Thread by @kevincarey1

1/ Let's talk about how wealthy businessman Jack Zhou is currently in the process of getting away with bribing his two sons into Harvard -- with crucial assistance from Harvard itself.

2/ The bribing first came to light back in April, when the Boston Globe reported that Zhao had given Harvard fencing coach Peter Brand $440,000 by paying him $989,000 for a $549,000 house. Brand then helped Zhao's son, a fencer, get into Harvard.

bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/04/…

3/ The story broke weeks after the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, which oddly *helped* Harvard because it was suddenly only one of many elite schools with corrupt athletic coaches. Harvard waited a few months and then fired Brand. bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/07/…

4/ The stated reason? Violating Harvard's "conflict of interest" rules, which sounds a lot more benign and possibly inadvertent than "bribe-taking" -- indeed, Brand's lawyer indignantly complained that Harvard had failed to inform his client of this arcane HR policy.

5/ Except -- whoops! -- it turns out Brand had an accomplice, a Virginia fencing coach named Alexandre Ryjik, who -- inconveniently! -- saved screen shots of his bribe conspiracy text messaging with Brand, which were then discovered by Ryjik's outraged and soon-to-be-ex-wife.

6/ It turns out that the bribe scheme also encompassed Zhao's other, older son, and included more shady Zhao-financed land purchases, plus a $1 million donation to a sham non-profit. (There is always a sham non-profit.)

bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/05/…

7/ In the text messages, Brand told Ryjik that Zhao's sons "don’t have to be great fencers. All I need is a good incentive to recruit them" and that the older son "is my no 1 recruit as long as my future us [sic] secured."

It's all per @EvanMAllen here:

bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/11/…

8/ So why am saying that Zhao got away with it? Because unlike, say, Georgetown, which expelled two of the students whose parents bribed their way into college, Harvard has allowed Zhao's son to stay.

In other words, he got exactly what he paid for.

nbcnews.com/news/us-news/g…

9/ To be sure, a grand jury investigation is underway. But how will prosecutors mount a case when the official position of Harvard University itself is that their admissions process was *not corrupted* and that, bribes notwithstanding, Zhao's sons legitimately deserved to get in?

10/ In this way, Harvard is inadvertently, or at least reluctantly, coming clean about a fact that elite universities very much do not want to admit, which is that their vaunted admissions standards are mostly a lie.

11/ Harvard really has two sets of standards. The first is what you need to get in without a special "hook." That standard is real, and pretty daunting, and can be broadly defined in terms of grades and test scores and a few other reasonably well-understood things.

12/ The second set of standards is the minimum threshold you have to meet if someone at Harvard really wants you to be there for non-academic reasons, including your sports skills or family connections or bribes, legal and otherwise.

13/ That second standard is applied to *a lot* of students and is very, very broad. So much so that it can't be easily defined, because it kind of, mostly, doesn't exist. If you disagree, feel free to provide evidence to the contrary.

14/ Jack Zhao's sons were well within the second standard. They were maybe within shouting distance of the first. They were in fact fencers, and who's to say how good they were other the fencing coach himself.

15/ In other words, Harvard is forced to stick with the "conflict of interest" nonsense because Peter Brand stayed well within the bribe-friendly two-standard system that Harvard routinely uses for itself. The only difference is who got to cash the check.

16/ Zhao's older son has completed his Harvard degree, which nobody seems interested in rescinding. His younger son is still enrolled and still on the fencing team. Zhao will likely be remembered as a self-made man who lived the American dream, such as it is, no more, no less.