The question you claim to be answering remains elusive to me. You kindly responded last week to my request to clarify the "point" the rest of us keep infuriating you by missing. So far as I can tell, it boils down to:
1. Hopkins' offers of admission to early recruits were always "conditional."
2. Bobby Benson told you that Matt Rambo was set on coming to Hopkins, but they couldn't "get him in."
Absolutely nobody has disagreed with you on Point 1, and for good reason: it's such a vague and obvious claim as to be virtually meaningless. Of course they were "conditional" acceptances; almost everything in life comes with conditions.
The point 51% has made is that, given that about 80-90% of the publicly known commitments resulted in eventual enrollment, the conditions must have been pretty relaxed. The only other possibility is a very stringent screening on the front end. But what 51%'s saying, and what I've said on this in the past, is that it's hard to see how that would even be possible given the minimal academic record (not even taken the PSAT, etc.) available at the time recruits were committing. I haven't seen you refute, or even acknowledge, this argument in any way, shape, or form.
On Point 2, I think the response you've gotten is basically: "It seems unlikely, given the publicly known and privately circulated facts about Rambo's recruitment, that that's exactly what happened. Maybe it was. Still, even if things did go down that way, it's hard to see it, in light of the Hopkins administration's general acquiescence in early recruiting, as indicating a changed approach that's responsible for the program's struggles."
I gather this response is enraging to you. But I have literally no idea what your actual objection to it is.
Honestly, I suspect this gets us closer to the heart of the issue:
Okay, so you're a booster! Maybe a big one. You get put on committees. You have access. You're proud of this. I don't mean to diminish it in any way. I just want to try to put in perspective why other people maybe don't treat your position as the trump card you think it should be.Normally i don’t bring personal matters into this kind if steaming pile you have created but just this once. I served on the Board of Blue Jays Unlimited, I was one of the firsf five or so to join Hopkins Hundreds when it begsn amd from the mid 1990s i was in the Athletic Center frequently. I was in the building the day after it was “reported”. I was there.
To somebody who wasn't "in the building the day after it was 'reported,'" what you look like is this. You're the guy who gets to stand four places to the left of Brezhnev when they all come out to watch the tanks parade through Red Square. Congratulations, a huge number of people aspire to that spot. But the thing of it is, that guy is the most lied-to person in the world. He's close enough for his support to matter, so that the people closer in have an incentive to spin him, but not close enough to control anything directly or check up on anybody's story.
So there you are watching the tanks, and the guy three places to Brezhnev's left is in your ear: "I have it on good authority from the Deputy Commissar in Magnitogorsk that they were on track to hit their steel quota, until they were sabotaged by that capitalist running dog lackey Kirilenko standing over there two places to Brezhnev's right."
You know about stuff that's going on! -- sort of. You can draw a very reasonable inference that Magnitogorsk isn't going to hit its steel quota this year. Accepting at face value the explanation you've been given as to why it won't would be idiotic. Your credibility to a third-party observer depends on how much you seem to be engaging in the first mode of thought as opposed to the second.
I'm using this absurd analogy precisely because I don't want to impugn any real person's character, but just to point out the structure of relationships. You (booster) are talking to the person (coach) who has most incentive to lie to you about what was said by the person (recruit) who has most incentive to lie to him. I'm not saying the story you were told is untrue! I'm just trying to explain why people don't automatically defer to it.
Am I being unfair with this analogy? Maybe. Still, it was you who came out with this amazing sentence, in which I search in vain for the slightest trace of irony. Comrade Okanadov couldn't have said it better:
Pull up a chair snd listen instead of trying to feed your inductively reasoned agenda
