… but strongly optimistic, on a beautiful summer day at the Garrett Park pool, where UD has just finished her swim, and where she now (they’ve got wifi this year) blogs. The little square of orange light on her computer panel shivers and shakes, and it takes an awfully long time to go from one window to another, but UD will take what she can get by way of internet access (on Thursday her home computer problems should be solved). Hotel lobbies, Starbucks, and now the local pool — when computers disconnect, UD reconnects with her little ‘thesdan world.

Five people have emailed UD about the clout list at the University of Illinois (she’s afraid if she tries to link to an article, it’ll take forever), and she’s grateful to them. She’d already read an article or two about it, and had decided not to post on the subject. But since so many of her kind readers think of UD and University Diaries when they read coverage in the Chicago Trib and elsewhere about the well-established use of clout on the part of politicians and trustees to get unqualified students admitted to the flagship public campus, she’ll happily share her thoughts.

Used to be UD was real radical on the subject. When she first started going with Mr UD, he told her about various Harvard friends of his who’d been admitted with middling grades and scores because their parents were well-connected. She was scandalized, and did quite a bit of populist railing against it, which irritated Mr UD no end.

He tried to explain to her that no university merely looks at grades and scores — there are all sorts of special admits, like athletes and musicians and the geographically well-distributed (UD recalled her father saying that he wasn’t that impressive a candidate for Johns Hopkins, but “No one had ever applied to Hopkins from Ocean City High.”) and, yes, children of alumni. “The main question,” said he, “is Can they do well at the university? All of my friends did very well. Most graduated with honors. And you know all of them and how well they’ve done in life.”

Although her position has moderated a bit, UD remains scandalized by purely money admits — Duke and Brown seem particularly fond of them — where if your father is Ralph Lauren or Rudy Giuliani (how else to explain Andrew Giuliani?) you have a much better chance of getting in than someone more impressive and less wealthy. And sure, many of the University of Illinois admits she’s reading about sound unable to do well at the school — Mr UD’s minimal criterion. One in particular — a law school candidate — sounds terrible, and it’s sad to read the admissions dean begging the administration clout-slaves not to make him write an acceptance email to this person. He worries that the candidate’s wretched test scores will damage the law school’s competitive statistics; he’s sure the candidate will be unable to pass any bar exam.

UD takes both a case by case and a larger, political-atmosphere approach to the clout admissions phenomenon. Illinois is of course one of our most corrupt states. And bad clout admits certainly increase when you’ve got players like Blago at the bat.

Similarly, many of our corrupt, provincial southern states have long regarded colleges and universities as patronage machines, charitable arms of the legislature designed to give jobs to governors’ wives and advanced degrees to children of the prominent. So when there’s a background of deep-rooted cultural corruption, you want to pay particular attention to clout practices.

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Update: Wrote this yesterday. Apologies for light posting — continued connectivity difficulties. They’re on their way to being solved.