Affirmative Action and Radical Politics
Perhaps if he hadn’t been so quick to push them through, to write what they should have been writing, they would have written their own dissertations. After all, social science is not rocket science. Writing a dissertation in the social sciences is more about perspiration than inspiration.
The real racists are not the professors who quit such committees or voice objections to them, but those who create a normative structure that begins with the assumption that black students can’t do their own work
In this kind of corrupt environment, everyone assumes that even the black student who is writing his own dissertation is somehow getting a leg up from the faculty. Corrupting some of the process destroys the integrity of all of the process.
Once word gets out that black students are having their dissertations written, other students turn in lower quality work. In a confrontation with committee members, one doctoral candidate who was turning in dissertation chapters way below her ability finally said, “Can you guarantee that my degree will be worth more than his (a reference to a student whose dissertation was being heavily edited)?”
Once the standards are lowered for some, they are indirectly lowered for all. Is it fair to ask some to work to the limits of their abilities and others to work to a level that is deemed acceptable for the color of their skin?
Who benefits from this process? Certainly not the black students. The good ones are tarred with the brush of favoritism. The bad ones are set on a course that almost guarantees failure in the profession. The people who benefit are the faculty and administrators who got their boxes checked off, and the people from Washington who got paid to fly out to assess the progress universities were making toward their cultural audits.
Ask yourself this: if you could imagine yourself black for one minute and lived through this process, would it not radicalize you? Would you not seek to embrace a different cultural reality, one that did not define you as incompetent?
The Supreme Court is going to hear, this term, the case of Fisher v. University of Texas. Ms. Fisher, a white student, alleges she was discriminated against in the admissions process because of her race. Previously, the court had ruled that race could be considered as part of the admissions process because diversity contributes positively to the educational experience. If Ms. Fisher wins her lawsuit, affirmative action might be once and for all struck down.
Anyone who has taught a class or just sat in on one knows that racial diversity is not intellectual diversity, and that pushing unqualified minorities through the educational process demeans the educational experience for everyone, especially minorities who do not need special consideration.
Ending affirmative action would be a start toward the implementation of real standards for all students and putting an end to faculty having to compromise their limited integrity and more limited courage. Ending affirmative action would be a positive step toward an environment where minority achievements would be valued as such and not looked upon as something they received because of the color of their skin. But most of all, ending affirmative action would provide a common view of everyone’s achievement and end the need for minorities to create a different cultural reality.
I just got a sneak peek at the galleys of Harry Stein’s new book entitled “No Matter What, They’ll Call This Book Racist” and it is all about this very subject (it will be released some time in mid April). It is a must-read.
If ever there was a political and cultural third rail in this country, it is race. In a weird way, Eric Holder was correct in calling us cowards for not discussing race – just not the way he wanted to. He is both a cause and a symptom of the “victim mentality” that has destroyed at least 3 generations of black Americans and stifled Dr. King’s dream of “content of character, not color of skin.”
Gradually, thanks to such brave individuals as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Herman Cain, Star Parker and others we are having that long overdue conversation about the false narrative of perpetual victimhood and the how and why of its perpetrators. It is the key weapon in the maintenance of liberal/leftist power in politics and across a broad spectrum of American life. If we can destroy that illusion, we will perhaps marginalize the leftists permanently but more importantly save lives that are now, and have been for 50 plus years, utterly wasted.
It is important to know that the hard left did not call for affirmative action or permanent victimization. It was liberal (social democratic) elites who attempted to co-opt the civil rights movement in a way that would quiet urban riots and other forms of disaffection with the status quo. Here are some items from the record that demonstrate my point: http://clarespark.com/2010/07/18/white-elite-enabling-of-black-power/. If you want more on this subject see http://clarespark.com/2011/03/28/index-to-multiculturalism-blogs/.
I was unhappy with Sefton’s comment because he conflated leftists with liberals, then held both responsible for perpetuating victimhood in minorities. First, leftists have criticized race as a concept, and second, it was white liberal foundations and their allies who invented such bandaids as affirmative action or other policies to solve the “American Dilemma.” See for instance http://clarespark.com/2009/10/10/ralph-bunche-and-the-jewish-problem/. This was a summary of my long journal article on Bunche’s class analysis that did not sit well with Gunnar Myrdal or the Carnegie Corporation in the making of famous and still-cited book on “the Negro problem” in America.
This is all pathetic. To quote a play I saw: “You can’t handle the truth.” The “Negro problem in America” is the average Afro-American IQ of 85. Left, Right, or up a tree, that’s the beginning and end of it all. Period. The absolute number of Africans-in-America with the IQ (around 110) to belong in college is so small that no possible scheme can place them properly and produce statistics satisfying the equal-rights agenda. There is no ‘legal’ way around unqualified Africans everywhere. Charles Murray looked truth in the face and retreated into Libertarianism. If there are US medical clinics relocating to Iceland, I’d sign on now.
Jacobite illuminates the obvious Big Lie, the absolute difference in basic intelligence between the races! These Professors as well as the Educrats who condone cheating on NCLB tests in K-12 schools also know this truth.
Wake up and speak the truth, then we will be able to do what is best for all.
No, leftists were very involved in demands for race quotas.
We can blame liberals, but we should not hold the radical left blameless. (Leaving aside for now all the other things they did to destroy academia.)
I was involved in some of the academic senate debates over the form affirmative action was to take in the University of California system back at the beginning of the 1970s. Many of us – but a losing minority – were concerned with precisely the question of lowered standards for the university as a whole and, particularly, with the devaluing of the University’s degrees issued to minority students who had spend four years meeting lower expectations than other students.
Our preferred alternative was to use the junior college system to enable promising minority students to make up any academic deficiencies and to demonstrate that they were ready to compete at UC on a level playing field without any special accommodation or lowered standards.
The opposition to this approach focused not on the university’s standards, but on making sure the affirmative action admits received the full four year UC ‘experience’ – rather than have the ‘stigma’ of being transfers as juniors.
Virtually the entire parade of horribles we envisioned happened: lowered admission standards meaning unprepared students, unprepared students demanding special accommodation in the way of (i) tutoring, (ii) special minority studies programs without serious academic standards, (iii) lenient grading to maintain enrollment, (iv) radicalization along the lines Sowells describes, and (v) the resulting impression in the minds of first other students, and the over time the public, that minority students degree didn’t mean what a typical non-minority student’s degree did.
The combination of affirmative action at the same time grading standards were lowered to protect young men from the draft as opposition to the Vietnam war became almost universal in the faculties has been resulted in the vast grade inflation and lowering of standards which characterizes most modern American universities.
Robert Bork noted that when he was a professor at Yale, he observed activist students who were “angry, intolerant, highly vocal, and case-hardened against logical argument.”
Professor Bork was among those ‘summoned’ to appear before the Black Law Students Union. Half of the faculty who showed up were made to sit in folding chairs, before whom the BLSU leaders stood like “very angry instructors using violently obscene language berated the faculty, who sat and took it…two large students stood at the door, apparently to keep any faculty from leaving. The dean of the university was told that he couldn’t speak, “as long as any black had something to say.”
