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  • Anand: A Biblical Flood, a Girl’s Death, and a Great-Grandfather’s Legacy

    Anand: A Biblical Flood, a Girl’s Death, and a Great-Grandfather’s Legacy


    Anand Giridharadas is a remarkable thinker and writer. In this post, he ties together the legacy of a very wealthy man who funded the fight against climate change and the terrible fate of his great-granddaughter Janie, who died in the flood in the Hill Cihntry of Texas.

    He wrote:

    In April 2013, Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas, made a statement that transcended the traditional obscurity of House Subcommittee on Energy and Power proceedings to trigger national headlines. “Republican Congressman Cites Biblical Great Flood To Say Climate Change Isn’t Man-Made,” declared BuzzFeed.

    In a hearing about the Keystone pipline, Representative Barton, whom The New Yorker once described as one of “Washington’s most vociferous — and, arguably, most dangerous — climate change deniers,” played the denier’s game of delinking human activity from weather events: “I would point out that if you’re a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change and that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”

    Three months later, Barton received a campaign contribution from William Herbert Hunt, an oil baron in Dallas. It was neither the beginning nor the end of their alliance. According to the Open Secrets database, Hunt had already donated to Barton about ten times since 2005. And Hunt would go on to donate to Barton another half dozen times, as well as to the Texas Freedom Fund, a political action committee linked to Barton. Though most of Hunt’s donations were to Barton, he also donated to other climate deniers and foes of environmental protection, such as Christi Craddick, David McKinley, Dan Sullivan, and Dan Patrick, who once said former President Barack Obama “thinks he can change the weather…because he thinks he’s God.”

    I have not been able to get the Hunt family out of my heart after I learned from The New York Times over the weekend that one of William Herbert Hunt’s great-grandchildren, Janie Hunt, all of 9, was among the dozens tragically killed in those Texas floods that were biblical in proportion, if not in explanation. Remarkably, Janie was one of seven cousins who attended the camp, and the only one to die.

    Now, I know how the internet works. I know people pounce on news items like this to make heartless, cruel comments. The object of this essay is very different from that.

    I am a father, and I know what I’d do to protect my children’s lives. The answer is anything. I hope I live one day to become a great-grandfather. William Herbert Hunt, according to this Dallas Morning News obituary, passed in April 2024, at 95, a life long enough that he got to enjoy more than 72 years of married life, see his children and grandchildren grow and thrive, and even get to see 35 great-grandchildren of his line.

    I have to imagine that Hunt, like me, would have done anything, absolutely anything, for his family. I even have to imagine that, if, by impossible magic, you could go back in time and a little birdie could whisper that one day a catastrophic flood, made more probable by climate change, made worse by fossil fuels, would claim one of his great-grandchildren at summer camp, Hunt might have reconsidered fundamental things.

    I have to believe that, because I refuse to believe that being an oilman makes you any less human. When the equation is made that simple, anyone would do the right thing. Anyone would do what it takes to save their own flesh and blood. But when it becomes more abstracted — when one’s activities indirectly cause X, which indirectly causes Y, which sometimes makes Z happen more often than usual — the mind loses its clarity. When no individual happening can be definitively linked to climate change, the deniability, the not-knowing, grows easier still. Suddenly a human being can go from doing anything to save their kin to doing nothing to save everyone’s. A person who, I have to imagine, would have given his own life for his great-granddaughter’s donates to those who have fought for a world that makes deaths like hers more likely.

    Source: OpenSecrets.org

    I am not writing to accuse one man. On the contrary, this story of a great-grandfather and his great-granddaughter is a story of a whole country and its descendants. As always, some will say the death of children should not be politicized. I hear that. But, also, what is politics for if it’s not a debate about stopping the death of children?

    I have sat with this story since I read the Times paragraph above. It has given me a pit in my stomach. I guess what one does with that is write. There is no glib I-told-you-so here. This is about what kind of great-grandparent all of us want to be, collectively. Do we want to put our heads down, do our work, justify it however we can justify it, donate to people who defend our interests, ignore the gathering evidence that we are on a path that will kill many of us and, at some point, take down the livable world?

    Or do we want to be the kind of great-grandparent who right now is acting to save great-grandchildren who aren’t even born yet, but who one day, beside some river, surrounded by inner tubes and kayaks and Crocs and flip-flops and cabins and bunk beds and singalongs and brightly colored blankets — the kind of elder who defends those lives and their right to glorious summers even before we know their names?

    What does it take to be that kind of great-grandparent now? It takes fighting back against the war on science that makes it harder for climate scientists and weather forecasters to do their jobs. It takes pushing back against extractive industries and their political protectors who would sell our future for a song, and who have made it unsafe for young girls to enjoy a Christian camp. It takes a campaign of media and organizing to educate people about the fact that a cabal of wealthy, well-connected corporate overlords is profiting at the expense of a future of carefree summers.

    I am still sitting with the pit in my stomach. My heart goes out to the Hunt family, to those six surviving cousins who must be feeling so many awful things that children should never have to. They are feeling things many others have already had to feel, and that more and more of us are going to be feeling if we continue down this road.

