"Vanity Fair's Schools for Scandals," edited by Graydon Carter

How could I not read this book? Its topics are a heady combination of education, social class, sexual politics, true crime, gossip, current events, social commentary and, yes, scandal. “Vanity Fair’s Schools for Scandals” (Simon & Schuster, 2017) is subtitled “The Inside Dramas at 16 of America’s Most Elite Campuses – Plus Oxford!” The book is a compilation of articles that have been published in the magazine Vanity Fair over the past 20 years or so, and is edited by Vanity Fair’s editor Graydon Carter. Each piece focuses on a "scandal" at one prestigious college/university or boarding school, including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Duke, and Columbia, and the prep/boarding schools St. Paul’s, Exeter, St. George’s, and Kent. Some scandals involve financial issues, some stories report extreme hazing, and some writers portray administrators and faculty whose outsize personalities and reputations come tumbling down. The most prevalent topic, however, is, sadly, sexual abuse of various sorts, especially in the boarding schools. Because these schools are small, isolated, privileged, and entitled schools, and because the participants share those characteristics, and because sexual abuse by its nature tends to be hidden, these abuses of power sometimes went years, even decades, without being acknowledged or punished. Administrators and Board members obviously wanted to avoid bad publicity, and often turned a blind eye, and/or quietly passed bad actors (often teachers) on to other schools without warning the other schools of the problem; this last had the ugly label but vivid of “passing the trash.” Even when presented with the existence of the abuse, those in charge often stonewalled, refused to believe the victims, or minimized the impact of the abuse (and let’s be clear, abuse ranged from unwanted touching to assault and rape, and sometimes the same abuser would prey on many many victims over many years). At the end of many of the pieces, there are short updates about what happened with court cases, and about where various administrators, teachers, and students are now and what they are doing now. Although I have subscribed to Vanity Fair for many years, and had read almost all of these pieces before (in some cases 10-20 years before), I found that reading them in this collected form was a powerful experience. Vanity Fair’s writers are excellent at capturing the auras and environments of these schools. In many cases, the writers themselves had attended the schools they were describing, or others very like them, so they were able to offer insiders’ perspectives. These writers do good investigative research, and they are persistent in getting the story. They write well, with many telling details. And through their descriptions they capture the essence of affluence and social class privilege that often facilitates these scandals. Postscript: Finishing reading this book just as the news arrived of the movie producer Harvey Weinstein's sexually abusive behavior toward young women actors and others in the movie world was a doubly powerful reminder of the way women are sometimes treated by powerful men in various fields. So no, equality has not yet arrived; and no, we are not living in a postfeminist era. There is still a lot of work to be done.