During that time, “radicals set the tone and the pace, particularly in the more prestigious universities. One lesson we learned is that a minority of fanatical disposition can effectively control an institution.”
No worries; they’ve moved on to Washington, and we have now achieved the hope and change they envisioned.
The “Hope and Change” he promised was to bankrupt the US Treasury and he is well on his way to success.
The OMB numbers that he is using hide the real impact of his spend, spend, and spend more approach to gov’t, will eventually give way to reality, but by then it will be too late for America to survive as a country or a concept!!!
Sounds like what the old Maoist Red Guards would do to their victims during the 1960s Cultural Revolution.
Mike Gallagher in Seoul
This is a very powerfully thought out commentary and more importantly very true. Unfortunately in our age, truth, evidence, and reason count for nothing. In fact, according to the guidelines of Critical Race Theory, your entire intellectual exercise is but more evidence of racism.
So very accurate. It is as if we are being asked(ordered really) to participate in a mass delusion. A sinister component of ths grand delusional scheme is that with time, even segments of the culture who know it is a “lie”, forget or choose to accept the fallacy. The very concept of “racism” is turned on its head. Now your branded as racist when you choose NOT to recognize skin color as the determinant of an individual’s intellectual, acedemic or professional merit.
“Barack Obama’s admission to Columbia University remains a mystery. He became the president of the Harvard Law Review without ever having written an article for it. Obama knew that he was where he was because of his race.”
That’s all I heard in 2008 about Barack Obama, about how “brilliant” he was. After all, if you are the president of the Harvard Law Review that automatically qualifies you to be president of the most complicated country on the planet, right? He also never ran anything in his life, not a town, not a city, not a state, not even a business, big or small. Nothing. But he was he gave a good speech so he had to be qualified to be president, right? He was some no-name state Senator and his ever-so brief time in the US Senate produced, well, nothing. But he was qualified to be president, right?
When I think all of the crap this country has been fed by Democrats, their spin doctors, the mainstream media, and all of the far-left organizations, especially the unions, it makes me want to weep. Yet we basically have a black president who’s major accomplishment in life was being black. Not only is that sad, it’s criminal. Criminal because people pushed the notion that somebody as unqualified as this could become president of the United States. And a majority of Americans, the people who don’t bother to read a newspaper, a blog, or much of anything for that matter, bought it. But now you have a record to judge this man on in 2012. Not so good, is it. Maybe next time the American public won’t be taken in by all the spin, all the hype, and all of the advertising one party dumps on us. If the American public understands that lesson, maybe the whole horrible experience of Obama will be worth it.
Before becoming President, Obama did have one and on only executive position; the directorship of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a gig for which he was hand-selected by unrepentant silver spoon revolutionary bum and lefty icon, Prof. Wm. Ayers (aka, “just a a guy from the neighborhood”), who was the senior figure on the search committee. The Annenberg Foundation kicked in about $100M, and other public and private donors about that much more in addition. The terms of the grant required –mirabile dictu– a rigorous and candid post-facto evaluation, which concluded that the money was almost entirely wasted on various predictable neo-Marxist nostrums to no constructive effect on the performance of the Chicago public schools, in terms both of faculty and students. When notorious right wing polemicist and gadfly Dr. Stanley Kurtz managed to get access to the Annenberg Challenge files in the library of the U of IL Chicago (a public institution, not to be confused with the private U., of Chicago), where Ayers had been a Prof of Education since he came in from the cold, escaping felony Federal terrorism prosecution on a legal technicality, somebody –most likely Ayers himself– pulled strings to deny Kurtz access to the filkes. Eventually, after an embarrassing sh*t storm across the center right blogosphere arose, Kurtz got access to the Annenberg files after all (assuming that they hadn’t been scrutinized and sanitized). When he was invited to present his findings on WGN’s high-powered AM radio –and traditionally libera–l talk radio show hosted for decades by ex- U. of Chicago sociology prof Milt Rosenberg, several weeks before the 2008 presidential election, Obama’s national HQ in Chicago organized a “denial of service (DOS) attack”, through their social networking software, to snarl Rosenberg’s call-in lines. It is fair to speculate that the boy genius behind that despicable DOS episode, at a time that the Obamazoids were desperate to delink their candidate from unsavory associations with Ayers and his ilk amongst the clergy –and who apparently got very rich from Facebook’s recent IPO– just last month bought himself the top of the masthead over at the New Republic.
Affirmative Action is just another in a long list of well-intentioned, misguided social experiments that has produced a generation of barely educated young people who soon discover that they are unemployable. That realization stokes the rage that they have been inculcated with, courtesy of the liberal left. Economic success demands at least some ability to express your thoughts coherently, a modicum of basic knowledge, a pleasant demeanor, and a reasonable dress code. Those who spend their college years in various grievance studies and victimology courses have not learned anything that will assist them to become an independent member of society. ‘Special treatment’ might earn you your degree, but it will get you a job. The Civil War ended almost 150 years ago. The modern civil rights movement is past 50 years old; but we are regressing, courtesy of Obama, Holder, Sharpton, Jackson, Farrakhan, Waters, and the rest of the professional race baiters. Pity.
Do you really believe “affirmative action” was well-intentioned? I submit that if it were honestly meant to do good, there would be no reason to use a euphemism for racial discrimination.
I was trying to be generous and not appear to be too strident. I apologize; it won’t happen again.
You do realize that AA was initiated by Executive Order — under the hand of Richard M. Nixon in the Spring of 1969?
He wanted to out do what the Democrats claimed to have done with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
It’s THAT simple.
He did it against all manner of protest.
The left does not have a monopoly on stupidity or cupidity. Bad policy is bad policy.
Nixon also supported price controls and other BS.
Nixon also created the EPA. He was a liberal in many respects, despite the fact that he was vilified by the “liberals” and leftists of his day. (Much the same could be said about George W. Bush.)
The problem is that they ARE employable, because of their race and/or sex. Once they are entrenched, it is virtually impossible to boot them out for their incompetence. Government offices are filled with arrogant, lazy, attitudinally-challenged minorities who know their job is a sinecure (unlikely they know that word, though). Cry “Racist!” and the whole world lays at your feet.
And when these “students” graduate with law degrees, PhD’s in whatever, the only place they can work is for govt. because as a govt. employee, for the most part you don’t have to do anything. There are 120,000 lawyers in the justice Dept., what proportion of them are african-american? Michelle Obama is a classic example; pushed through Harvard Law School but completely unable to function as a lawyer she gets a $350,000/yr sinecure at U of Chicago Medical Center, “diversity officer”.
Be aware there is great pressure to extend this affirmative action into medical schools, so you may get a doctor with an MD degree who has to take his socks off to count to twenty.
The pushing thru of unqualified blacks in medical school has existed since 1974. The reason I know this is that is the year I graduated. The person next to me (a black fellow) alphabetically had failed almost every pre-clinical course during the first 2 years of med school. He then disappeared from the school and we all assumed he had been dropped. On graduation day he showed up. I asked him where he had been and he told me that he had attended clinics in a central African country. He graduated with the rest of his class and went on to his internship in Puerto Rico.
Thank you for the info. I knew that AA has been present in med schools for some time, but Obamacare takes this much further, there is to be a major push to expand med school graduation classes to reflect society at large.
If this doesn’t terrify you, nothing will.
Hopefully the medical boards and residencies will be the last filter through which incompetency is sifted out. There’s no affirmative action there, as far as I know. You pass your boards, or you don’t. But what a waste of time, money and opportunity.
The graduate of West Point with the lowest grade point average is called the “Goat”. The graduate of medical school with the lowest grade point average is called “Doctor”.
…and the empty suit con man from Harvard is called “Mr. President.”
“The person next to me (a black fellow) alphabetically had failed almost every pre-clinical course during the first 2 years of med school…He graduated with the rest of his class and went on to his internship in Puerto Rico.”
I hope he didn’t kill too many patients.
Remember the Bakke decision, that permitted racial quotas in med school?
“Bakke was admitted to the medical school and graduated in 1982. Patrick Chavis, one of the black students originally admitted through the university’s affirmative action program, in Bakke’s place, had his medical license revoked in 1998 by the Medical Board of California due to his ‘inability to perform the most basic duties required of a physician,’ such as being, ‘grossly negligent in his care of seven liposuction patients–including one who bled to death after he abandoned her bedside’.”
In the mid-90′s I dated a Vanderbilt-educated pediatrician who had just finished his residency. Although he was an upper-midwest, kum-bay-ya liberal, he was willing to admit that there were black students in his Vanderbilt medical class who were completely unqualified for the program. They were shepherded through the program by staff and administrators, and were given degrees. Think about that the next time your child is sick.
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You are a filthy liar and a spammer, and I have no idea why PJM allows these posts to go through.
Hey, it worked for Obama.
Worked for Obama.
The “political science” and “social science” faculties have been the rulers of college campuses since the Sixties, and this is one big reason for the mess described here. Simply put, they are (to borrow a phrase from the TV show “M*A*S*H*”) out to remake the campus in their own weird image, and thereby do likewise to the world. I dealt with this in person, in my college years.
Like most science students, I had to take a certain number of “culturally enriching” courses in college to “round out my experience”. Translation; “We don’t care if it has no application to your major, you WILL take politically correct courses to raise your social consciousness! (And ensure continued employment for the PoliSci faculty.)”
I had no problem doing it. “Social Science” courses are a simple problem for anyone trained in the scientific method;
1. Sit up front, and make sure to ask at least one question in every class session you know the prof can answer, because it came from one of said prof’s papers. (Always give your name when you ask.)
2. Take careful notes; everything the prof says will be on the tests (including his biases).
3. In your term paper, pick a subject near and dear to the prof’s heart. The more they pontificate about a “cause” in class, the more they love it, especially if they savagely attack anyone who questions their interpretation of the need for such a “movement” (PoliSci and SocSci profs are all about “causes” and “movements”).
4. In the references, be careful to use the prof’s favorites; extra credit can often be had for using obscure papers by one or more of the prof’s mentors, and most profs can’t stop talking about same. (Note that this often requires quoting out of context, as many such papers are heavily self-contradicting; then again, the prof probably never noticed this about their godhead, anyway.)
In short, “social justice” style courses are an unavoidable reality in college, and have been for almost half a century. And the best way to deal with it is the method described by Tom Clancy (through Cathy Ryan speaking to Liz Elliot) in “The Sum of All Fears”;
Just pretend you’re a tape recorder, take in everything the prof emotes about, and when you have to respond in class or a paper, just hit “Rewind”, and then “Play”.
cheers
eon
I too have a degree, background in Science.
After a 4 year stint in the early-late 90′s in the military I completed my B S ~ 1 year later.
I applied to a myriad of companies and was called back by most.
Before having an interview at 1 particular potential employer I was told I had to read, watch a ‘Diversity Booklet’ & ‘Diversity Video’ (This information provided by a Black woman. Has anyone, anywhere had to endure these like-minded videos whereas the person providing the agony-like nonsense and/or paperwork been other than a Black female? Just curious.) prior to the interview.
I told the woman (I know I’m paraphrasing because I was not as ‘polished’ in my statement when 23 years old), ‘I’m not watching nor reading anything. I’ve lived, worked and depended on far more intellectually diverse people in places YOU can’t imagine. Whose melanin features NEVER crossed my mind. Furthermore these ridiculous, mindless, P C, empathy-seeking videos, color in the bubble brochures will never grasp nor address’.
She’d fumed out the door. 5 minutes later she came back in and told me I didn’t have to do the aforementioned nonsense.
Later I was offered a job from the same company though turned it down for another company and less pay. Why?
My colleagues/ bosses were Filipino, Black, Indian etc., and they’d found the ‘Diversity’ memes to be demeaning and in place for all the wrong reasons.
I’ve found through the years the companies who incorporate the AA/EEO standards are more times than not – spineless Anglo bosses who give in to such idiocy to, ‘Go along to get along’ response. Shame. For they too prove their intellectually void persona with such response.
I got through university in the days when it was still an unwritten law, a badge of integrity, that professors keep their personal views out of the mix of their teaching.
I never knew what my political science professors believed personally. It never occurred to me to try to appeal to their own prejudices or positions. (I did almost come to blows once with a teaching assistant over his political positions, sort of a Ward Churchill type guy, but only once did that happen.)
About 10 years ago, I was shocked (literally) to read remarks of a college professor who seemed to have no reservations, no shame, in saying that it was his duty to instill his personal (enlightened) worldview into the craniums of his captive audience.
Podium as personal pulpit.
I still haven’t recovered.
I first encountered the “classroom as bully pulpit” phenomenon in high school. My junior year civics and economic teacher started the year by stating that his intention was to make us all liberal Democrats. Among his brilliant strokes of genius were;
1. Claiming that “Communism is the best thing that ever happened to the people of China.” (My response? “Yes, obviously, since they traded a bunch of hereditary leaders with no actual qualifications, megalomania and lousy fashion sense for another bunch of hereditary leaders with even fewer qualifications, psychopathy piled on top of megalomania, and even worse fashion sense.”)
2. Taking down the American flag in the classroom and replacing it with the North Vietnamese flag. And prating about the “final liberation of the oppressed peoples of Southeast Asia.”
3. Calling for President Ford’s impeachment for pardoning Nixon.
4. Calling for the death penalty for all gun owners, while demanding it be abolished for murder.
And even more entertaining fluff.
And this was just in the civics half. In Econ, he went full-on Keynesian/Malthusian on us, “proving” (in his own mind) that socialism was the only successful economic system that was even possible- and oh yes, excoriating any country that gave up on it for doing so. Yes, including Israel, which he also loathed for all the other usual “progressive” reasons.
