Can you support any of this with actual evidence? Or are you just sharing your opinion?
If he was going to support it, he would have.
Why the scare quotes? Institutional racism is a real thing, and even liberal institutions aren’t immune to it - seriously, you think only conservative universities havethese problems?
I’m sure that’s also a factor, yes. Kind of how like street protests aren’t a thing in North Korea…
Even if it is true that (many) minority students are unprepared for Ivory League academics, a statement that may very well (or not) be true, it does not logically follow from that that any attempt to have more training and education is simply “pointless job creation”.
Your two conclusions contradict one another. If it is true that minorities are underprepared for Ivy Leauge education (and other areas as well), then, creating jobs and training and education to try and fix the problem is not “pointless” job creation.
The link went to an article featuring an idiotic statement by Anthony Scalia. AKA “Fat Tony.”
I don’t know Shodan’s first name, nor the state of his physique. I was criticizing his choice of sources.
I’ve encountered a lot of dogmatic statements like that, both regarding our entire society and Ivy League universities. I never encounter much factual evidence to back any of it up.
On issues such as whether the earth is 6000 years old, or whether humans are causing global warming, or things of that sort, I should base my conclusions on objective facts and logic, rather than blindly following dogma or uncritically accepting what someone says. Surely I should use the same approach to analyze claims that Ivy League universities are racist.
You’ve encountered plenty of factual evidence that institutional racism pervades our society in GD (even if not in your everyday life). You simply refuse to accept it, or you choose to believe that the evidence does not support any broad conclusion. For example, we’ve often discussed the ACLU’s evidence regarding “driving while black.” I don’t think that law enforcement officers are more likely as a group to be racists; in fact, the opposite should be true since LEO background investigations are designed to weed out open racists and other undesirables.
Or here’s another possibility. The Ivies educate their students to spot racism lurking under every rock and crevice, regardless of whether or not such racism exists. Technical colleges in Minnesota and other schools like that are more interested in giving their students useful skills and preparing them for productive careers, less interested in teaching their students to spot imaginary plagues of racism.
In a different post, you linked to a Wikipedia article about institutional racism. It offered up a lot of claims about feelings:
…students of color felt differently…
…students of color perceived the climate…
…Students of African descent and other students of color felt the campus environment…
…students of color felt that…
Lots of feelings, but no objective facts. To some skeptics, that might suggest that students at certain universities are being taught to feel about racism in certain ways, even if racism does not, factually, exist at those universities.
I’m not puddleglum, but before I go off chasing cites, which of the factual assertions do you doubt? Not the opinion parts, the factual assertions on which the opinion is based.
For instance, do you believe that elite universities generally select for the top students, that students admitted under affirmative action guidelines are generally less academically qualified, that they often struggle academically, that they drop out more, take longer to graduate, often switch to easier majors like the humanities rather than STEM fields like engineering or medicine, or that race or gender studies majors have more trouble finding jobs after they graduate? Do you believe that blacks generally have lower GPAs in those schools?
I don’t see how you need a cite that minorities say they feel excluded. Cites to that effect are in the OP.
Regards,
Shodan
The training and education is not for the minority students to be prepared for Ivory League academics. The training is for other students and for professors so they will learn how to think about minorities and how to act around them.
The second part of that assumption seems perfectly sound, at least. There are black students at Minnesota State University of Moorhead, and at thousands of similar institutions throughout the country. To imply that black students at MSUM (or anywhere) are victims of a great deal of racism and violence, but aren’t intelligent enough to know that they’re victims, would be … how shall I say it … incredibly condescending?
I would agree with this. I teach at a small state college in the deep South, with a lot of first-generation students; not exactly Minnesota State Community and Technical College, but close enough. About 40% of our students are minorities, and the vast majority of those are African-American. Some of the same grievances students have raised at other schools are definitely equally true here (underrepresentation of minorities on the faculty, buildings and facilities named after people who actively blocked racial integration of the university, etc.) But our students don’t actively protest any of this stuff. I think it’s partly because we’re in a part of the country where most people are raised to defer to authority and not make waves, but also because most of our students don’t see themselves as having the agency to change things through protest. You have to start with a certain baseline level of privilege for this to be thinkable, and you also have to be not-too-worried that one wrong step will cost you everything you’ve sacrificed to get here.
