Expel Francisco Nava

Princeton University Junior Francisco Nava has confessed to self-assault.

According to the AP, "Nava claimed to have been assaulted Friday by two men off campus, police said. But he later confessed that scrapes and scratches on his face were self-inflicted, and that the threats were his work, too, said Detective Sgt. Ernie Silagyi.

"A spokeswoman for the Ivy League university said punishment, which could range from a warning to expulsion, was pending Monday."





Francisco Nava
Tiger, Moralist, Hoaxer

The 23 year-old junior politics major, residential assistant, and member of a campus wide committiee of religious life from Bedford, Texas cultivated a reputation riling up his fellow students for their liberal views. He belonged to the Anscombe Society, a student organization that seems to exist for the purpose of discussing Princeton's sexual mores, as we see from the society's calendar

Designed for Sex
A Pro-life, Pro-family Evening of Dessert, Coffee, and Conversation
Sexual Propositions: Romance Without Regret
Making Love Last: Finding Meaning in Sex and Romantic Relationships

It makes me yearn for the Princeton of yesteryear where the annual bacchanalia of Naked Olympics at first snow replaced such solumn thought and discourse. In this hot house of sublimated sexuality, Mr. Nava appears to have lost sight of another commandment in the Decalogue: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor."

"Tiger, tiger, burning bright/In the forest of the night," and Francisco's fellow tigers must be struggling to account for this sad-sack, self-loathing lost soul. "What the hammer? What the chain?/In what furnace was thy brain?" But I'm struggling to account for how this chap even made into Princeton in the first place, in the face of compelling evidence that argued against his admission.

I remember my own trangressions during that confusing time of life, and my first instinct is one of forgiveness-- perhaps the semester off with a gentle suggestion that he might consider the spires and gargoyles of the Brigham Young University instead of the spires and gargoyles of Princeton. But this is more than just a prank or even a libel at the over-privileged kids at an Ivy League campus. It epitomizes the illusion that fosters the elites that a generation later will start wars and plunder our treasury.

Like George Bush, Francisco Nava is not an aberration of the Ivy League. He is the very flower of the Ivy League, with his dishonesty, arrogance, pomposity, and moral strut. While I was browsing through Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas' whiney new book My Grandfather's Son, it occurred to me that Thomas and Nava are hypocritical brothers under the skin as they are both beneficiaries of affirmative action that placed them in these clubs for superior humans while they deny the same privilege to anyone else that follows them in the name of conservative orthodoxy.

What a tribute to Princeton's Dei sub numine viget. And it is for that reason that the only appropriate penalty will be Mr. Nava's expulsion.

By every measure, Princeton University is one of the great educational institutions on the planet. U.S. News and World Report claims that Princeton is indeed the best university in America, and I have no reason to doubt that magazine or the experience of child porn star Brooke Shields.

Although conservatives condemn the Ivy League for its liberalism and general wickedness, they nevertheless clamor to send their own kids to those schools. And the reason is that these school give their kids the keys to the kingdom-- posh mansions on the main line, exemption from the hard life, and boundless political influence and social opportunities.

But I wonder if this is a case of a victory of illusion over reality, at least when it comes to developing the mind. Graduates from this intellectual sausage factory have the Seal of Good Housekeeping upon graduating. But is their education really any better than what you could get at, say, Arizona State? There is little interaction with the Nobel Prize winning superstars, and assistants not much older than the typical freshman teach some of the survey classes. When a demi-god does descend from the clouds to teach lowly underclassman, it's more often than not grunts from thirty-year-old notes. Frankly, I think most people can do better with a card to their local library.

Perhaps all of this could be tolerated, except for the suspicion that rather than being a center for excellence it is rather a cesspool of mediocrity. Princeton, like many of the top private universities, is as far from the ideal of meritocracy as cats are from kings. At Harvard, for example, Daniel Golden estimates in How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite College-- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates that as many as 60 percent of the freshman slots are reserved for legacy and investment admissions. This would make a good SAT question: If the average SAT of the 40 percent who get in on their intellectual bandwidth is 1500 and the average SAT of the remaining legacy kids is 900, what is the average SAT of Princeton University? The answer: probably less than the students at most trade schools. According to Golden, investment admissions seats are reserved for those who have parents who buy their way into the school, and the going price at Harvard is currently about $2.5 million dollars.

Princeton expects an average SAT score of 1500. But, like the price tag for education, this too is a fiction. The true score that they expect from you on your applications depends on all kinds of affirmative action diversity factors. Starting with a base of 1200, you can subtract 100 if you are Jewish kid from Boston but add 100 if you are a Baptist kid from Salt Lake City. Subtract 100 if you are Chinese majoring in math but add 100 if you are a Chinese hockey player. And add another 300 points if your daddy has endowed a chair or if your last name is Bush or Kennedy. The admissions process is indeed fertile ground for ample cynicism.

SAT scores, or what psychometricians a generation ago called IQ, have little real intellectual meaning, and it is surely true that the legacy from Groton prep with a SAT of 1300 is a dunce compared to the his peer in a barrio or a ghetto with a SAT of 900. Yet, there are only a small number of seats that are available at institutions such as Princeton, and I don't think it is rude to suggest that admissions committee at Princeton dropped the ball in Mr. Nava's case. The case for affirmative action based on poverty seems stronger to me than basing it on race, sex, and family wealth. But surely among the factors that admission committees should consider as part of the package is a person's ethical maturity and psychological stability.

It appears to me that Mr. Nava's story of his life's journey blinded to committee to these more fundamental considerations. Perhaps it is more accurate to say the the people on the Princeton admissions were blind because they wanted to be blind. I hope today that their eyes are open and their faces are red.

Princeton and other Ivy League schools will continue to attract brilliant students and professors, and must do so to offset the possibility that the schools are merely diploma mills willing to sell a piece of paper to the highest bidder. But the reality is that vast numbers of people are excluded from these gateways to the good life and power, not through lack of effort and ability but through an accident of birth, in this case, birth into the home of the not so rich and not so famous. There is nothing American about this kind of unfairness, so in that sense I do think Princeton and the other Ivys hate America.

While I think that the ending class-based discrimination should be a condition of continued federal funding, I think also it's unlikely that will ever happen. Thus, for most people, that is just one more hurdle to jump, not unlike the numerus clausus that these schools inflicted on Jewish students for decades. In face of such obstacles, the answer is not to retreat but to study harder and be mentally tougher than the legacy or the affirmative action kids.

With his family connections and his ethnic and boarding school background, Francisco Nava will thrive, enjoying a future someday as a Republican investment banker or as a congressman, although his diploma probably won't come from New Jersey.