Billy Townsend is a Florida blogger who specializes in exposing grifters, especially in education. He calls his blog “Public Enemy #1.” He served on the Polk County school board and has been relentless in pursuing the scams perpetrated by Governor DeSantis and former state Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran, now president of New College, a position for which he is uniquely unqualified. Someone on Twitter noted recently that the university presidents appointed by DeSantis won’t have to worry about plagiarism charges, because few if any of them have ever published a peer-reviewed article or book.
Chris Rufo is the attack dog of the far-right, who literally manufactured and sold a public panic attack over “critical race theory,” a concept debated in law school classes. As a result of his publicity campaign, any teaching about race and racism in American schools became suspect, enabling some states to suppress honest discussion of those subjects. Most recently, Rufo hounded Harvard’s President, Claudine Gay, until she resigned over charges of plagiarism.
Townsend writes here about Rufo’s inflated academic credentials:
In the least surprising revelation ever, Christopher Rufo does not have a Masters of Arts degree from Harvard, as he once claimed in his Manhattan Institute bio. He has, instead, a Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) from Harvard Extension School.
Indeed, this anti-woke grifter is continuing to misstate his educational credentials, even after very very quietly correcting one aspect of his misstatement — as I’ll show you in a moment.
As anyone who remotely follows Rufo knows, this is the kind of credential misstatement he would summon the New York Times to pursue if the person doing the misstating was black or a woman. And the useless NYT would dutifully obey. I’m sure they will find a way to avoid this particular misstatement.
But Rufo’s fellow trustees can and should confront him with this at the next meeting.
Rufo claims undergraduate achievement he did not earn
Harvard instructs graduates of Harvard University Extension School to spell out “Harvard University Extension School” on resumes and bios because its sees a meaningful distinction between “Harvard University Extension School” and Harvard’s traditional graduate schools…
Selectivity of admission is the core difference in these Harvard graduate programs. It’s a lot easier to get into “Harvard University Extension School” than traditional Harvard.
Thus, Rufo’s conflation of degree credentials claims a level of achievement in admission that he did not earn.
It misrepresents the quality of Rufo’s undergraduate performance, suggesting that it was strong enough to earn admission to Harvard’s highly selective graduate schools. It was not.
Rufo’s misleading claim dilutes Harvard’s brand, which is why Harvard cares about how graduates claim this credential, I suspect. I’ve posted Harvard’s direction in how to refer to the extension school below.
The “never admit” grifter admits to something
Is this a big deal? Rufo, a bombastic Bad Ken 99.9 percent of the time, seems to think so. He very very quietly acknowledged that his Manhattan Institute bio misstated his education credential by very very quietly having it altered.
In doing so, Rufo violated the #1 tenet of the modern “conservative” and “anti-woke” grifts — the #1 tenet of Rufoism: always loudly refuse to admit or acknowledge anything damaging to the grift. And yet, here Rufo is admitting….
Billy Townsend goes on to portray Rufo’s bio—before and after—on the Manhattan Institute website, where he is a senior fellow. And he shows that Rufo’s misleading claim to am MA at Harvard persists on the New College website, where DeSantis named him as a trustee as part of the governor’s plan to turn the progressive liberal arts college into the Hillsdale of the South.
Townsend writes:
Ride it while it lasts, Chris
Ironically, considering the time and effort I’ve spent on these two Rufo articles, I’m thoroughly uninterested in him. He’s just another grifter, a little farther down the grift value chain than young Austin Hurst, who I introduced you to earlier today.
But they’re essentially the same person — lazy bros trolling for rich guy money by owning the libs. Rufo’s need to overstate both undergrad and grad school credentials is a pretty good example of that.
Rufos, like Zieglers, always come and go. This one will too.
Townsend then quotes a Harvard document explaining how graduates of the Harvard Extension School should refer to their degrees, advice that Rufo ignored until he was caught.
I urge you to open the link to read the material I did not reproduce here. It’s fascinating.
