Brown University Holds ‘VIP Dinners’ for Children of the Wealthy and Powerful
“a terrible message about Brown’s commitment to inclusion”
It’s amazing that this could occur in an industry that is obsessed with fairness, equality, privilege, etc.
The Providence Journal reports:
VIP dinners offer peek at culture of privilege at Brown University
On a mild Wednesday evening in October, patrons approached the doors of Bacaro on South Water Street, only to encounter a posted notice that the upscale Italian restaurant was “closed for a private event.”
By 7 p.m., Ubers, punctuated by the occasional privately owned Audi and Land Rover, began dropping off groups of Brown University students wearing blazers, dresses and high heels. The students were there by special invitation for the “Marty Granoff Dinner.”
Even at a university that tops the Ivy League in admitting wealthy students (the median parental income of a Brown student is $204,200, and 19 percent of the student body comes from the top 1 percent of the income scale, according to data collected by a research team at Harvard University and published in The New York Times), the profile of Granoff’s guests stood out.
Dinner attendees included the children of an elite group: preeminent U.S. politicians, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, business executives, financial moguls and otherwise wealthy individuals. To re-create the guest list, said one student attendee, “Just look up the names of buildings [on campus] and look up people with matching last names — that’s it.” Another attendee added that as the daughter of two doctors, she thought almost all of the dinner guests “are richer than I am.”…
“It is bad enough that Brown provides legacy preferences in admissions — essentially affirmative action for the rich,” wrote Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation and an expert on socioeconomic inequities in education, in an email. “Separate dinners for wealthy students send a terrible message about Brown’s commitment to inclusion.”
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Comments
it is called donations. Think of it as those students – or their parents – paid a LOT of money for that dinner. That is all.
Brown, or should I say Marty Gronoff (?), should be allowed to do as it wishes, as long as they own up to it, when challenged when and if they make statements to the contrary. And who is to say that those not invited didn’t have a better time that evening. I wasn’t at the Oscars last night and I still had a pretty good evening.