[quote=“Fotheringay-Phipps, post:30, topic:579972”]
No.
“If members of one ethnic group get extra chances because their race, while members of another have to be successful at every step of the way, then Trump is justified in pointing to it as unfair.”
Yeah, all us poor white folks just hate it when being white just doesn’t carry the advantages that it used to. That is so unfair.
And I thank you, 9th Floor. However, to be more honest than I’m comfortable with at the moment, I’m afraid my posts don’t always have such a reasonable tone. But in light of the thread Diogenes started about the passing of his mom and the way the board has come together to express its sympathies, and in light of the helpful and informative posts I got in IMHO in regard to certain questions I had about buying a bicycle, I’m reminded again that the vast majority of this board - probably 99% of it - is populated by good, compassionate, intelligent and helpful people who I would be happy to have as friends despite our political differences. Thus, I’m trying to kick my own behavior up a notch from the more combative “fight fire with fire” stance which I’ve adopted over the last few years. I imagine I’ll backslide from time to time but I’ll be working on it, and keeping your post in mind will make it that much easier.
So thanks doubly for your post - once for the compliments; and again for the motiviation to live up to them.
Regards,
SA 
Just because something is postitive or complimentary doesn’t make it not prejudiced. How would you feel if you were a black athlete working hard every day in practice and putting in extra hours at the gym and somebody said to you that blacks were just superior athletes. The asian kid staying up late to study and busting his ass to earn his grades only to find out that he’s just good at math. And what about those that don’t possess the “positive” attributes that you want to somehow not pre-judge them to have? Are they trying harder to fail?
And even still, your comment that a statement is not prejudiced because it is either positive or commonly known is factually incorrect. To go back to the sentence I’m still having trouble swallowing, to say that blacks are natural athletes is prejudiced because you are assigning a characteristic to an entire group of people based upon their skin color. Note that I am not saying “racist.” It is still prejudiced.
A large part of the problem from your perspective is that you’re hearing a lot of things that I haven’t said. I’m about to call it a night right now but I’ll try to return tomorrow and explain what I mean.
There is nothing about the constructions “You people” or “the blacks” that make them racist. No amount of grammatical analysis, comparison to other phrases (“Gee, how about ‘article, noun’? Is that racist? AHA!”)
They have racist connotations because they are most commonly used by racists. They rarely precede a positive sentiment. It’s the same process that led to “Some of my best friends are black” becoming associated with a racist mentality. Routinely pairing those phrases with negative statements about or hostility towards a particular group renders them tinged with ugliness.
Of course, it doesn’t help your position when you buttress it with your own racist sentiments, Starving for Attention, but you’re too dumb to figure that out. Thanks for letting us know where you were going, so that we didn’t wonder.
Nothing I said was related to this so I won’t address it.
As advocates of Affirmative Action are always quick to point out, the college admissions process is not supposed to be 100% neutral. They advocate easier admission processes for minority students for multiple reasons: institutional discrimination, potentially poor quality of public schools where they were born, and to increase the diversity of the student body. No one seems to be advocating a purely 100% neutral admission process in which the student’s name is kept blacked out and their race unknown and the only thing their admission is based on is GPA, standardized test scores and some form of adjustment scale for school districts that are known for being tougher or easier. I don’t see why legacy admissions must be viewed as inherently unfair since the system isn’t about neutral admissions. Or rather, if we view legacies as unfair, so what? The entire college admissions process even outside of legacies is not inherently fair or designed to be fair to the persons applying, it is designed in a manner that maximizes the prestige, student body and et cetera of the institutions. Essentially, the admissions process isn’t for the benefit of students it is for the benefit of the school.
If the whole admission process was, by intention, supposed to only admit the absolute best students regardless of circumstance, I would agree legacy admissions are not fair. That isn’t the goal of college admissions, though. It is a valid institutional goal to reward the children of prominent alumni who have shown great levels of financial support for their institutions. It should be noted that at Ivy League schools the admission rate for legacies is 30%, while higher than regular undergraduates it does show being a legacy isn’t automatic. If your parent or relative is someone who has donated a massive amount, or is massively prestigious, it’s probably automatic. If your parent graduated from there 20 years ago and has given paltry donations every few years? You’d better hope you can get in on your own merits because that’s not going to be enough on its own.
I don’t remember saying it was fair. Do you really think college admissions in general are “fair?” Plus, I’m not arguing against AA at all, I just found your throw away comment about legacies to be pointless and off base, so I corrected it.
As you note yourself, there is no inherent conflict between legacies and AA. I also think you can have a valid disagreement with either of those programs or both of those programs. I don’t think it’s hypocritical to oppose AA but support legacy admissions, or to oppose legacy admissions but support AA.
Right, but we’re talking about specifics of prominent politicians here. People are going to bash politicians they don’t like, and they’ll find spurious reasons to do so. That’s as old as the game itself and trying to bring up general concepts like legacy admissions or whatever to “expose” the hypocrisy of people who are specifically slamming politicians is pointless. Those people are making a political point to try and tar people they disagree with, they aren’t trying to start a serious debate on real issues (the fact that many people start a serious debate on the issues in response to mud slinging is unfortunate because the source of the debate invariably poisons the potential for real discourse.)
