July 27, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Now, the next topic I
Now, the next topic I want to address is this ridiculous Princeton/Yale thing. For those of you with better things to do than watch Fox News at 3 am, the Princeton admissions office was apparently logging into the Yale admissions office's server to check whether desireable candidates had been admitted.
It makes me ashamed to be in the Ivy League, even in its outer suburbs.
Not, mind you, because I expected higher moral standards at the Ivy League. If you want moral standards, go to the University of Virginia. The Ivy League long ago abandonned any attempt to inculcate virtue into its charges in favor of nurturing their delicate little psyches. Judeo-Christian values are so, you know, middle class.
But the entire thing is so mind-bogglingly dumb.
Of course, I shouldn't expect that high a level of mental acuity in the Ivy League either. After all, I was there. After you've had an argument about the future of capitalism with an honors Poli-Sci student who can't:
1) Define capitalism
2) Define imperialism
3) Understand why the Roman Empire shouldn't be classified as a capitalist society, given its imperialistic history
4) Define communism
5) Define the difference between communism and socialism
6) Understand when you tell him that the Soviet Union, while embracing the communist ideal, was not actually living under a communist system, since the state hadn't yet withered away.
7) Define the difference between a libertarian and an anarchist. (I don't mean come up with a perfect definition; I mean come up with something more accurate than 'Libertarians just don't want the state to do anything because they hate taxes)
. . . you begin to suspect that the much-vaunted system for separating the wheat from the chaff may have broken down somewhere.
Probably in the admissions office. As in most colleges, the admissions office is a refuge for graduates who haven't found themselves positions elsewhere. They do get traded around, but the Ivies being the Ivies, the admissions office at an Ivy League school is generally staffed mostly by graduates of one of eight Eastern schools founded by people who wore wigs and knee breeches and prayed a lot.
And yet when they were caught, the best lie that the Princeton admissions folks could come up with is that they were checking the security of the Yale system? This is a brow-furrowing, ear-cupping, head-shaking, "did he actually say that?" concrete-buoy of a lie. This is Richard Nixon going public to tell the nation that his Secret Presidential Task Force had just been making sure that the door locks at the Watergate met federal safety standards.
Which begs the question: how did the folks in the admissions office get through four years of an Ivy League education without learning that the proper response to a crisis like this is to blame it on the guy that no one in the office likes?
This level of stupidity is matched only by the soul-searing idiocy of the folks at the Yale Admissions office and their friends in the Yale Information Technology Department. Such a system should never, ever have been accessible through the web. If it was, it should never, ever have used something as stupid as a student's name and social security number, sans password, to access the files. And if it had to use those things because the heads of the fun folks in the Yale Admissions Department's were too full of plans for Newport weekends and the release date of the latest Moby album to cram in a new password, one would think that elementary common sense would tell one to deny access to anyone whose request emanated from any IP address range assigned to rival institutions of higher learning that might conceivably have interest in the information. Papers keep describing Yale's system as having been "hacked". Hacked? No self-respecting hacker would stoop to that kind of entry; it's like breaking into a house that has the door unlocked, a welcome sign out, and a cooler full of icy beverages awaiting the burglar when he deigns to step inside.
Of course, no burglar would. Because if you saw such a house, you would probably suspect that it was a trap set by the police. If, that is, you had sense enough to come in out of the rain.
One begins to suspect that the Yale admissions folks weren't quite as stupid as they're letting on.
Posted by Jane Galt at July 27, 2002 8:29 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>