Billy Townsend, by the way, is a graduate of Amherst College, whose admission standards are as rigorous as those of Harvard.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Mr. Rufo has inflated his academic credentials. That fact by itself does not refute his opinions about CRT, wokeism, or anything else. Take the author name name off anything he writes and analyze the text. Are the arguments well-supported or not? Dismissing what someone writes or says purely because you don’t like him is employing the logical fallacy of ad hominem – as seen dozens of times every month on this blog.
Christopher Rufo used the accusation of plagiarism, a type of fraud, against Harvard President Claudine Gay to bring her down. He committed acts of fraud by misrepresenting his ALM from Harvard University Extension School as an MA from Harvard University on multiple sites. That is not an ad hominem attack but relevant evidence of his disingenuousness.
exactly, that OUGHT TO BE obvious enough
Yep. And thanks for saying so.
Rufo admitted to making up the CRT thing out of whole cloth as a way of sticking it to the Dems. He’s a hatchetman, like Atwater before him.
it seems to me the simple term liar encapsulates this person and his work. He had a goal and he created a fictitious dialogue to promote his theoretical goal. He sold it as factual, but never really proved it to be so.
Liar. Opportunist. Grifter. They all fit.
Thanks for bringing up policy over personality. When Rufo appropriated the word “woke” to describe policy that was sensitive toward certain subsets of humanity in our midst with a designated term he could use pejoratively. He stated this plainly, m as king his form of argument correspond to the definition of propaganda. He made his style of argument an issue itself. He tried to make himself the issue, to advance his career as the modern day Lee Atwater, attack dog who later admitted his moral bankruptcy on his deathbed.
As for issues: Rufo and Hillsdale want a completely Euro-centric interpretation of history. No serious academic would countenance such an academic cop-out. Rufo and the Hillsdale crowd do not like CRT, but they really do not use term correctly and ignore what it argued: that systemic racism lingered in our judicial process long after Jim Crow laws were declared illegal. This is undoubtedly the case.
Rufo and company themselves are guilty of the very charge you level at readers and commentators here: that policy is ignored and people are attacked. I call you on it.
Exactly. Well said, Roy.
I think, Ms. Waite, that what you were searching for was that this is an example of the genetic fallacy, which is discounting a proposition because of its source. So, if Hitler said, “Circles are round,” that wouldn’t make them any less round.
If Rufo is being dismissed, it is because of the actions he has committed (including fraud) and the specious arguments he has made against “CRT” and “woke-ism.” His credentials, in fact, do not qualify him to judge people who have earned PhDs.
Amen. And thanks for saying so.
Credentials are as good as the scores
they are based on.
Meaning?
Or, in the case of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump and George W Bush, as good as the money that buys them entrance.
When I was a kid, I naively thought that a degree from Harvard or Yale really meant something. But then
Bush Jr., Cruz, Hawley, Stefanik, Alito. One could make a long list.
Having an Ivy League degree means that you had the grades and test scores to be admitted. It also means that you had the opportunity to have a great education with outstanding professors. But it does not guarantee that you will have a keen sense of ethics or morality. They don’t teach that.
Or that you actually cared as a student about building a body of knowledge as opposed to simply getting through the class with a passing grade.
In other words, it doesn’t mean that you seized that opportunity. Though I must say, I have met some truly highly educated alumni of Harvard and Yale.
Cruz and Hawley are living proof that even the greatest education in the world doesn’t confer a sense of ethics. In their case, it instilled a sense of entitlement.
Billy Townsend followed up on Rufo’s failure to correct his resume.
https://open.substack.com/pub/billytownsend/p/resume-fudging-grifter-trustee-rufo?r=56jld&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
“Having an Ivy League degree means that you had the grades and test scores to be admitted.”
This comment speaks to why rich parents spend so much money to get their kid admitted. It’s not actually true. What’s true is that having an Ivy League degree means you either had the grades and test scores to be admitted, or your connections or parents’ influence or money got you in despite there being hundreds or thousands of applicants with better grades and test scores. If you are in the 2nd category, you get to benefit from the assumption that you had the stellar grades and test scores required to be admitted, even though you had to meet a lower bar to be admitted over hundreds or even thousands of applicants who met a much higher bar.
