Bass shouldn’t have taken USC full ride
When people offer you free stuff that you know you get without paying only because of your powerful position in this life, you don’t have to go to your corporate ethics officer to see that accepting it would be wrong.
You know it in your gut.
And we’re not talking some streaming-service CEO getting a swag bag at the Oscars.
We’re talking a person elected to Congress to serve the people of Los Angeles, and it’s nothing like a service to us to essentially be bribed by a prominent local institution.
Because for our elected officials on the take, the question is: The gift is in exchange for what, precisely?
The free-stuff accepter this time is Rep. Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, who will be stepping down from her House seat to run for mayor of L.A.
The good news, not that it matters all that much, is that the stuff she took is of the admirable, uplifting kind — not mere glitz.
But free stuff not available to the rest of us is still free stuff. And the taking of it is a despicable habit among the political class.
What Bass got was free tuition from USC, which paid entirely for her 2015 master’s degree in social work from the university, to the tune of $95,000. Just an ordinary scholarship? No way. The full ride was not publicized to other students. Scholarships are only available to students who fill out lengthy applications, which Bass did not. Very rarely are they for 100% of tuition, as hers was. In fact the social work dean, the same one involved in the Mark Ridley-Thomas case, made the offer to Bass herself.
USC is the largest employer in Bass’s congressional district. Its wants and needs are complicated and often government-related. Who wouldn’t see a conflict of interest there?
Bass says the House Committee on Ethics OK’d the scholarship because its members believed it would help her do her job. That’s probably true. Graduate study in any field helps a person better understand the details of this world.
But Bass didn’t accept the free semesters of study from some random institution. She regularly met with USC brass on their visits to Washington. It’s simply unseemly to have taken such a large gift from an institution in your district with such big needs.