Felicity Huffman Was Sentenced to 14 Days for the ‘Varsity Blues’ Scandal. Here’s What People Are Saying.
By Chronicle Staff
September 13, 2019
Paul Marotta/Getty Images
Felicity Huffman walks out of a Boston courthouse after being sentenced to 14 days in prison for her role in the college-admissions scandal.
The actor Felicity Huffman was sentenced on Friday to 14 days in prison for her role in the Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal. The former star of Desperate Housewives had pleaded guilty in May to paying someone $15,000 to correct her daughter’s answers on the SAT, and to secure an accommodation so that her daughter had more time to take the test.
“There are no excuses or justifications for my actions. Period,”Huffman said in a statement. She also apologized to her family and to the “students who work hard every day to get into college, and to their parents who make tremendous sacrifices supporting their children.”
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Paul Marotta/Getty Images
Felicity Huffman walks out of a Boston courthouse after being sentenced to 14 days in prison for her role in the college-admissions scandal.
The actor Felicity Huffman was sentenced on Friday to 14 days in prison for her role in the Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal. The former star of Desperate Housewives had pleaded guilty in May to paying someone $15,000 to correct her daughter’s answers on the SAT, and to secure an accommodation so that her daughter had more time to take the test.
“There are no excuses or justifications for my actions. Period,”Huffman said in a statement. She also apologized to her family and to the “students who work hard every day to get into college, and to their parents who make tremendous sacrifices supporting their children.”
Reaction on the internet was swift and varied, with some observers expressing fury about what they saw as a lenient sentence.
Two weeks struck Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, as a light sentence considering the potential harm.
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She tried to steal tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of human capital from other kids... State it that way, and two weeks seems a pretty meager prison sentence. https://t.co/g8C2xn9DGz
Similarly, journalists like Sam Ro, of Yahoo Finance, and Steven Weiss thought that the sentence would amount to little deterrent to others who might try to game the admissions system.
Would the average parent sacrifice 14 days of their life, for their kids to get 4 years of living an ideal choice, plus continuing lifelong benefits?
Others noted the racial dynamics, particularly the white privilege of a wealthy white woman paying a small penalty for her crime, when people of color often fare far worse for less serious crimes.
A man spent 36 years in prison for stealing $50 from a bakery.
In particular, to some observers, the way Huffman was treated stood in stark contrast to the punishment that has been levied on poor parents caught trying to enroll their children in higher-performing public schools. One such critic was Anthony A. Jack, an assistant professor of education at Harvard University, who wrote The Privileged Poor, which examines how elite colleges fail low-income students.
There are parents who did less, who simply used a different address, to put their children in safe schools, to give them a chance at a future who are in prison for much longer. 14 days. She wanted the college of your choice. This is insulting, infuriating, and disheartening. https://t.co/kC6uEU2na5
Other observers thought the sentence was the wrong punishment because it was taking aim at the wrong problem. “There’s not a good argument for Huffman serving any jail time,” Noah Berlatsky, who writes about culture, said in a thread. Instead, he wrote, a fine whose proceeds could be donated toward scholarships might be more fitting because it would spotlight broader flaws in the enrollment of elite students in colleges.
if we care about the wrongs she did, we should address the system that enabled them, which gives huge advantages to the wealthy in obtaining education and markers of elite status. the reason what she did is possible is because the system is unjust in the first place
Eve Ewing, a noted sociologist of education at the University of Chicago, as well as a poet, asked her readers to think bigger about the punishment:
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Give yourself the imaginative space to wonder what justice regarding Felicity Huffman would look like OTHER than a longer prison sentence. Like, what could we demand that would actually undo harm or help somebody? If we stretched our minds?
The rot in college admissions revealed by the scandal has called into question the very notion of meritocracy, as Chase Mitchell, a former writer for The Tonight Show, satirically noted:
Congratulations to Felicity Huffman on making it into an exclusive institution based purely on merit https://t.co/olGbIPkZ5O
