June Bonus Review: Vanity Fair's Schools For Scandal
Crimes and misdemeanors (and a trebuchet) among the 1%
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
There isn’t always an actionable offense in the articles collected in Vanity Fair’s Schools For Scandal: The Inside Dramas at 16 of America’s Most Elite Campuses plus Oxford (though having just typed out the full title suggests to me that there is at least a fine in said title’s length). Sometimes the subject is merely a scandal, or a figurative crime against parity (or taste), versus a wrongful prosecution or the decades-long sheltering of a sexual predator. The common thread, per the book jacket, is “an American obsession with status and…the lengths we will go to achieve it, preserve it, or destroy it — from…the false accusations in the Duke lacrosse team’s infamous rape case to the (mis)reportage of a sexual assault at the University of Virginia…to the Keystone Kop theft of a college’s rare books,” and topics range from Skull and Bones to Trump University.
The story
VF’s SfS is a fantastic bathroom book. Understand that this is not faint praise, or at least that it’s sincerely intended as practical counsel on what kind of reading you can expect (my other work wife Tara Ariano and I pitched the Television Without Pity book as “for the back of the toilet tank,” and it worked). Schools for Scandal is probably the most successful Vanity Fair-based book I’ve read — and I’ve read too many — probably because it contents itself with collecting the original articles, instead of incorrectly guessing that a given longread needs to become an even-longerread. And because it’s a dozen and a half manageable-length pieces, it’s perfect for a seated trip to the john…and if you run into a scandal that’s dull or tiresomely written, or one you read already when it first came out, you can just skip it. I myself flipped past the Transy art heist piece, since I’d just read it for TBP 139; maybe for you it’s the straight-faced description of Skull & Bones membership argot on page 13 that will send you gagging to the next chapter.
A number of the mag’s usual suspects turn up in the pages of SfS, including Todd S. Purdum, Evgenia Peretz, Buzz Bissinger, and Alex Shoumatoff, which is another strength of anthologized VF: if you particularly favor any of the magazine’s regulars, you can start with their work, and if you particularly don’t, you can skip their entries. Bissinger is a lot sometimes, but his work on the Duke-lacrosse case is solid, and I’d also recommend Sarah Ellison’s deep dive into the U.Va/Rolling Stone story; Clara Bingham’s “Code Of Dishonor,” on the culture of abuse at the US Air Force Academy (no relation to the Lt. Gen. Bunting quoted therein); and John Sedgwick’s look at Columbia’s St. Anthony Hall (“exclusivity concealed a certain suppurating shabbiness” is both wildly overwritten and right on, as it were, the money). Only one article, on Stanford Business School malfeasance, refused to grab me, but…you know. 2020. That’s probably on me, not the article.
And…you know. 2020. Schools for Scandal probably isn’t priority reading period, and if you’re 1) utterly fed up with the bias baked into the bricks of elite institutions, and will find tales of those institutions confronting their own bullshit (or worse) infuriating, versus cathartic; or 2) all set vis-a-vis understanding the ubiquity of sexual predators in environments of higher learning, I completely get that, and this is not the book for you, or not the time for you to read it. I myself felt my stomach drop when I turned to a piece on the Kent School and for a split second thought it was about my school, which has a similar name — and, back in the aughts, had two different teachers caught victimizing the students. Bryan Burrough used to live in my town, and we probably got lucky he never decided to pitch a piece dragging the joint. Anyway: Burrough’s not in Schools for Scandal, but it’s well written and low-commitment, and while I wouldn’t necessarily pay full price for it, it’s five to ten bucks well spent at the beach-town used bookstore. Just leave it on the tank at the rental. — SDB
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