A bit like Claude Rains in “Casablanca,” I’m shocked. Shocked at news of the scandalous college admissions scandal. Wow! Stop the presses: it’s news that wealth, position and prestige confer benefits.”
As a guy from L.A.’s eastside who got through undergraduate school and graduate school (in the Ivy League) by means of part time jobs and scholarships, I marveled at the proportions of the buy-your-kid-a-slot in your preferred top tier college scheme.
But the revelations got more outrageous day after day. One family apparently paid out $6.5 million to fraudulently buy a spot for their college-bound son or daughter.
The rich kids who were apparently too busy twiddling on their smart phones to read or study sat comfortably at home while professional test takers took their exams for them. SAT.CAT. ACT. Professional essay writers – for a hefty fee – wrote their “personal” essays. When reading about that aspect of the college admissions scandal, an alarm went off in my head. It triggered a memory I had basically buried deep in my brain.
A National Enquirer-type would-be headline flashed through my consciousness: “I Was a Teenage Essay Writing Whore.” The news of the scandal reminded me of something I did more than 50 years ago. Something of which I’m certainly not proud. Something journalistically and editorially unethical. It happened when I was in the eighth grade.
This was at Lincoln Junior High School in Lincoln Heights. (We didn’t have middle schools back in the Pleistocene.) It was probably in 1965. (Criminals apparently don’t always remember the specifics of their crimes.) It’s a cliché but I was a voracious reader. I devoured just about everything in our school library as well as 50 cent used paperbacks that I bought at a dusty bookstore in downtown L.A. (This is before the people started calling in DTLA.)
I had a brother in high school. He and his friends were paranderos. They liked to party; they didn’t like to study. They passed classes by the skin of their teeth. My brother asked me to “help” a friend of his who was on the cusp of failing an English class. He needed to turn in a book review. I met with this guy. I don’t remember the details of this mini Mafia negotiation. When I spoke to him it became clear that he couldn’t write a grocery list, let alone a coherent book review comprising illuminating declarative sentences, woven together seamlessly with pristine paragraph transitions. No way.
I agreed to write the book review for him. The price: TEN LARGE. I was 13 years old and earned a bit more than a dollar an hour cleaning a restaurant in the mornings before I schlepped to school. (I lived on the border of Boyle Heights, where residue of previous, pre-Mexican immigrant occupations remained.)
I think the book was “Grapes of Wrath.” It may have been “Tortilla Flat.” I’m not sure. But I am sure it was a John Steinbeck novel. As a kid I gobbled up everything by Steinbeck, partly because he was the only writer who included Mexicans or Chicanos in the tales. Literature didn’t use the term “Chicano” back then, but we knew who we were.
My payment of ten bucks for prostituting myself editorially is nothing compared to the six-and-a-half-million dollars some family paid to open the side door, the transom, the window, the cellar trapdoor or whatever portal was available to get the kid into the college of his/her choice. Six-and-a-half-million samolions! That would pay for a boatload of scholarships for deserving students from East L.A. or South L.A. (Or heck, the Inland Empire for that matter.)
My fee was minuscule by comparison. But as a principle it was equally wrong. Trust me, I ain’t proud of it as I look back at something that happened more than 50 years ago when I was a kid, wielding a dangerous weapon – a manual typewriter.
These things make us think—or at least—should make us think—about the moral and ethical imperatives involved in such issues. Over a long career as a journalist, university professor and author I have tried diligently to do the right thing. I’m pleased with my record, but in retrospect I’m bummed that I succumbed and did what I did in the eighth grade.
By the way, my brother’s homie got an “A” on his book review.
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Copyright 2019 by Luis R. Torres. Torres a product of East L.A. and a resident of Pasadena, is a veteran freelance journalist, university professor and author. He holds a masters degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of a forthcoming biography of former Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina.