Parallel Admissions

“In scores of instances, the influence of prominent individuals – and the University’s refusal or inability to resist that influence — operated to override the decisions of admissions professionals and resulted in the enrollment of students who did not meet the University’s admissions standards — some by a considerable margin,” the commission wrote in its report. It determined that 33 substandard undergraduate students were admitted in 2008 and called for the resignation of all trustees, who, with two exceptions, complied.

In his resignation letter Shah wrote: “When I became a Trustee at University of Illinois in 2003, many of the stakeholders in the University of Illinois system — trustees, university administrators and staff, legislators and others — operated under a set of rules and norms that seemed appropriate at the time. Today, I recognize that those rules are changing with the times and I think that change is a very good thing.”

Shah is accused of arranging work at the school for his future son-in-law and of pressuring the university to admit an unqualified student to the business school. In a scathing report, the commission wrote: “Perhaps as much as any other single ‘special’ admission, the admission of this MBA applicant demonstrates how the confluence of various factors that should be utterly irrelevant to the consideration of an application can, if allowed to, yield an indefensible outcome. Shah can fairly be criticized for encroaching on the province of the professional MBA admission staff … and also for creating a sense of urgency that … contributed to what can fairly be characterized as a snap, and erroneous, judgment.”

In a March 2008 email, pleaded on behalf of one student: “Do you think we can help [redacted] . . . I am to visit his family next week in India. May be [sic] he can be on probation during first year.”