He would have enjoyed flunking me for constantly poking holes in his arguments, but unfortunately for him I got “A” on all his quizzes, completed every assignment, and got an “A” on the final. (He worked to standardized curriculum tests, which must have grated on him.)
In case you haven’t guessed by (2) and (3), this was in 1974-75.
This sort of thing has been around in the U.S. educational system longer than you might think.
cheers
eon
You survived, undoubtedly as a function of superior intelligence (flattery alert) and an already well honed cynicism.
But we see so many writers on the internet who are still deeply mired in their high school and college indoctrination, apparently with no hope of escape.
I know about susceptibility to brainwashing, not as much from teachers but by the ethos of the times, 1960′s Berzerkley. It took me a couple of decades to fully understand what had happened to me.
I can barely imagine what is happening to children in public schools now.
It’s funny–I also graduated from high school in that era (1975), and though I remember that the teachers you became close to would reveal something of their own political thinking in conversation away from the classroom, they didn’t really take it on themselves to indoctrinate openly from the podium. There was some kind of sense that it was incumbent on them to “present both sides.” Maybe now I’d groan to see, if I could, how the side they didn’t agree with was presented; but at least on the surface, what seemed to be going on was that we were meant to learn stuff and make up our own minds. I’m glad I didn’t have an out-and-out indoctrinator such as you describe. No question, though, that that’s become normal since–certainly for my children’s teachers in middle school and high school for the past dozen years or so. We have sometimes gone so far as to remonstrate; mostly, we just make sure our children hear a different side at home.
No doubt the experiences people have described are all too common, but as a life-long humanities prof at a major university I disagree with some of the interpretations. Each of my syllabi offers any students an automatic A if they can discern my political views on any subject. I haven’t had to pay up yet. And I’d say most faculty share my views—at an institution most here would likely identify as one of the top three radical institutions in the country.
What accounts for the undeniable corruption of our universities if faculty as a whole hope to maintain standards? I’d argue that the answer is most likely to be found in the massive expansion of administration into all aspects of university life—now, more and more, into curriculum and academic standards themselves. And it is into administration that the largely unqualified products of AA go. The pay is much higher, as is the scope for acts of racial and gender inspired vengeance.
Great post eon. I have been absent for quite sometime but am glad to be back and see your comments.
Welcome back!
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There is one underlying factor that creates the foundation on which affirmative action sits; until it is obliterated from the public conscience (the zeitgeist), AA will never go away: The soft bigotry of low expectations.
Their “achievements” are not suspect to me. I am in my 60s, and I have watched AA from the beginning. It has morphed from a program for equal “access” to one of racial preferences. The result has only been to damage the supposed beneficiaries.It has spawned a class of entitled, sub-par performers. It is in direct conflict with the Constitution (what isn’t any more), and it needs to be abolished…immediately.
You should be old enough to remember the ‘bad old days’ before affirmative action, when any minority you did find in an elite university as a student or faculty member, or in the learned professions from other than a traditionally ‘minority’ school, could be safely assumed to be more competent than the average in the school, faculty or profession, or they would not have been accepted in the first place, or succeeded thereafter.
The greatest losers in affirmative action are the really bright minority students who can stand on their own achievements.
Sad but true. I know that there are many truly bright and talented minorities out there. I cannot even begin to imagine how they feel about the current situation.
Very true. I went to a private middle class boarding school where the Federal Program called ABC ( A Better Chance) in the 1960s sent the most talented children who were unlikely to be able to go to college so they could get a rigorous fundamental education and then go on to some of our finast colleges. At that time the intelligence of those ABC students from the inner cities of America was very high as was the capabilities of the equal number of poor white students largely from the rural south. They all stood out for their academic achievements and worked very hard at their studies. They were also right at the point (1969) where numerous colleges and universities realized they could no longer be all white. They were all accepted and attended fine colleges and universities and were fully capable of handling the work load. Unfortunately the Federal Government later discontinued this program and at our 30th reunion one of the minority students who had attended Harvard undergraduate and medical school and was at that time( he has since passed away) a well respected neurologist, said in response to my question about what happened to the A Better Chance Program, They killed it because it worked. So true.
Do you think what has happened to our “education” system is an accident? In the early 60s, I took math courses in high school that you cannot even take now until you are at the junior level in college.Dumb down the curriculum, do away with the courses that teach thinking and logic, and the result is a country that will elect an empty suit like obama as President. The result of this election in 2012 will tell us whether or not the US as we know it has a future.
Yours is such an interesting remark! I am so interested to hear what a mathematician (or scientist) says about the school curriculum today, since the 1960s.
Since I’m a Latin teacher, and graduated from high school in the mid 1970s, I’m well aware of how the humanities curriculum has been dumbed down; I always somehow thought (not having been a good math student myself) that math was a subject where things had even improved–more people take calculus now in high school, etc.
I certainly know that many fewer books are assigned to students to read in English and history courses (sorry, “social studies”) than in the past–and, ironically, a lot of us thought we had a pretty easy ride and undemanding courses, when I was in school–and that foreign language teachers have pretty much given up getting students to read anything in a foreign language. I can see that, every few years, the Latin book and materials I’ve been using at a given level get really hard for the current students. They tend to have trouble reading and understanding information off a chart in the language book; I feel like I’m constantly teaching the same basic points (“No, that ending means it’s a genitive…”).
People forget that the original premise of ‘affirmative action’ was that there was a significant group of minority students who had the sort of top 10% (or so) level of intelligence necessary to succeed in college (as then understood), but who would not have the opportunity to go because (1) they had not been identified and put into college preparatory high school tracks, or had attended high schools so poor that they did not have the preparation needed, and (2) lacked the family financial resources to attend, in any event.
In that context, a program like your ABC, or some of the earliest affirmative action programs that tried to identify talented minorities at younger ages and give them remedial academic help to ready them to succeed at elite colleges, makes a great deal of sense. And, based on historical experience in the ’50s with the expansion of college attendance white ethnics (including especially Jews) using the post-WWII GI Bill, it seemed like a good bet.
The problems, unfortunately, were that as the idea of affirmative action became popular (1) colleges wanted minority students now rather than waiting several years for gifted minority students to be identified and prepared for university, and (2) the pool of really talented minority students turned out to be smaller than anyone thought, there simply weren’t enough to go around among the colleges and universities who wanted them.
This led to admitting unqualified students – deficient in preparation and, often, not the intellectual equals of their non-affirmative-action-admitted peers. And the focus on numbers also led to the increasing number of minority students at the best schools coming from already middle-class (or better) minority families who would not have qualified for programs like your ABC.
And, once the students and administrations realized the kids were in over their heads, we had the anger, demands for ethnic studies, etc., etc. and the deterioration of academic standards followed the lowering of admission standards.
My own B.A. (Economics) came in 1954 from a small, private, all white male college with many classes having only 12-15 students. Yes, I had Latin in my District of Columbia Public High School in the late 1940′s….during the segregation period.
These comments here about all of this so-called “Affirmative Action” thing are really a sickening revelation to me.
Really…..I’d no idea this was going on.