That’s why very rich people are willing to donate so much money and pay college admissions “advisors” and essay writing “helpers” so much money and pay upwards of $50,000/ year for 13 years of private school tuition.
Their kid could go to any college and live their life with the $50 million trust fund their parent gives them. The Ivy degree has no financial value to them.
But it does have a value that is priceless – the assumption that they are especially smart. Students with a degree from their local branch of the state university don’t get that, even when they graduate with high honors. We tend to know when Republican politicians went to Ivies and we rarely know what colleges the ones that didn’t go to elite colleges attended. I read an article that pointed out that significantly more Republicans recently elected to the Senate had Ivy degrees than Dems. They get unearned respect, like Stefanik and Hawley. I believe that had Donald J. Trump graduated from SUNY, he wouldn’t be president. Wharton is part of his brand, and that association works, even when he’s made fun of. Stefanik without her Harvard degree would be Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The students from top public schools who get into Ivies or other elite schools have to be extraordinary, and even then, many get rejected. But that’s not a requirement for all applicants. Other applicants are put in a special pile where they don’t have to be extraordinary. Just good enough to get that assumption that they are just like the other students who had to be extraordinary to get in.
Anyone see the children of prominent Republican ivy leaguers who bash the supposedly woke, elite schools vying to get their kids into the new anti-woke university advocated by ? Or Florida’s New College?
NYC PSP,
I don’t agree with your statement that rich kids with poor grades and low test scores are admitted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. I know kids from privileged families who were rejected by the Ivies. Each of those schools gets 10 applicants for every single seat. They try to find kids with geographic diversity, kids who want to major in different subjects, and despite the Court ban on affirmative action, kids who bring racial and ethnic diversity. With so many applicants, it’s tough for anyone to count on their parents’ fortune to get them in.
Trump took his first two years at Fordham. He transferred in to Penn. I wish he would release his grades and scores. He proves my point, as do CruzandHawley, that an Ivyeducatuon does not assure high ethical standards.
Was it $2 mil. from Jared’s father?The agreement was in installments. Politico wrote about it.
A reporter from the WSJ, Daniel Golden, wrote a book about how rich people buy their kid’s a spot in Ivies. I think it was called “The Price of Admission.” Charles Kushner’s gift to Harvard on behalf of Jared was one example. I know one of Jared’s high school classmates, who told me Harvard accepted him and passed over others with superior accomplishments from their school.
Diane, I know an extraordinarily smart couple worth probably $100 million with very smart kids, and neither of them got into Ivies. To their credit, they lost no sleep over it.
Diane,
I never made a statement that rich kids with poor grades and low test scores are admitted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.
But I can see that my clarification of what I did say — that having an Ivy League degree doesn’t mean you had the grades and test scores to be admitted — should have come earlier in my comment.
“your connections or parents’ influence or money got you in despite there being hundreds or thousands of applicants with better grades and test scores.”
The definition of “grades and test scores to be admitted” is extremely high, when you are talking about a middle class kid from a public school. It’s not the same for certain students from elite private schools.
The NYT ran an article about this just last year:
“Study of Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qualification”, By Aatish Bhatia, Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz July 24, 2023
“Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.
A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed résumés, and applied at a higher rate — but they were overrepresented EVEN AFTER ACCOUNTING FOR THOSE THINGS. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.
The study — by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard who study inequality — quantifies for the first time the extent to which being very rich is its own qualification in selective college admissions…..
“The new data showed that other selective private colleges, like Northwestern, N.Y.U. and Notre Dame, had a similarly disproportionate share of children from rich families. Public flagship universities were much more equitable. At places like the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia, applicants with high-income parents were no more likely to be admitted than lower-income applicants with comparable scores.”
At one of the colleges that shared admissions data, students from the top 0.1 percent were 1.5 times as likely to have high nonacademic ratings as those from the middle class. The researchers said that, accounting for differences in the way each school assesses nonacademic credentials, they found similar patterns at the other colleges that shared data.
