obviously the fact that you can intentionally astroturf a public scandal against a transgender person and completely ruin her career for the crime of Doing Her Job is the real story here and i by no means want to underplay the severity of that. but i do think it's interesting in the context of the larger debates around academic integrity in the wake of chatgpt cheating scandals that these institutions are openly revealing how little academic integrity actually factors in to how they operate, and who is allowed to succeed within them. It's difficult to make me believe that the thing posing the biggest threat to The Sanctity Of The College Essay is that people might cheat their way out of doing them, when we have just witnessed an instance of someone turning in a barely coherent screed written with a sub-highschool level grasp of the english language and filled with blatant hatespeech and receiving zero academic consequences for doing so. Not only that, but attempting to hold this student to a standard of intellectual honesty you all seem very convinced is innate to higher learning is something that was structurally punished. I think we are all learning a lot these days about how exactly the US higher ed system functions, and what sort of people it is designed to serve, and what sort of purpose it serves for those people. Because it's not for learning.