Yesterday’s 12-year high school education is now crammed into 17 or 18 years of high school plus college education. And when it is complete, it’s at once bloated, stale and weak. Flaccid or saggy; pick your gender-correct metaphor.
The demise of the family, the rejection of truth and standards, the selfishness of teachers, and most of all the expulsion of God from education are responsible. Reverse all of these, and it will return to its former size and strength.
The progressives are going to get their wish one day, they will with their heavyhandedness force the counrty into another civil war. Race will be a component of it because of policies liek affirmative action. But it will be patriot against progressive.
Officially, race will be a component of only one side.
Have you ever noticed that AA/EEO never hurts the white progs who support this racist ideological program. Most college/university staffs are white as are most professors. How come there has never been a push for universities to remove half their professors and replace them with blacks? How come the presidents of UMich and Texas have never stepped down from their jobs in support of hiring a black to take their places?
How come nobody has asked the Dems in Congress to fire half their staffs and hire blacks and hispanics to replace them? How many blacks are on the staffs of all the white prog 527s and how come their is no cry about how white they are? How many black CEOs of the Sierra Club has there been? Media Matters? NOW? How many blacks does Buffett have on his staff?
How come Sharpton and JJ never holler about the lack of blacks on the morning and evening broadcast shows? Nightly anchors? WH press corps?
This tells me that AA is just a joke the Dems use to keep blacks on the plantation.
Those are questions that are probably aptly answered by the “follow the money” approach.
I pretty much agree with the comments above. But, note how many rice bowls will be shattered if AA goes away. That means there will be a LOT of lobbying to keep it in place, no matter what. The only way it will disappear is a 9-0 Supreme Count decision.
Absolutely right it’s not going away- it works too well.
It’s a patronage system to identify and pack the bureaucracies with Party loyalists. Nepotism rules municipal and Beltway hiring policy.
Sotomayor was placed on the Supremes to keep such racial pandering alive; Bush’s candidate, Ernesto Garza, was blocked because he wouldn’t (and we can’t give ‘brownie points’ to Bush).
As usual, the Republican just rolled over for Kagan and Sotomayor.
As long as the river of corruption keeps flowing, they’ll just make noise to negotiate their cut.
Consequently, university administrators have numbers to produce because the government wants to see numbers. The reality is that the faculty that push black students through aren’t compassionate at all. They’re part of a bureaucracy that needs a certain statistical outcome. The black student is a means to an end. That end is a check in a box.
A parallel in what happened in Atlanta public schools a few years ago where a highly placed administrator (and possibly others) altered some students’ test scores in order that the district as a whole could look better academically than it was.
That administrator herself was named (something like) Atlanta administrator of the year. Hopefully she was stripped of that award when her machinations came to light.
Administrators and professors enabling of all these academic shenanigans, throughout the educational system, is nothing short of appalling.
Affirmative action (sex, race, whatever artificial “balance” you’re seeking) over the decades has brought all kinds of unqualified individuals into public life & teaching positions who never would have made it on their own merits.
The upshot being that the society as a whole is degraded.
Well, this certainly explains much about Obama’s attitude. He had everything given to him and he has bought into that idea that he is somehow owed everything and that everyone should agree with him. But deep down he knows the truth. Really makes one fear for this country. Thanks so much MSM for failing to background check this guy.
The MSM didn’t vet this guy because they have their share of reporters, many of whom are affirmative action hires, who are as “dumb as soup” – think CNN reporter Soledad O’Brien who lost a debate with an interviewee over “Critical Race Theory”, Ezra “nobody pays attention to the Constitution because it’s so old” Klein, and New York Times plagiarist/fabulists, Jayson Blair and Zachery Kouwe.
As a middle-aged white woman finally returning to college to finish my BA/get MA, I can’t believe the nonsense I’ve been forced to endure. Orig. major was “Human Communications”. I was asked to not only spew garbage, but had my arms severely twisted trying to force me to believe it. I won’t go into all the disgusting details that made me change my major to Cognitive Neuroscience (still in the psych dept., but MUCH more hard science). However, I can speak to some of the minority students in my classes. There were some who sat bored and never cracked a book, or asked/answered a question; yet they passed w/grades almost good as mine. There were some who after the first 3-4 wks. realized how deeply they were in over their heads — I felt sorry for them b/c you could see them becoming more and more anxious. They KNEW they weren’t gonna be able to perform up to standards and graduate. BUT. Some of these students dropped out; others were moved to womens/minorities/gender studies programs (the univ. equiv. of deg. in Basket Weaving, but even less useful).
The absolute worst was an AHUM class called, “The Multiracial Individual”. Yeah, it was an elective, but the *only* thing that fit w/that qtrs. schedule. And I naively thought it might be interesting. I spent 50+ hrs. being told I was inherently bad, evil, wrong and (all together now) RACIST simply b/c I’m white. Talk about discrimination! And since all students have to fill out a “prof. eval.” at end of qtr., he basically TOLD us what to say: that this type of class should become a *requirement* for graduation. Ya know, before I was in this farce of a class, I truly didn’t consider myself as someone who rushed to judgment on others for no better reason than skin color. If anything, this class PUSHED me in that direction! I got sick of trying to defend myself for living, let alone as a good person. In my final paper, I sidled up to attacking prof’s positions, but in such a way that in all honesty he HAD to give me my A. To his credit, he did.
That Orwell dude sure was smart.
I’ve been around so many affirmative action hires and tokens and had to do the job of so many of them that I automatically question the qualification of ANY minority in any professional or high-level job. That said, I’ve worked with some that were very conscientious and capable, but at least on initial meeting, they are all tarred with the same brush. Some are oblivious to the fact that there is an army of people around them doing the job they’re supposed to be doing and just settle in for the perks and pay. Others have a really rotten attitude and a sense of grasping entitlment.
I can appreciate the original notion of taking affirmative action to seek out applicants. I grew up in the intellectual impoverishment of the rural South of the ’50s and know from my own experience that the keys to rising above those circumstances is to, first, know that there actually is some other way of life, and, second, to have someone show you a path to that other way. Justice Thomas and I were born a few months and a few miles apart in roughly equal economic circumstance in rural Georgia. Both of us were born with a God-given right to work for the minimum wage in the nearest chicken processing plant. It didn’t matter that I was white and he black; it mattered that someone showed you a path out of the impoverished rural South. His Catholic schooling, something very uncommon for anyone in The South and extremely rare for Blacks, gave him a path to the Ivy League. I had more fits and starts because I didn’t have a clear path or anyone to show me one, but I did have some notion of a better way to live and a better path than working for the minimum wage and hoping for a $0.50 raise after a year or two. Thomas might have found his way on his own, certainly his family had a very strong work ethic and a strong sense of independence. My own experience is that not having any clear path cost me about ten years of aimlessness, an aimlessness that cut me off from a career in a credentialled profession. I eventually got to the same place, but by the time I was at the top of my career path, at least in terms of professional positions, I was older than I should have been and by virtue of having had to scratch my way up, had made on Helluva lot of enemies.
