I thought “Fox News commenter” would be someone actually affiliated with FN, not a random poster. That might just be me.
Yup, Tufte is great for some serious ignorance-fighting about visual-data fallacies and flimflam.
Just to get back to the affirmative action question. I think that there is more to affirmative action than just selecting a diversified class from equally qualified applicants. The notion behind affirmative action is that the qualifications and standards that the schools apply are inherently discriminatory. Since the point of affirmative action is to correct for this discrimination, it requires that minority candidates be accepted who score lower than non-minority candidates on these arbitrary biased measures.
What else could you mean by “tip the scales?”
If they are qualified without AA, why do we need AA?
If you are saying there is a pool of equally qualified candidates, and AA puts the black ones in line first, then maybe you’re right. It’s my impression that this isn’t how it works though.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. If you need someone to officially bitch and moan, though, okay. I hereby declare that athletic affirmative action is wrong too.
However, in a larger sense you bring up a great point - why doesn’t someone sue over athletic AA? Has anyone ever done so?
See, that’s the weird twisted logic that bothers me. Simply end the discrimination. If it’s so subtle that it can’t even be detected and ended, then maybe it doesn’t really exist.
Most congressmen farm out tweeting to low-level staffers who make little mistakes like this.
Farming out tweets is usually a bad idea. For someone like Donald Trump, it would be a really good idea.
Dammit man, these plans are supposed to be soooper secret, don’t open 'til after the election.:eek:
On the other hand, Ben must have learned something on his recent trip; unlike Bush, he’s not calling it a Crusade. :smack:
Or, the people doing the evaluating (college admissions officers, and the like) are so much a part of the system that that they can’t be relied on to identify their own bias.
What you say sounds nice. Now, who would you appoint who is so supremely objective that they can announce when discrimination doesn’t exist anymore?
Finally a war Republicans are against!
Give them time.
So what is “inherently biased” about the grading and standardized testing in high school that is a bias not present in the classroom at UT?
It’s not that difficult a concept. Suppose experience shows that students who score more than X on their SATs do well at UT. There are 100 openings, and 100 affluent white students scored X+60, while the highest scoring black student scored X+55.
The black student is clearly qualified, but if they go strictly by score, he won’t get in, so they have to tip the scales to achieve diversity. I think it’s worth it. You may not think it’s fair, but neither is it fair that affluent white kids take prep courses that can add 100 points to their SATs, or even get their family doctor to sign statements that they have ADD and need more time for the test.
So why not just go with income-based preferences rather than race-based ones? Let the Jack-and-Jill Club crowd hire their own SAT tutors or work their own perfidy with family doctors.
Answer: because this AA program is *not *about getting more poor black kids into UT. That was already accomplished with the (very clever, and pretty much unimpeachable) program that guaranteed admission to anyone in the top 10% of their high school class. That meant a large, poor, urban, mostly black high school in Dallas or Houston would have a large number of mostly low income black students who would qualify for admission, year after year.
The problem UT officials and advocates for AA saw was that this was leaving out the children of affluent black families who had relocated to more affluent areas and who sent their kids to mostly white high schools. They wanted more “diversity within the diversity”, to try to ensure that the black kids at UT were not all poor inner city kids. So you are trotting out tired old arguments that have nothing to do with what UT is actually arguing in court:
As for your contention that the students admitted through this racial preference plan are still well above the threshold at which they would be expected to “do well at UT”, I will once again refer back to the CNN op-ed from the Columbia professor (who is African American) who notes that research absolutely shows these “mismatches” hurt students who go into STEM fields and law, and then goes on to point out:
I don’t really blame people for assuming that if Scalia said it, it is probably right wing douchebaggery, end of story. But after having this understandable knee-jerk reaction, when you receive more detailed information on the subject, you shouldn’t dig in so stubbornly just because you don’t want to admit you might have gone off half-cocked (and/or you don’t want to admit that Scalia could actually be right about anything, ever).
Are you really unaware of the accusations of cultural biases in standardized testing? There is no shortage of studies on the subject.
Because racism exists. Until the anti-AA side stops pretending like racism was long solved, then we need AA.
So given that racism is a real thing and people are often denied spots in school and work because of it, how do you plan on fixing it?
Looks like you only read the first part of my sentence, despite the fact that you quoted all of it. Let me try again, with emphasis:
My mother is a retired sociology professor who has been singing the tune about bias in standardized testing for decades, so yes: I am aware of the argument, though I find it to be wildly overstated. But even if we take it as a given, that doesn’t explain how the bias allows such a student to suddenly succeed at UT. IOW affirmative action is applied far too late in the process, even if every assumption of its proponents is correct (which I doubt).
Let me in fact quote one of my mother’s favorite anecdotes. Her mother, my grandmother, was born and raised on the Omaha reservation (my great-grandfather was “full blooded” Native American; my great-grandmother was white). My grandmother was forcibly sent off to an “Indian” boarding school as a teenager, the whole nine yards, and my mother keeps in close touch with her cousins on the “rez” and identifies herself as Native (I do not). Anyway, she says my grandmother knew a boy who did poorly on the Anglo-style yardsticks of academic progress, but could draw an amazing, beautiful portrait of a horse, something that would not be captured by a standardized test or by conventional grading metrics. Okay, fair enough, as far as it goes: but how would such a person make the grade at UT? You can’t take nothing but art classes even if you are going for a BFA.
I think it’s a lot more nuanced than you present it in 2015. If you are a black person, a young black man especially, from a poor family, and you don’t go beyond a high school education, you are definitely going to get the shit end of the stick. Police will harass you (or worse), employers will be reluctant to hire you, landlords will be reluctant to rent to you (unless they are slumlords, in which case they will probably give your kids lead poisoning which just exacerbates the whole problem).
If OTOH you are a black person from a middle class upbringing, *and *you get a master’s degree or better (yes, I’m aware that kids from the black middle class tend to backslide in SEC more than people from the white or Asian middle class, but that would not likely be true of someone with an advanced degree), you still will face some of the racist hurdles of American life, along with some extra ones: not only will you get hassled by the cops for DWB, you might get extra scrutiny if you have a nice car, and you may end up dealing with the humiliating situation that Professor Gates famously did, with your neighbors and police mistaking you for an intruder.
BUT…does anyone believe a black person with an advanced degree is going to have trouble getting a job (as long as they are willing to move to a blue state if necessary)? It is well publicized that people who get humanities Ph.D.'s these days have a slim chance of getting a tenure-track professorial job (this article says it’s about 6% for a literature Ph.D.). What do you suppose the percentage is for an African American with such a doctorate? 100%? If it’s 90%, let’s face it: that other 10% is just not hustling.
Wasn’t there a multitude of SRIOTD’s from the debate to get us of this hijack?
How is it a hijack? What Scalia said is alleged to be a SRI, no? It’s certainly a RI (no one can doubt that Scalia is a Republican). I see people taking issue with most of the other SRI’s listed in the thread (as to whether they are in fact stupid); why can’t this one be debated?