The biggest contributor was that admissions committees gave higher scores to students from private, nonreligious high schools. They were twice as likely to be admitted as similar students — those with the same SAT scores, race, gender and parental income — from public schools in high-income neighborhoods. A major factor was recommendations from guidance counselors and teachers at private high schools.”
The entire article explains how the system works. It’s not simply about having affluent parents — it’s about having affluent parents who send their kids to the right feeder private school so that IF their kid has near perfect test scores and stellar grades and is a nice kid with normal accomplishments instead of a world class academic champion in something, they are far more unlikely to be shut out of an elite college.
Diane, if you know a fair number of students who attended elite private high schools and had stellar grades and near perfect SAT scores (which doesn’t mean 1450 or 1500, even though those were once consider very high scores), and they were shut out of Ivies, that’s surprising. Because if that really happened even half of the time to students who were not just “average excellent” but unusually high scoring students, high performing students, parents of the top students at elite private schools would not be happy.
There are plenty of smart students at those elite schools who aren’t interested in the Ivy race. But for the ones who are, the students from elite privates get a boost.
One of the most interesting sections in the study is “The Missing Middle Class”.
“We had these very skewed distributions of a whole lot of Pell kids and a whole lot of no-need kids, and the middle went missing,” said an Ivy League dean of admissions, who has seen the new data and spoke anonymously in order to talk openly about the process. “You’re not going to win a P.R. battle by saying you have X number of families making over $200,000 that qualify for financial aid.”
Why is it that at top public flagship universities, students with the same SAT scores are equally likely to be admitted, but at elite private universities, students who are very rich get a huge admissions boost? Why does it matter to their parents – who don’t have to worry about their child’s financial future – that their child get that admissions boost?
The definition of “having the grades and test scores to get admitted” at public flagship universities is the same whether the student is middle class or very rich, but for students applying for elite private schools, “having the grades and test scores to get admitted” seems to vary depending on how rich your family is and whether the applicant is applying from an excellent suburban or selective public school, or a private school.
FYI – the study showed that very poor kids get that admissions boost just like very rich kids do. But it certainly makes sense to make some allowances for students who have been disadvantaged. It seems absurd to give a boost to students who have been lavished with advantages.
NYC PSP,
I read those studies.
I thought at the time that affluent kids have an edge over poor kids with the same test scores and grades because no college can afford to accept a class of kids who can’t pay tuition.
Diane,
But did you know that kids from private schools had a significant admissions advantage over upper middle class students from affluent suburban public schools when their test scores and academics are the same?
The interesting thing the study found is that it is only elite private colleges like Ivies where private school students get that significant admissions boost over affluent public school students with the same academic credentials. When applying to excellent state flagship universities, the private school students have no admissions advantage over public school students with the same academic credentials.
From another NYT article:
“College Admissions: Vulnerable, Exploitable, and to Many Americans, Broken”,March 15, 2019
“At the heart of the scandal is a persistent adulation of highly selective universities. “Elite colleges have become a status symbol with the legitimacy of meritocracy attached to them, because getting in sanctifies you as meritorious,” said Jerome Karabel, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a historian of college admissions.”
Two kids can have the same academic record and test scores – both excellent – but to me it seems problematic that it is likely that the one who gets sanctified as meritorious is the wealthiest one and not the middle class one, because while they compete on a level playing field when applying to top public flagships, that isn’t the case when applying to elite colleges. The bar to be admitted is raised or lowered, and what was interesting is what lowers it isn’t just family income, but attending a private instead of a public high school.
Of course,that’s true in life. If the connected kid meets some basic qualifying standard when applying for a job, they are “qualified” and got hired based on merit, and it doesn’t matter whether there were even more qualified applicants who didn’t get the job. That only matters if the kid who meets that basic qualifying standard and is hired is an underrepresented minority, in which case if there is even one applicant who appears to be more qualified on paper, their hiring is “unfair” and they are portrayed as having been given their job unfairly. It’s a double standard.
NYT
Thank you for writing at the blog. Readers gain valuable information and insights from your comments. You have original takes on what you report. Importantly, you have the ability to prioritize what is significant in what you summarize from a source.
