You Have to Read This Letter – Common Sense with Bari Weiss
If you don t know about Brearley, it s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an anti-racism pledge to be considered for admission. (In the course of my reporting for this piece I spoke to a few Brearley parents.)
Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week. Among the lines:
If Brearley s administration was truly concerned about so-called equity, it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was genuinely serious about diversity, it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
I m pasting the whole thing below.
Meantime, I m going to ask Andrew Gutmann to join Paul Rossi and me for our subscriber-only conversation this coming Tuesday night. I hope he ll join. Details about that event will be in Sunday s post.
I promise: this newsletter won t be exclusively about education. But my gosh is it a wild right story to follow right now. . .