Washington wants more ex-cons—oops, we’re not supposed to use that term anymore—to go to college. Schools as varied as Columbia University, Arizona State, and Nyack College are among dozens of institutions that have signed on to the White House’s “Fair Chance Higher Education Pledge.” The idea is to make college accessible to those who, having committed crimes, have “paid their debt to society,” as President Barack Obama rather unoriginally puts it.
The pledge is part of the administration’s broader effort to ratchet back the numbers of incarcerated young minorities and to reduce the long-term consequences of a felony record for those who do go to prison (or, in the White House’s wonderful euphemism, those “who have been impacted by the criminal justice system”).
The Scrapbook sympathizes with the goal of reintegrating into society those who have been punished and made amends, making it possible for them to, as the president says, “earn their second chance.” But in practice, the “education pledge” entails having colleges turn a blind eye to possible threats on campus. Schools signing the pledge promise to determine “whether criminal justice-related questions are necessary to make an informed admission decision.” In other words, colleges are agreeing not to ask prospective students about their arrest records.
How odd, at a time when so many students are complaining that they don’t feel safe on campus—micro-aggressions, eeek!—that schools should be compromising real issues of safety. Should schools really toss aside a basic gauge of whether a prospective student will be a danger to his or her classmates? By all means, make room for those who have learned from youthful mistakes. Reward those who have demonstrated they’ve put crime behind them. But you can’t make those kinds of thoughtful determinations by declaring your school is uninterested in, and won’t inquire into, the criminal records of applicants.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that next year a young man named Brock Turner applies to various universities around the country. He might even choose specifically to apply to Boston University, the City University of New York, and schools in the University of California system—institutions that have all signed the Obama administration’s pledge. Is it really of no interest to the assorted admissions offices that Turner has a criminal record? Because Turner’s record is no mere teenage marijuana-possession bust: He is the former Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. Turner has proved that he is a threat to those around him. But by the time he sends out his applications, he will have served his notoriously lenient sentence. And lenient or no, he will have officially “paid his debt to society.” So which university would like to stand up and offer him a place, willfully ignorant of his crime?
What, no takers? No one eager to let him earn his second chance?