Learning is not something that we UNDERGO during the first 12 to 20 years of our lives. It is something we UNDERTAKE over a lifetime. Anyone who thinks that a person can be come well educated simply by attending a university, even a good university, is sorely mistaken. I’ve known many people with fancy degrees who promptly forgot most everything they learned in school and who never read and so did not continue to build their knowledge. John Waters says, if you go home with someone and there are no books, run from there as fast as you can (or something like that). I agree. I once hired a young woman with a degree in English from Harvard. A week or so in (this was a publishing house), she came into my office furious because I had covered her manuscript in red ink. “I went to Harvard!” she said. “Yes,” I said, “but this is a publishing house, and you have to learn, for your job, when to use the comparative and when the superlative, which compounds are hyphenated and which are not, and so on. Also, I guess they don’t teach proper symbols for proofreading and copyediting markup as part of getting a degree in English from Harvard. You need to learn those, too. Here”s a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style. Keep it.”
She became one of my best employees. A very talented editor. But she come to the job with a lot of learning to do.
Glad you wrote that. I was about to. Now I can go birdwatching with Melissa
Bob
Where does one learn to mock a person with whom he disagrees? And, at what age does a person learn that credentials are required to diagnose a person as mentally ill? Where does one learn the occasions in which an apology is appropriate?
A red pen upbraiding your incivility, would that be used sparingly?
I did no such thing. I did satirize negative characterizations of the Catholic church and of Catholics that I thought over the top, as others have here as well. Please do not make false accusations.
In answer to your first question, one might study satirists throughout the history of Western literature starting, say, with Aristophanes.
Teflon Bob but, no such treatment for NYC parent and me.
Linda, I have many family members who are Catholics. They are really good, progressive people. I found some of the things you were saying offensive. Diane has also commented a number of times that her partner is Catholic and a good person. There are reasons for these reactions.
Linda,
Yep. If someone is regularly going to tone police people they don’t like, they should at least be overly careful to police the tone of their own comments.
One man’s incivil personal insult is another man’s “satirization”. But who gets to decide?
NYT and I have both explained, there are (a) the members of a demographic group and, separately, there are (b) the right wing political activities of a church and its influential members (those who self admit to politically advancing the sect). It’s a distinction that McConahey in her recent book, Playing God, said, some people will never be able to make.
Loyalty that results in omission of critical information is a separate issue.
It creates a harmful teflon because, writ large, the fight for public schools, abortion and LGBTQ rights and equal civil rights (e.g. Biel v. St. James Catholic school) suffers from misdirection.
Stepanik’s interview at Meet the Press last Sunday showed how tribal loyalty is played to the advantage of getting votes for Trump.
We get a window into the character of a person who gaslights and insults. When the real focus of the tactic shuts down a review of an institution’s political activities, we’ve seen the outcome e.g.
courts in in New Orleans and Boston.
An Idaho case involving the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act will be reviewed by SCOTUS. Yesterday, only the Guardian had the major headline. Blogs that understand the reproductive risks that threaten women’s lives should, regardless of loyalties to religious sect, report about the organizations filing amicus curiae briefs aimed at denying women and girls the right to live.
Fighting an unnamed enemy with the excuse that organizational membership is down and Catholics are being persecuted shows the extent of the desperation to make the US a theocracy.
The attack of the Church on women’s reproductive rights really is execrable. Thank you for calling it out, Linda.
Thanks Bob for your comment.
Thanks for your advocacy on behalf of women.
Reading this reminded me of another grifter: Michelle Rhee
It seems she’s not gone. Updated April 04, 2023 | by Grace Chen
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/the-controversy-of-michelle-rhee
Lloyd, it’s hard to believe that article appeared in 2023.
It reads like 2013.
The article’s dated April 2023 but if you scroll down to the comments the first one says it’s from 11 years ago so it has to be a repost from 2013
Nephew, that makes sense. Rhee has faded from sight.
