I’ll have to differ with you here. For one, structural racism leading to underrepresentation doesn’t (necessarily, if ever) mean looking at a pool of candidates and refusing to hire the minorities; it typically means that the pool lacks minority candidates, because our system doesn’t allow everyone to succeed equally.
Note that one of the things Brown is doing in response to these protests is (from the article in your OP) to develop future minority faculty members from within Brown:
The Brown document does arguably address some of the concerns voiced by Loury and McWhorter insofar as it aims to increase the future pool of PhD hires by increasing racial diversity in Brown graduate programs; to encourage scholars “from diverse backgrounds” through a post-doctoral fellowship program that aims to create new faculty members; and to expand the number of undergraduate students from historically underrepresented groups who are brought to Brown during the academic year and summers “to engage in research opportunities that will help prepare them to be competitive for admission into Brown’s graduate programs.”
So, clearly Brown doesn’t feel this is an issue than can be shrugged off a with a “We can only hire from the applicant pool we get”, they are addressing the issue pro-actively.
Secondly, this issue is a small part of the overall dispute, is there anything else you feel could be factually verified?
Yeah, the left-wing campus protesters are having extraordinary success squeezing money out of left-wing campus administrations. Some people might even be slightly suspicious that the left-wing protesters are making up spurious claims of racism in order to get money for cultural studies programs, diversity offices, and so forth.
Protests like this aren’t entirely a new thing. Fifteen years ago I was a student at Harvey Mudd College in the Claremont consortium. During my senior year, the colleges in the consortium began to be victimized by a series of “hate incidents”, such as the word “nigger” being written on a calendar in a hallway and that kind of thing. After each “hate incident”, the colleges’ left-wing groups would announce that obviously the only possible way to respond was for the administration to give more money to the Office of Diversity, to the Black Student Affairs Office, to scholarship funds for minority students, and so forth.
I, and certain others, occasionally wondered about something. Since it’s always the left-wing organizations set up for minorities who benefited financially from the “hate incidents”, is it possible that one of the left-wingers was actually committing those hate incidents?
As one side in this debate sees it, universities exist for academics. Every decision they make when evaluating people, from undergraduate admissions, to graduate admissions, to faculty hiring, to promotion and tenure, should be based only on people’s academic qualifications. It should be blind to race, and to all personal traits unrelated to academics. If this means that certain races are over-represented and others under-represented, so be it. A university’s purpose is research and education, not maintaining an exactly representative body of faculty and students by race.
The other side of the debate says what you just said. If one race is being underrepresented, we can automatically assume it’s “because our system doesn’t allow everyone to succeed equally”, and thus it’s still evidence of structural racism in the university system. But how so?
Shodan has helpfully presented us with statistics documenting that in some fields, the number of black Ph.D.'s is at or very close to zero. For Hispanics and some other groups it’s not much better. What exactly stops a black or Hispanic student from earning a Ph.D. in physics or math or geology or computer science?
Is it that no black or Hispanic students are admitted to universities? Far from it. Affirmative action guarantees that far more black and Hispanic students are admitted than otherwise would be.
Is that the university system somehow discourages them from entering those particular fields at universities? Far from it. There are large, well-funded scholarships that exist solely to encourage them to enter those fields.
Is it because the tech fields are the most academically rigorous, and members of some races are therefore less likely than others to be able to make it all the way to a Ph.D.? That would seem like a possibility worth considering. Of course, if you’re a professor at Brown or Yale and you float that possibility in public, there will be 500 students holding a sit-in in the President’s Office ten minutes later demanding that you be fired and the entire faculty sent for Sensitivity Training.
I–how can I put this–do not believe this to be an accurate summary of events. Especially the final sentence. Would you care to cite that final sentence?
Also, dude, you really should read your own cites.
WTF???
I tried following every one of the cites in that article, looking for something more objective (so help me, I even visited the American Conservative, figuring it couldn’t possibly be less objective). Every single one was broken or a malicious website.
Why would you give such a terrible cite?
Perhaps a more accurate cite might refresh your memory. For example, here’s how students really responded to these actions:
So, you know that bit about how students said the only response was, let’s see, what was it? That “obviously the only possible way to respond was for the administration to give more money to the Office of Diversity, to the Black Student Affairs Office, to scholarship funds for minority students, and so forth”? Help me out here, ITR.
Let’s set race aside for a moment (and note that the protests in question aren’t just about racism, but also injustice due to sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and such), to as to analogize. I live on the edge of Appalachia, in Kentucky. To the east of me is the Great White Ghetto of deeply impoverished white people.