ETA: On at least one issue of local significance, I know for a fact that students aren’t silent because they don’t care – they held a well-attended forum about it, and the vast majority of students who got up to speak disagreed with the university president’s decision about said issue. But that was as far as it went. They may disagree strongly with the administration, but they aren’t socialized to see protesting as something they either can or should do under those circumstances.
What, now you’re concerned about being condescending to blacks? Where was that concern when you wrote the OP?
Ethnic studies majors have a unemployment rate 28% higher than average.
Only 22% of black students who enroll in college with the intention of earning a degree in the STEM fields actually do so.
The best study on this was done at Duke which found that “Over 54% of black men who express an initial interest in majoring in the natural sciences, engineering or economics switch to the humanities or social sciences compared to less than 8% of white men, 33% of white women switch out of the natural sciences, engineering and economics with 51% of black women switching.”
Michelle Obama’s thesison attitudes of black alumni of Princeton, found that the respondents became more comfortable dealing with blacks in an intellectual environment and less comfortable dealing with whites. It also found that the respondents spent more time with blacks and less time with whites during their time at Princeton compared to before or after.
Anything else that you are unclear about?
No. But drunken frat boys are hotbeds of crassness & crudeness, which often includes stuff that sounds very racist.
There are also a lot of privileged elitists at colleges. But it’s not really limited to the Ivy League. Schools are a hotbed of many of societies worst qualities, because they are filled with [del]sub-humans who are leeching off society[/del] teenagers and young adults.
Brown University responded to the protests by offering to spend one hundred million dollars on vaguely-word initiatives have something or other to do with race. Not surprising, I guess. Yale had offered fifty million dollars a few days earlier, so Brown had to outdo the competition. Harvard will probably offer an ever bigger amount soon.
It might come as a surprise to Ivy League liberals, but there are some places where such sums of money can’t be tossed around as if they were chump change. Probably no community college anywhere has that sum of money to offer. What could they possibly do to compete with Yale and Brown?
So the basic premise here seems to be, if you’re a student in the Ivy League, you might as well protest, because the administration will spend huge sums of money in order to appease you. If you’re a student at a school that’s focused on education and job preparation, such as Minnesota State Community and Technical College, you might as well focus on your classes, do well, and get ready to search for a job, since nobody will pay you just to whine. But I don’t think it’s true that “no one gives a shit about the school, nor does anyone have lofty expectations of what they should be doing to train their students”. I think that the government officials who run community colleges cares about having students get the best possible education at the best possible price. In the Ivy League, not so much.
So, you ask a question. Then you supply* your* answer…
Or, maybe Brown, Yale, Harvard, etc. are more responsive to student concerns because they rely on alumni contributions to create a wholistic learning and social environment, whereas Minnisota Bumfuck University is basically offering job training. That’s fine, and there is nothing wrong with that, but don’t pretend elite universities are offering the same thing. You are competing a BMW to a moped.
Elite universities create leaders who run the world, and who occasionally “whine”. Your school generally does neither it would seem. Kudos to them for having a clear mission and mandate that doesn’t seem to involve anything but teaching students academic subjects at a mildly competent level. It doesn’t speak at all to whether there are racists in either place.
I rather doubt that the administration of any Ivy League school is conservative. While polls show university faculty leaning strongly left, I’ve never seen a poll of administrators on the subject. But consider Larry Summers. He was forced out of Harvard for not being left-wing enough, but landed a cushy job as advisor to President Obama. Think any Ivy League president will become advisor to a Republican any time soon?
As for “plutocratic”, I wouldn’t deny that many Ivy League denizens have that tendency.