I spent a few years in the mid-’80s working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They suspended their Indian Preference rules and hired me and another honky dog to go find $58,000,000.00 they’d left laying around in rural Alaska. That was still a good bit of money back then. What I found in rural Alaska villages was the same sort of cluelessness I grew up with; they were in a dark room and had no idea that there were lights or switches to turn them on. Unfortunately, federal Indian programs and state and federal largesse has made it fairly comfortably for them to continue to live in the dark room and the notion of lighting a candle never enters their mind. I had the good fortune to somehow be taught to both curse the darkness and light candles.
I attended law school several years after first venturing out into the private sector. That experience proved an invaluable edge. I didn’t enroll with pie-in-the-sky beliefs about the legal genius and integrity of those who hide in academia; I assumed they were in large part just as lazy, both from a work standpoint and intellectually, as their peerage from other disciplines. But for a minority of the exceptional, here duly noted and thanked, I was right.
I learned quickly that your politics are far more important to success in law school than your performance. You simply find a way to convey your devotion to the cause despite the safeguard of an “anonymous” grading system. In other words, you enter the world of Clintonian legal ethics, but you leave the choice to be corrupt to the professor; it’s how we catch all those Muslim men heading to the subway station with a fake bomb from the FBI. It proved no more difficult with law professors. When your torts professor tells you on day one that he considers himself a “reformed Marxist,” don’t worry about what the fool thinks that means — simply understand that he expects every wrong, no matter how ridiculous, to be compensated on his exam. Never suggest that having $9 birth control pills available a mile down the road at Target should be an impediment to finding Georgetown U. liable for the “wrongful birth” of a poor law student’s baby — it is! When your criminal procedure professor has argued several seminal fourth amendment cases to the Supreme Court, you can bet that the correct answer is all searches and seizures are unreasonable, all fruit of said searches is inadmissible, the police are fascists, etc., etc. It’s easy.
Most students stumble upon these self-evident rules of test taking and pass in the great middle. Those who truly learn, for good or bad, to “think like lawyers,” can take it a step further. They can feed the professor what he/she wants to hear just as their minimally-sentient peers, but they can maximize its benefits — bait the bomber. They can tell the professor exactly who they are — and it doesn’t require back rooms or an overt conspiracy to do so. My preferred “keys” were the famous classroom utterances or speech patterns of my outspoken Statist classmates deftly woven into my answers. My most successful was conning an overtly racist professor (his faculty mates would no doubt refer to him as main-stream Progressive) into simply believing that I was the perfect candidate for a little “affirmative action.” I was so convinced of his racist mindset that I worked a bit of Ebonics (this was years ago) and “street” speech patterns into my answers. Law school grades are centered around a fixed mean; in my day, anything above 79 was in the top half; 90s were rare indeed. He gave me a 98. I publicly thanked him at graduation — after all, that grade helped me become graduation speaker. I would give a years income to see the look on his face when he learned that he had “affirmatively helped” someone who believes in equal opportunity for all.
He and I weren’t the only two in attendance at graduation who understood the relevance of that grade. I was proud to show the world that even a stupid conservative could be awoken. His fraud was exposed to those to whom it mattered most. Not surprisingly, he now has a government job. He probably blames some dumb student from years ago.
I’ve heard, though I don’t know it to be true personally, no longer having any affiliation or interest beyond athletics in my alma mater, that many, many, many who now graduate do so with honors. If it’s not true, I’ve long suspected it is only a matter of time before it becomes so — part of the “everybody gets a trophy” idea of egalitarianism . . . . . . and the easiest way to hide the academic fraud perpetrated by some of my most enlightened and respected professors.
Yes I can see through the crap of affirmative action.. that’s how the president we have now was elected.. the people who voted for him and still support him have in the last couple of decades been inundated with movies and tv shows the usually the only black in the cast as the next einstein.. for example The west wing.. black president, star trek next generation the dude with the stupid glasses.. and many more.. i was in the information technology field when i was working.. we had one black (quota) .. he was encouraged to just take naps and eat and run his personal errands.. one reason was that in meetings he would say some really off the wall stuff in regards to laying out solutions to problems we occasionally had with our network.. even though he had gone to school and had massive training he seemed to not know one thing about networking. it was hilarious at times I can assure you. but also crappy because he was paid as much if not more than we who did all the work..the reason i knew obama was going to get elected was directly caused by the tv nightime soap the west wing.. what a bunch of idiots we have in our country. fantasy time all the time..
In the TV show The West Wing, President Bartlet was a white guy played by an actor of Mexican heritage, Martin Sheen.
All that happens is that you get a ‘work around’ with the place keepers left alone, and the able and willing doing the work. When the drones get promoted, they are frequently wise enough not to interfere.
What will eventually happen is that the mass of workers will become disillusioned with the ideology of guilt and redemption. When that happens there will be no race riots or burning crosses. Rather the corrupt beneficiaries will discover that they get no help from others.
As a note, a friend from Wall Street Clyde M. was a superb equity analyst who happened to be Black: we both knew people in Baltimore. His son Cam went to Harvard, and has done well thereafter.
If you produce, people don’t care if you are green or have supernumerary digits, if you demand special treatment, you are on your own, and not in a good way.
In 1975 I retired from the Air Force in the grade of Colonel. My final assignment was as commander of an engineering group (at that time I already held an MS in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Mathematics). I had about 100 engineers and technicians in my command. About a third of my command (all civil servants) were blacks. They, of course, had obtained their education before the days of AA. They were as good as any other engineers back then. They represented the “top” of their demographic, and had succeeded in getting a quality education.
I particularly remember one young man who had come into the Air Force as an enlisted man. He went through Electronics School before being assigned to this unit. When his enlistment expired, he stayed on as a civil servant. By the time I arrived on the scene he had finished a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering, going to college nights and weekends, and was working on a Masters. I promoted him to a supervisory position when he competed for one.
We were, of course, well in excess of any “quota” for blacks in the unit. It was impossible for higher headquarters to know that, however, since race was not listed in civil service personnel files. I recall one day I was ordered to walk through the building and, by observation, determine the number of blacks we had (shades of South Africa’s race inspectors). Of course I did it, and made my report, but I thought it very demeaning of me and my men. I thought of them as engineers, not as members of this or that ethnic group.
At any rate, AA was already on the march in the 1970s, and it affected the military and the Federal civil service, not just academia.
There are many black people that actually believe that the it is and always has been just racial preferences and dissertation writing perks that they were excluded from….and that they are now being included in the system as it always was. They are clueless to the lowering of standards, or that other people are doing their work. They think they are just rightfully getting high pay and perks for doing the same thing that white people did before blacks were admitted. That they are often recommended for promotion for the purpose of getting them out of an office to be replaced hopefully by someone qualified and industrious, only reinforces this notion that the system was always this way…white people sitting around doing very little and getting well paid for it (on the backs of the oppressed dark skinned folks hard labor).
This reminds me of confiscated white owned Zimbabwe farms, which were given to black political supporters, and now produce nearly nothing. The black farmer sits on the porch like he saw the white farmer do, and wonders why the farm isnt functional (not even profitable).