Does a random person from Appalachia have the same chance to succeed as a random person from, say, the Northeast? No, they don’t. Their education is worse, they likely have no family history of or cultural drive toward higher education, their health is worse, their job skills are less valuable, and on and on. Oh, and if they do make it to college, people associate the Southern accent with stupidity and treat them differently, leading to feeling unwelcomed and uncomfortable.
This is the sort of thing I mean when I say that America doesn’t allow everyone to succeed equally - initial conditions vary dramatically, and interactions with others vary dramatically, based on factors outside the individual’s control.
I can speculate, but that’s all it’d be. Further research would be required to meaningfully answer that question.
We can analogize again, though - What exactly stops men from becoming kindergarten teachers or nurses? They aren’t, you see. It could be social pressure, or a preference for hiring women, or something else, or a combination of the three.
Am I wrong in assuming that you have a STEM degree? You seem to hold a bias to the effect that STEM is real, rigorous academics, and other fields are playtime.
I’m not seeing a contradiction. What ITR Champion was talking about was the left-wing response to the alleged hate crime, not what they did when they found out it was a hoax. That’s what your cite says -
IOW they shut down the college and called in the FBI. They didn’t realize it was a hoax at that point.
I was on campus. The demands were generally made on campus and circulated on internal email lists and other sources that I don’t have copies of now.
It can, however, be noted that what I was describing when I was a Claremont 12 years ago, with left-wingers using alleged hate speech to demand money from the university, is pretty much the same what’s happening at the Ivies and other universities this semester, which you can read about in the links in the OP. The process generally being: (1) left-wing activists claim they’ve been the victims of racism, pointing to supposed minor annoyances like writing on a wall or black tape as proof that the horrible racism exists. (2) left-wing activists issue demands, which invariably include more money for cultural studies programs, money for hiring of more minority faculty, etc… (3) left-wing administration hands over the money. If it’s happening at Yale and Brown and a dozen other schools now, why wouldn’t the same have happened at Claremont then?
Kerri Dunn vandazling her own car and then using it as proof that racism was a problem at Claremonet did happen, regardless of whether or not you believe it happened.
I’m not sure what the end game is under your proposed view of how things should be. There will always be factors that cause any particular competition, whether that be sports, academics, or otherwise, to be unfair at the outset. Where are we setting the starting point?
I mean, if we have a slam dunk contest today against Shaq, I will lose. Shaq will beat me. Was the contest unfair today? Did I have an equal opportunity? It depends on how we define that. Under my definition: yes. Under yours: no.
So, at birth, did Shaq and I have the same opportunity to win a slam dunk contest on December 14, 2015? Again, it depends. Under your definition, Shaq’s genetics gave him an unfair advantage. What would we ever do about that?
Turning to academics, you are correct that Appalachia as a whole suffers from all of the deficiencies you mentioned. What is the solution? Should we be given preference for admissions? Every time a professor tells me I did a shitty job, should I take that as an assault on my Appalachian accent or heritage?
I guess in a sense I am fortunate enough that it is still socially acceptable to come right out and joke with me about incest or getting used to indoor plumbing, whereas minorities always have to worry if the sleight is hidden.
That is my main concern with the articles you cited earlier. Some blacks are complaining that they were not chosen for a group project in class, talked down to, or were told by a professor that they should think of another major. That stuff happens to whites as well. What makes those kids think it is racially motivated? Again, I want to learn, and I’m not saying that it is NOT racially motivated, but you’ve got to give me more than regular stuff that happens to everyone.
The other things complained of were absolute absurdities. Wanting to rename Calhoun Hall because he owned slaves, wanting to rename Lynch Hall because it evoked memories of the lynching of blacks by the klan, and for the real topper, the student who was offended by the term “you guys” and complaining that he came into the “space” to say that.
TLDR version: I am a white guy from Appalachia. I deal with assholes all of the time. All of these “microaggressions” can be chalked up to someone simply being an asshole at worst, or at best a professor being brutally honest and telling the student that he won’t make it as a doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.
Or, these people might be Sam Bowers reincarnated. Until these students show me something more than I deal with almost every day, I’m not going to demand that colleges spend money to fix a problem that may not exist.
We examine differences in minority science graduation rates among University of California campuses when racial preferences were in place. Less-prepared minorities at higher-ranked campuses had lower persistence rates in science and took longer to graduate. We estimate a model of students’ college major choice where net returns of a science major differ across campuses and student preparation. We find less-prepared minority students at top ranked campuses would have higher science graduation rates had they attended lower-ranked campuses.
Suppose that Sally dreams of becoming a chemist, does very well in a standard high school chemistry course, and receives a preference into an elite school where most of her classmates have taken AP chemistry. Even if Sally does not experience “learning” mismatch, she is likely nonetheless to end up with a B- or a C in chemistry simply because of the strength of the competition.
