By Lee A. Daniels

Clout works.

In recent years, that was the key principle influencing—to an outrageous degree—admissions to the college, law, business and other graduate schools of the University of Illinois.

Since 2005, for more than 800 applicants with substandard grades and test scores but the right political connections, it wasn’t what they knew about subject matter that counted. Rather, it was what “connections” they had to some of the state’s most influential politicians, lawyers and business leaders.

Last May, the Chicago Tribune, began publishing dozens of articles on how the “clout” admissions game worked at the state’s flagship university. Those stories’ revelations were subsequently confirmed by the scathing report of a special committee of investigation chaired by Abner Mikva, the former Congressman and federal judge.

“For years, a shadow admissions process existed at the University of Illinois,” the report [PDF] begins. “In scores of instances, the influence of prominent individuals—and the University’s refusal or inability to resist that influence … [gave] advantage to clouted applicants, who were typically from affluent backgrounds, and unfairly [disadvantaged] those in the general applicant pool.”

The stories and the commission’s findings infuriated many Illinoisans and roiled the state’s insular political establishment. Nearly all of the university’s trustees, including its chairman, resigned under pressure, as have numerous high-ranking university officials. Last week, the University’s President, B. Joseph White, announced he will step down at the end of the year.

The special commission’s report makes clear that the scope of the University’s “clout” plan is almost certainly unprecedented among major institutions of higher education.

But, curiously, except for a few news stories here and there, the scandal has been all but invisible in the mainstream media.

Even more curious has been the deafening silence of those conservatives and centrists who otherwise take every opportunity to rail against affirmative action’s efforts to expand the inclusion of women, blacks and other people of color—all the while declaring their opposition is based not on race but their allegiance to objective measures of “merit.”

Indeed, that solid wall of silence in June led Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, who opposes affirmative action, to question why “conservatives in particular” have been missing in action on the Illinois scandal, and, more broadly, on the widely-used practice in higher education of admitting relatives of alumni in far greater percentages than those in the general applicant pool.

What has sharpened criticism of the latter in recent years is clear evidence showing that as a group, the grades and test scores of so-called legacy applicants don’t match those in the top quarter to a third of the general student pool, and, once in college, they earn lower grades, too.

Actually, today’s silence on the right and center is a replay of what occurred in California in 1996 when a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that the University of California Board of Regents (the University system’s trustees) were operating a back-channel admissions process that opened doors for their relatives and children of friends and business partners into the University’s most prestigious campuses, UC-Berkeley and UCLA.

What gave that hypocrisy a more pungent stench was the fact that the Regents had just voted to drastically reduce affirmative action admissions for women and people of color.

One regent, in a March 16, 1996 Times article, was unapologetic. “Anyone in prominence who has made a recommendation—a school principal, a legislator—those carry weight. People who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are blacks and Latinos, don’t have that kind of weight to carry. And we’ve got to recognize that.”

That sentiment was echoed earlier this summer, in another March 16, 1996  Times article entitled ”Some Regents Seek UCLA Admissions Priority for Friends,” by a top University of Illinois fundraiser, who told the Mikva Commission that the clout process passed along “appropriate information” to help university admissions officers put the attractiveness of applicants in perspective. He asserted that such a system doesn’t hurt lower-income students because funds from generous donors provide scholarships that make it possible for poorer students to attend the university, too.

There has never been much public discussion of the double standard such remarks illuminate. Few have followed the road paved by journalist Daniel Goldren in his 2006 book., The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges – and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.

Golden, an opponent of all kinds of preferential treatment, offered case studies, so to speak, of how applicants who were connected via kinship or friendship to prominent people in the arts, politics and other sectors of American life gained admission to elite colleges. He bluntly noted that “Even as conservative critics paint affirmative action for college-bound minorities as giving African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans an unfair advantage over more capable white candidates, the truth is the reverse (my emphasis). The number of whites enjoying preference far outweighs the number of minorities aided by affirmative action.” Golden declared “these preferences of privilege amount to nothing less than affirmative action for rich white people. As such, they should be part of any debate about affirmative action for racial minorities.”

Currently, under Richard Kahlenberg’s direction, The Century Foundation is preparing a volume of essays examining the practice of legacy preference in colleges and universities. Perhaps that will provoke a more honest discussion about affirmative action in admissions.

Wanna bet?

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.