More’s the pity. All of our long term quality of life in this society is diminished by promotion of people based on skin color and not merit.
He has a bright future in climate science.
Another person who will call Obama what he really is – and afffirmative action occupant of the White House.
If it were not for a complicent press (no vetting) and a complicent Congress (no vetting) and a complicient Party (Democrat) who wanted to push through his nomination dispite the cost in damage to the Constitution, the cause of freedom, and the cost in $.
All in the name of their version of “diversity”
M-A-K-E-C-A-S-H-25-D-O-T
I am currently in an MA program (one that requires research, and is not limited to parroting my professors’ views), and I must say in my 4 years as an undergrad, I never experienced “indoctrination”. Of course, I am fairly intelligent, and can recognize feeble attempts at such fairly easily. Only one Marxist in 4 years of my undergrad years. No Marxists as a grad student (the Mandatum probably has something to do with that). I think all you right wingers are quite humorous with your paranoid histrionics.
And we think you ignorant lefty punks are too stupid to even know you are indoctrinated. Flash punk: Lefty and smart are NOT synonyms.
Well Carl, smart as you are, I don’t think you should extrapolate on the basis of one single experience, your own.
There was a story in the news today of one jr. high teacher who in January enlisted his 8th grade students into a “vet the negatives of each of the republican candidates”, plan being to send the results of their “research” to Obama’s people. No matching vetting exercise of the community-organizer-in-chief.
That teacher oughta be fired. Yesterday.
At the outset of the Obama admin., you had little schoolchildren forced to sing his praises…You remember, “Barack Hussein Obama, mmmmm, mmmm, mmmm…?”
Don’t you ?
My, my- such generalizations from a study with a cohort of exactly one. It’s clear you haven’t taken any meaningful statistics courses or you’d realize how ridiculous your statement was. In the sciences, “research” involves actual mathematics, not just looking up other people’s stuff.
“I think all you right wingers are quite humorous with your paranoid histrionics.”
I attended Ohio State in the mid- 90′s and anyone persuing an undergraduate degree they were required to take of the feminist, black or 3rd world courses as part of the ciruculum. I opted to take “the history of Asian culture.” One of my compatriots took a afro-centric course just to have an angry black male grad student lecture the white students how racist they are. After a few days he spoke up and challenged the lecturer on his issues. He went apoplectic with him screaming and threatening to beat him and then huffed out of the class just to return a few minutes later snearing him “how angry you make me.”
Needless to say he dropped the class. To the credit of a few white students, they simply stood up and walked out.
That is reality. Glad to hear you never had that kind of experience.
Laughter (in this case declaring you opponent to be quite humorous) is a defense mechanism. Declaring himself to be intelligent is beyond belief. Every spoiled suburban kid is told by their yuppie parents that they are intelligent.
Rarely to lefties disagree without accusing us of being hateful, stupid, humorous,uneducated, extreme,… In order to peretuate the lie, the resort to name calling. The drive-by anonynous insult on the internet is their specialty.
My brother played college basketball and was forced to attend “Race in Sports in Society” lectures by perpetually angry Black Studies Professors. He told me that his black teammates seemed embarrassed by the whole thing and would never bring it up after the lecture. Black Solidarity prevented them from bunking another brother’s scam, but he could sense the turmoil they felt inside.
Anybody that does not acknowledge college to be left wing is in denial or just trying to be provacative. It is no tjust true here, but around the world. I just got back from Peru and visited a Univsersity campus. There was Che, Fidel, Patrice Lumumba graffiti everywhere. There was even a riot where the PD let loose with tear gas.
Obama has recently made a mantra of “everyone has a fair chance, everyone does his fair share, everyone plays by the same rules.” I take this to mean he plans to abolish Affirmative Action. Right?
No, he plans to double down on AA type initiatives (see, for example, unashamed bias in his justice dep’t) in the name of that vision to which his ideology and positioning force him to pay lip service…”leveling the plaing field” aka fundamental transformation…
But you knew that.
Exactly. What he means by “everyone has a fair chance, everyone does his fair share, everyone plays by the same rules,” is “everyone gets the same chance – adjusted for equal outcomes, everyone gets his fair share according to what I say because I am fair after all, and everyone plays by the same rules which are my rules, and which promote equal outcomes.” Liberals think they are strong because language is weak. Language is weak because it often does not communicate what it really means. But weak language doesn’t make for strong ideas even when ignorant people are persuaded by it.
“The real racists are … those who create a normative structure that begins with the assumption that black students can’t do their own work.”
Bravo!
As far as I can tell no one here has yet provided a link to the video at the end of this blog post, and I think it’s very relevant. No one this nuts would be in the classroom of any self-respecting university if it weren’t for affirmative action.
http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/22/how-not-to-get-an-a/
Miller’s comments strike a chord. Had this dissertation been written in the social sciences or the humanities it would have been business as usual in higher education. Higher level administrators know they can meet affirmative action quotas in these disciplines because qualitative standards cand be fudged more easily than quantitative. Political science, sociology, psychology, English literature, to name a few, have become dumping grounds for students who cannot meet the rigor of the social sciences.
However, there were signs that affirmative action was invading the sciences. Ten years ago, a colleague in who taught micro biology at Ohio State’s medical school complained that affirmative action students were given multiple tries at passing all exam until the students passed. Feminists, concerned about the low number of engineers organized to ensure that engineering colleges graduated more women.
As a direct hire authority for the U. S. Navy and manager of an Engineering group I came to dread the black interviewee. The really good black candidates were taken by the private sector. I saw a number of black interviewees that were so obviously incompetent in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and computer programing that they were not employable even as entry level engineers. Being government I had to take at least one black candidate every year, my quota. I knew I would have to train them or get rid of them. Again, it was government. It is nearly impossible to get rid of incompetence. Those willing to learn, I taught. Those who did not take ownership of their incompetence, I gave only the simplest routine “fill in the forms” tasks, and they failed miserably. And every quarter they got well deserved, well documented, unsatisfactory performance ratings. My efforts at documenting incompetence were rewarded every time by an EEOC complaint. I took early retirement and a job in the private sector at twice the pay. Most of my employees were good workers and highly competent. The overwhelming majority of the vacancies I had to fill came about because an employee was promoted.
I too attended a prestigious graduate school seeking a Ph.D. in math. I had difficulty writing a dissertation, but nobody wrote one for me. So, I eventually dropped out. My failure to complete the Ph.D. turned out to be a stroke of good fortune. After leaving school, I became an actuary, where I enjoyed a fine career — a career that suited me better than professor of mathematices would have done.
“Cowards” are we, Mr. Holder?