A long line of studies (e.g., this excellent study by two psychologists) have shown that students receiving large preferences, facing these pressures, tend to abandon STEM fields in large numbers. Competition mismatch thus appears to have large and damaging effects on the number of blacks, in particular, graduating with science or engineering degrees.
Does American society give different people different levels of preparation? Absolutely. Every society in history has, and always will. Are certain races currently more numerous among the less fortunate, and others among the more fortunate? Absolutely.
But a university like Yale or Princeton cannot fix this problem. If Yale evaluates applicants equally without regard to race, that is not an example of racism, even if it means that more of some races and fewer of other races get admitted. Trying to pretend that Yale is a racist place where blacks need extra coddling, simply because blacks on average in places far away from Yale are less likely to be born privileged, accomplishes nothing. In fact, it is harmful. The best thing that can be done for black students or students of any race at Yale is to hold them all to the same high standards. Trying to somehow correct, on the campus of Yale, imbalances that occur to other people in other places, is destined to fail.
You cannot just hand-wave racism as some monolithic force that pervades society through and through just because you’re having trouble identifying exactly who is doing exactly what.
Consider the fact that nearly all businesses and all government agencies have written policies forbidding racial discrimination, and that expressions of racism are highly unacceptable in polite society and that goes double for the media. The public schools have a reputation for being fairly liberal and if you grew up within the last 40 years chances are you have been thoroughly trained in the principles of civil right. Then of course there’s that political correctness you’ve been hearing about.
This is systemic non-racism in spades, so any actual racism that does exist is going to be that which slips through the cracks.
Most racists are students or ordinary schmoes and since racist incidents usually trigger a big scandal, persons in positions of responsibility have a lot to lose if they are exposed as racists. And if there’s any instruction or collaboration taking place in administrative offices, the risk of exposure goes way up.
So while a number of shocking incidents have been taking place here and there, I’m inclined to believe that these are the exceptions that prove the rule rather than something that happening absolutely everywhere.
Racism certainly exists. As a problem that needs addressed at Ivy League campuses in 2015? I don’t believe it, and the cites here have certainly not convinced me and others.
That’s precisely what they did. Precisely what they DIDN’T do was “announce that obviously the only possible way to respond was for the administration to give more money to the Office of Diversity, to the Black Student Affairs Office, to scholarship funds for minority students, and so forth,” which is ITR’s totally unsupported claim–a claim contradicted by a more reliable cite.
:rolleyes: Not, it’s not, which is precisely the point: given all the media coverage this received, why the hell did you decide to cite it with a link to a malicious hate cite? Why not cite it with a link to a reputable source, one that doesn’t suggest, for example, that lesbians aren’t female, one that doesn’t provide all its supporting links to hacked/malicious/404 cites?
I never said the hoax didn’t happen; I’m confident it did. I think you gave a bizarrely terrible cite for the events themselves, and then you’ve made some incorrect claims about how leftists responded to the events.
As for what discrimination black students might feel at a prestigious university, check it out:
Read the whole article. It’d be illuminating if it weren’t such old news; if you genuinely think black students don’t face antiblack discrimination, it really will be illuminating.
I did fine too. And yet I know plenty of people with as much or more natural ability that didn’t, and it’s disproportionately the ones from poor families, families with a parent in prison, teenage pregnancies, or just plain not thinking they belonged at college.
The end point is equality of opportunity. The starting point is identifying factors that prevent equality of opportunity.
That’s a pretty crude analogy. Let’s say it’s a high school 3-point contest instead. Your competitor gets private coaching five days a week, and comes from a comfortable family of sports enthusiasts. You work five nights a week to support your single mother, practice when you can with a rag ball and garbage can, and your mother and teachers are encouraging you to give up shooting baskets. Who has more natural talent? I don’t think it matters, since you’ve been set up to fail regardless.
Nothing can be done about genetic advantages, but plenty can be done about the myriad non-genetic advantages, or rather done about the disadvantages.
There’s no one quick fix. A university could have an outreach program to identity the particular needs of Appalachians, and it could try to identity promising but underdeveloped academic talent in the region, but it can’t fix Appalachia itself.
Well, sometimes it is racially motivated, even unconsciously so. Never wondering whether a sleight is due to your race is part of white privilege. I have never once in my life thought I was being discriminated against for being white, and I am very confident that I never have been.
Perhaps group projects could be assigned randomly, and professors can be instructed by the sort of programs proposed at Brown.
Not being hurt by slavery or (the majority of) lynchings is also part of white privilege. Not everyone is you.
As for “you guys”, the automatic use of masculine pronouns is a problem. Not life-or-death, but then we’ve fixed most of those in this country.
When in doubt, I want data to be collected and analyzed. It’s a good start.