Attack dogs like Rufo are all part of the GOP that operates like a crime family. The GOP no longer searches for truth, justice or even the rule of law. The right has made such a big commotion about voter fraud. If they cared so much about the election integrity, why then are right leaning states pulling out of the Electronic Registration Information Center, a group that combats voter fraud? https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/09/gop-states-program-voter-fraud-fight-00105252
power and wealth.
What troubles me most about all of this is that too many in the legacy media questioned Gay’s authenticity before challenging the veracity of Rufo’s accusations. As with CRT, too many were in a hurry to ask questions of the accused before checking on the legitimacy of the accuser’s. I guess Steve Bannon’s strategy is effective. Fill that room and most will forget the toilet paper to clean it up. Then add a billionaire and Harvard crumbles.
The legacy media always checks on the legitimacy of the accuser if someone the rich and powerful like does the same thing as someone the rich and powerful don’t like.
And viola! The legacy media learns the plagiarism can be weaponized! Whodda thunk it?
The legacy media spent months helping to weaponize the rich and powerful launch their attacks on Gay and then they turned around and reported that it was wrong to weaponize attacks on this other victimized person who the rich and power liked.
That’s the true horror, Paul. Ackman gets the say because of his $$$$. Disgusting.
“Doesn’t guarantee you have a keen sense of ethics and morality,” yet, it is a ticket that enhances opportunities for job positions at the top e.g. Donald Rumsfeld from Princeton.
A research study should examine Individuals in top positions who have Ivy League degrees compared to those at the same level who have state university degrees with a focus on differences and similarities in ethics and morality.
Further research may identify an exploiter gene similar to a sociopathic gene that is carried by one’s offspring.
One of the best philosophers now working in the U.S., IMHO, is Eric Schwitzgebel. He has done research that indicates that ethics professors are no more ethical than the average person.
Click to access EthSelfRep-110316.pdf
“best philosophers”
For mirth, blog readers should click and read the highly selective and limited categories used in the questionnaire e.g. vegetarianism. They’re in the first sentence of the 2011 piece.
A person might be discerning and say student exposure to a framework for making ethical or moral decisions, an opportunity to examine how decision makers have weighed factors that involved morality, etc. would be valuable in research purporting to advance knowledge.
On the other hand, the “gotcha” tone appeals to some.
Schwitzgebel is well-known and influential as a champion of what is known as Experimental Philosophy, which conducts scientific study bearing upon traditional philosophical questions. The juncture of the two realms of science and philosophy is a fertile one.
In particular, Dr. Schwitzgebel is known for his work on faulty intuitions about the workings of one’s own cognitive and perceptual systems. Among many other things, he does studies that deal with matters like our poor levels of knowledge of our own conscious experiences (i.e., on faulty introspection), including such fascinating topics as false memory, belief as disposition, accuracy of purported mental imagery and other supposed representations “in the mind’s eye” like dream reports, and so on. Fascinating stuff. His is, like Daniel Kahneman’s, a fertile mind. And like others of my favorites among contemporary philosophers–David Chalmers and Nick Bostrom, for example–Schwitzgebel is a master of the thought experiment, a technique that he wields in marvelous philosophical short stories (I write a LOT of these myself) that bring to mind Borges, Calvino, and Barthelme. I highly recommend Schwitzgebel’s book Perplexities of Consciousness, published by Bradford Books. A superb selection of his essays and some of his philosophical fiction can be found at
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/on his website at
And he blogs at
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/
A small quibble, Diane: Amherst is likely more selective than Harvard given its smaller size.
Yes, Amherst is highly selective. Billy Townsend is a graduate of Amherst. He didn’t fudge his resume like Rufo.
“Only 6% of freshman at Amherst are legacies (at admission), down from 11% when the preference was still in place.” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 8-30-2023)
The number of wealthy, Ivy League-educated parents who would choose state universities for their kids, after they were turned down based on merit admission would be interesting. I’d speculate that the “elite” colleges with a hand tipping the scale for the privileged could raise their tuition based on demand.
As Billy Townsend says, he was not a legacy and his family wasn’t rich. He went to public school in Florida.
Thanks for linking to the Townsend article. The info about Austin Hurst was interesting, too.