You know, if I had the ability to go back to 1861 I would tell the members of my family who served in Mr.Lincoln’s Army (when they could barely speak English) not to bother. I would tell them to just to stay in their small Pennsylvania town and cling to their guns and religion. Don’t go tramping off to Gettysburg and get shot and killed on behalf of a bunch of ungrateful people who are going to take that gift and throw it away. America is the only country that ever did anything like that. It is also the only country that ever completely overhauled its society and reframed its laws to ensure that a minority succeeded. And they have never said thank you and they have never abandoned their hatred and mistrust of people who never did anything but helped them. Are there still white people who whisper the n-word to each other and giggle? You bet. Do they exist anywhere other than the margins of society where they have no power or influence? No. So quit letting that idea self-victimize you. Change your names from Rasheed and Placenta to Ray and Patricia, get off your duff, make something of yourself, be real men and women and stay home with your families, or don’t make a family until you can afford one, take your crazy uncles Jesse and Al and display them in stocks in the town square and welcome back to the best country God ever gave man.
Dear Mr. Miller, I enjoyed your piece but wish you had expounded on what you mean when you say Obama “too embraced a cultural explanation of a different reality and a political radicalization that affirmed that reality,” and “the need for minorities to create a different cultural reality.” Is this reality a figment? Do you mean a different take on reality, or an attempt to refashion reality to fit a different narrative? I’d still enjoy reading your amplification on this point.
Mr H’s story reminds me of an elderly acquaintance and engineering PhD who spent decades shifting back and forth between academe and industry. At his first military-industrial engineering post, he encountered the phrase, “good enough for government work,” which never left him: He had experienced engineering work without government involvement in the private sector, where “good enough” wasn’t; only when government became involved did standards begin sliding, with ever fewer repercussions.
Back in 1965 I took an Intro to Anthropology course from a guy who was an expert on African revolutionary movements and a professed communist, but at least he was upfront about his politics. One day when he was extolling the virtues of a communist system, I raised my hand and asked the following question: “If you were a Martian who could look down on our planet, and you saw people trying to escape communist countries for capitalist ones, and never the other way around, which would you conclude was the better system?” His answer, verbatim, was: “You sound like the US Information Agency.”
All that said, it was still a substantively interesting course, and also a chance to see how people like that think, and I’m glad I took it. My own experience as a college professor (22 years of it) taught me that I was pretty typical — that students in general are not as easily influenced by their instructors as we instructors like to imagine. Getting students to respond a certain way on tests is one thing, but actually changing their ideas is quite another. That goes for changing lefties into conservatives, too. A colleague once summed it up as “They’re gorillas when the come in, and they’re gorillas when they go out.” With respect to basic political orientation, that’s more true than false.
Everything said here is true. But of course the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action are white women. Why are they eligible for it again? I assume to create a large constituency which supports it.
Slightly over 40 years ago, I was held to a higher standard than my classmates on a calculus exam. My answer was graded as completely wrong, but I found numerous classmates with exactly the same answer who were given full credit. When I questioned the teaching assistant who had graded the exams, he promptly produced a counter example to my answer. I was so stunned that I was barely able to ask why that answer had been counted correct for numerous other students. His response was “From you, we expect better.”. I still expect better from myself, but I would not like to consider what the effect of “From you, we don’t expect very much.”.
Affirmative action is ipso facto unfair.
Students’ progress/scores should depend on their merits as individuals, not their skin colour or sex. Meanwhile, up in poor old Canada, it now seems that thugs’ prison sentences will also depend on similarly extraneous factors.
http://rossrightangle.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/supreme-courts-racist-hogwash-excuses-red-indian-criminals/
Anglo-Saxondom is going nuts!
This has been my experience exact. As a professor at an undergrad institution I never flunked a black student without running it by the dept. chair. And I made the students SIGN-IN every single day so I could back up my allegations of students lack of committement to the class. I felt more like a corrections officer than a professor.
As a doctoral student I took a course with a black professor who was so completely out of her depth that the following term she was taking a research methods course in another department along with her own students! One black doctoral student (nice enough person) was so unqualified to be there she was found more than once looking for a professor’s office on the wrong floor (could she read? reason? I don’t know). There were also a few white students who didn’t belong there including one who had ‘donated’ heavily to her alma mater (where she now teaches) – this particular student had FLUNKED OUT of the doctoral program a few years before.
Colleges & universities must get the government off their backs because as it stands it is ALL about numbers, and the prestige of X. Too many ‘students’ at all levels are there for the social life or the perceived benefits and are either not interested or not capable of doing the work. The race thing is especially bad, but it shows up in all sorts of ways and is anything but fair.
Another reason compelling the continuance of affirmative action is that of the great number of black students coming from inner-city schools. Despite the huge sums of money spent there, the schools are a complete failure and show no sign of ever succeeding. Students graduating from these schools perform as poorly today as they did decades ago. Without AA to cover it up, the spotlight would wind up stopping on the origin of the problem, inner-city schools, then the real fireworks would begin.
A few years ago in talking to my mother (age 83) that in high school she learned the same things tha I learned in college. And I went to a ‘good’ private high school and college, whereas she had attended a public high school.
Makes you wonder doesn’t it.
A little late here (and apologies if I missed that someone has done this already), but the link in the article ought to be to Sowell’s column of the 14th, not the 13th.
http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell/racial-quota-fallout.html
One suspects that in many cases the supporters of affirmative action really don’t give a rat’s ass about the people they claim to want to help, it’s really about them feeling self-righteous in themselves. Whether the object of their largesse is helped or hurt is beside the point, which is why arguments along those lines get no traction.
You guys are all so young! I remember “affirmative action” from executive orders issued under JFK and LBJ in the early 60s. It was considered important then to distinguish AA from a “quota,” which all agreed would be a Bad Thing.
Looking it up on this here newfangled Wikipedia, I see I’m right. Heck, by 1968 they’d already added gender to the list.
Did you mean to cite Sowell’s March 14 column instead of his March 13 column? Here’s a link to what I think you intended:
http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell/racial-quota-fallout.html
Not only do we all have to suffer, by having unquaified minorities with degrees doing work they are unqualified for, and not able to be fired for fear of discrimination suits. But even worse, the black students that really do know their stuff, and graduated because they actually deserved to, will always be under a cloud, because everybody they deal with will rightly have to wonder whether they are an incompetant affirmative graduate. I knew one in college, a black guy that I knew was pretty smart, because he was a vey good chess player, and also he was in the same major as me, and I interacted with him enough to know that he really knew his stuff. But because of affirmative action BS, everyone he deals with is liable to assume he is incompetant, until he proves otherwise. The race grievance artists will call those attitudes racist, even though it is their race conscious policies that perpetuate those attitudes, not because they we are racist, but because. given the very real problems with unqualified black graduates, those attitudes are actually based on fact.
Yes, I was shocked too when I heard about the mathematics dissertation, but should not have been. Way back in the 80′s when I was a grad student, a classmate was a member of a protected class. We were all attempting to earn Ph.D. degrees in an experimental, physical science. This one student could have done the work but apparently didn’t want to. This student’s experiment was actually performed by the student’s mentor and another graduate student. The priveleged student analyzed the data and wrote the dissertation, but that would never have been accepted anywhere from a white or Asian male. The unlucky graduate student who did the work and got no credit transferred to another group afterwards.