… and its expensive, successful effort to get their kid (now President Trump’s son-in-law) into Harvard. (The New York magazine article from which I got the quotation below is mainly about the jail time Papa Kushner has racked up. Money and influence can get you into Harvard, but apparently cannot always keep you out of jail.)
When Jared applied to college, Charlie was determined to get him into the most prestigious schools, and he called in favors to achieve his goal. In 1998, Charlie made a $2.5 million pledge to Harvard. According to The Price of Admission, the best-selling book written by Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden, Charlie asked New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg to lobby Ted Kennedy to put in a call to Harvard admissions dean William Fitzsimmons on Jared’s behalf.
Alex Pareene, in Salon, reviews this history in light of Trump’s attack on Obama’s Harvard admission.
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And baby, I gotta tell you. UD has been covering universities for a long time, and the big affirmative action story is Kushner’s kid at Harvard, Ralph Lauren’s kids at Duke, and scads of other money admits. The Laurens are what’s called a “development family.”
April 28th, 2011 at 10:00AM
Teddy the Expelled Cheater had pull at Hah-vuhd?!
April 29th, 2011 at 11:01AM
Before the election, the question about Obama’s entry into Harvard was whether he had been spotted early by the Lake Shore Drive crowd, and whether they greased the skids for him.
As for paying to get into Duke, I can understand why someone would pay to get into Harvard, but why would anyone pay to get into Duke? Wasn’t that the school that once had Morris Zapp on the faculty? You wouldn’t think things could go downhill from there, but . . .
April 29th, 2011 at 11:58AM
AYY: And Charlotte Simmons in the student body.
April 30th, 2011 at 12:23PM
I guess the Kushner family is newsworthy, but what’s really odd is that Salon is scrutinizing Trump’s son in law’s admission to Harvard more thoroughly than it scrutinized Obama’s admission to Harvard.
July 12th, 2012 at 9:42PM
what is this conspiratorial crap about “obama’s admission to harvard”?
he was a columbia graduate at the time, utterly unknown to the “lake shore drive crowd.”
there’s a big difference between admission to the college and admission to the law school. soudns like an obama hater who never went to college.