huge endowments, b. their ownership of property, c. their tuition and other costs, d. the income of those they serve. The entirety of the funds raised from those very-high taxes should go to the public educational opportunities for least among us, pre-school through college. Not a cent of it should go to any school practicing exclusionary policies and all private schools do.
Especially high taxes should be placed on the self-aggrandizing gifts of billionaires and millionaires to elite institutions, especially those with the name of the donor attached. Living where I do I have seen how those have destroyed and enveloped neighborhoods where poor people and the working poor have lived at a terrible rate in Boston. The pretenses that all of that is for the good and that it contributes to the common good that includes its victims is a pious lie.
For more, listen to the Brueggemann lecture I linked to below.
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