    On Instagram, an adult cousin of Janie, Tavia Hunt, who is the wife of Clark Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs football team, shared the family’s pain and raised the old Jobian question of how to sustain faith in the wake of such inexplicable tragedy.

    I am not a religious person, but my heart goes out to her, too. And, whether or not you believe in the god she cites above, it is also, of course, people who let things happen in this world we live in. It is also we who allow things to happen to us. And part of me wonders if, even hopes that, there might be an awakening from a story that connects cause to effect, upstream to downstream, more clearly than usual in a crisis that has long suffered from nebulousness. Perhaps this family, out of this horror, can help rouse the rest of us to become the great-grandparents our descendants deserve.



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  • California Legislature asked again to ban legacy admissions in all of higher education

    California Legislature asked again to ban legacy admissions in all of higher education


    Assemblymember Phil Ting introduced a bill Wednesday to ban legacy admissions in California’s private colleges and universities.

    A California assemblymember wants the state to join others in forcing private universities to stop legacy admissions.

    The bill would prohibit the state’s private colleges and universities from receiving state funding through the Cal Grant program if they give preferential treatment to applicants with donor or alumni connections. 

    The bill makes California one of a handful of states considering curbing legacy admissions at both public and private colleges. Nationally, Sens. Todd Young, R-Ind., and Tim Kaine, D-Va., have also introduced legislation to ban public and private colleges from considering legacy connections in admissions decisions. 

    “Unfortunately, we saw last year that the Supreme Court disallowed the consideration of race in college admissions, but what they didn’t do was disallow the knowledge of income or class in college admissions,” said Assemblymember Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, who authored the bill, Assembly Bill 1780. “For the “1% of Americans, they have complete access, they have a back door, they have a side door, they have an express lane into our most elite institutions.” 

    Ting cited a study by Harvard University economists that found that children from families earning more than $611,000 a year are more than twice as likely to receive admission to a university when compared with low- and middle-income families with comparable standardized test scores. 

    Although the vast majority of private institutions in California say they don’t use donor or alumni connections to admit students, and none of the public institutions use legacy status for admission, six universities do, based on their admissions reports to the Legislature. 

    Stanford, the University of Southern California and Santa Clara University, in particular, all admitted more than 13% of their students based on connections to alumni and donors, based on their fall 2022 enrollment. 

    “This is a fairly limited practice within our sector,” said Kristen Soares, president of the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities. “We have indicated to Assemblymember Ting’s office and others that we welcome the conversation and look forward to reviewing the details of the proposal once it is in print.” 

    Officials from Stanford and USC did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication. 

    Fall 2022 Enrollment Data

    Sophie Callott, a senior at Stanford University, said her parents met as law students at the university, and so she’s a legacy student. Despite that, she’s in favor of ending the practice. 

    “I do not want my achievements to be overshadowed or questioned by the possibility that I only got into Stanford because my parents went there,” she said, during a news conference hosted by Ting on Wednesday about the bill. “People who go to schools like Stanford have an unparalleled advantage in the job market that allows them to disproportionately occupy high-paying leadership positions. If their children are further given a leg up in the admissions process, then this cycle of wealth and privileges continues.” 

    What is not known about legacy admissions?

    The move to ban legacy admissions has taken off following the conservative-majority decision by the Supreme Court to effectively end race-conscious admission programs at colleges and universities. California law has banned the use of affirmative action in public institutions since 1996, and a recent effort to reverse that decision failed in 2020. The state’s private institutions did not have to follow California’s affirmative action ban, but in order to accept federal dollars, they did have to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision. 

    Alyssa Murray, a Stanford student and co-president of the Stanford Black Student Union, said during the news conference that legacy admissions is a form of racial preference and economic discrimination, and ending it would be one step toward creating true equity in higher education. 

    “For nearly a century, California private schools have predominantly admitted white students, creating an insurmountable racial imbalance,” she said. “That means legacy admissions will always favor white and wealthy applicants at the expense of low-income students of color who often do not have alumni relations.” 

    Ting attempted a similar bill in 2019 following Operation Varsity Blues, the national college admissions scandal that exposed a scheme through which the children of rich parents were able to get into top-tier schools using fake athletic credentials and bogus entrance exam scores. That bill ultimately failed and was opposed by the state’s private colleges because the system of legacy admissions was unrelated to the scandal and there were concerns that disallowing private schools that use legacy admissions from participating in the Cal Grant program would only hurt low-income students also attending those institutions. 

    Ting said the 2019 bill failed because Varsity Blues was too anecdotal and there wasn’t enough hard data, but now the numbers show where legacy admissions are prevalent. That data is now available because of a separate 2019 bill, AB 697, that Ting authored in the aftermath of the scandal, forcing private universities to send admissions and enrollment reports to the Legislature.

    A June report by the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities, which did not include data from Stanford or USC, found that only five of 70 private institutions allowed legacy admissions — Santa Clara, Pepperdine, Vanguard, Claremont McKenna and Harvey Mudd.

    “It is a fact that legacy admissions perpetuates a cycle of privilege that fortifies inequity in higher education,” said Murray, co-president of the Stanford Black Student Union. “Legacy admissions perpetuates the racism of decades past when colleges and universities were closed to Latinx, Black, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, American Indian and Alaska Native people.”





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