It meant he could apply in the basket of students who are sons of career military officers. So instead of having to be one of the top 5 to apply at his local congressman or senator’s office he only had to be in the top 100 nationwide of sons of career military officers. The system would not benefit him in any other way.
The fact that he scored so well on his admissions exams means he would have gotten in regardless of who his parents and grandparents were. Primarily because you always have multiple avenues you can pursue. You can go through your local congressman, or either of your two state senators. So even if not for his parentage McCain’s test scores meant that it’s more or less impossible he would not have been admitted.
I don’t even know if he applied as the child of a career military officer, he very well may have gone through a local congressman or Senator, I’m not sure how you’d look that up.
No, I guess you are too stupid to understand my argument, which is that you’re wrong to say the blacks don’t share tendencies beyond superficial skin color. They share all kinds of tendencies, ranging from voting Democratic to being good at sports.
Is this a joke, or a remarkably stupid racist remark?
And they say his heart grew three sizes that day …
Here’s a fun question for you:
How many blacks in Ethiopia or Sudan vote Democratic or are good at sports?
If not, perhaps you’d better start by specifying “American blacks”, which would at least a half-assed attempt to say something meaningful. Well, more like eighth-assed, since the vast majority of American blacks are average at sports just like everyone else.
Since the majority of professional flute players are white, should I assume that “white people are good at playing the flute”?
There is no affirmative action in grading tests. The tests are blind graded so unless the professor can recognize your handwriting, he has no idea whose test he is grading.
The cutoff for magna is still top 10% I believe.
I don’t think anyone MUST fail. I am also pretty sure that Harvard isn’t on a C curve. Unless things have changed drastically, they are on a B (of some sort) curve and that just means that half the class must get that grade of lower. Grade inflation exists but there is still a curve and making magna still means you are in the top X%.
Its not that difficult for the people that get in. The curve is softer than the stay puft marshmallow man. They try really hard to keep you from flunking out. They get you tutors and extra help and all sorts of stuff.
A lot of it also comes from what I think is a general misconception about what causes schools to become prominent and well known.
Historically prominent schools, whether in the United States or Europe, have been the schools that the wealthy, upper class elite attended and where their children after them attend. Of course, the upper class elite had educational options back in the 1700s whereas the children of bakers and farmers didn’t much go to school at all, so schools like Harvard and Yale weren’t the “best” schools in the 1700s they were the only real college/university type schools around.
There’s a reason so many early American leaders were graduates of either the Ivy League schools or a few of the small prestigious private schools in the South (William & Mary graduated many famous politicians of the era) it’s essentially because those were the only schools. There weren’t huge state school systems, community colleges, correspondence colleges et al.
Throughout the 19th century you saw more schools being created per capita, and the prestige of the old schools actually really started to get magnified. At one point there was prestige just in being a college or university at all, because they were so rare. During the 19th and early 20th century the old schools that used to be the “only” schools continued to attract the same people they had always attracted: the elites at the upper rungs of society. Classic old-money types, politically connected families and et cetera.
Just as the elites are drawn to institutions frequented by elites, generally those institutions will attract elite professors.
While the whole concept of “schools for the elite” certainly is part of the reason Ivy League schools continue to be so well regarded, it is also because of genuine quality at elite institutions (ivy league or not, elite certainly encompasses schools like Johns Hopkins, U. of Chicago, Stanford etc.) While their genesis as elite institutions comes from their tight association with the wealthy and the upper class, they also do genuinely have some of the best professors, best researchers, and best minds in their fields.
They also provide vastly better networking and job opportunities.
However, none of that has anything to do with how hard Math 101 or Sociology 330 is at Harvard versus the same course at the University of Tennessee. Undergraduate courses and programs in the United States are very similar. In what way do people posit Harvard makes first year calculus harder than it is at UT or Florida State? Last I checked the fundamentals of beginner’s calculus are pretty universal. Are people under the impression that elite schools have “strange grading systems” or that they make it so you have to get a 90% on all your exams to pass the class? Because that just isn’t the case.
If anything the hardest grading systems are more likely to be found in small liberal arts schools. Some of those schools have systems such as “all classes are pass fail, and a certain percentage of the class must receive a fail” or “all classes must give x % of A grades x % of B grades, x % of C grades, x % of D, and x % of fails.” I’ve known people who have said they went to schools like that, and thus I would say those systems genuinely present more difficult academics than Harvard or Yale which I know have relatively standard grading systems.
Even then, that is just talking about how difficult it is to get a good grade in a class. Even such a grading system doesn’t make Calculus I any harder to learn than it is anywhere else. So I am genuinely curious as to where people think these elite schools are making your average undergraduate program more difficult. Schools that just give away degrees wouldn’t be accredited, and there are fairly well known regional accreditation bodies in each of the regions of the country. Generally if a school meets those accreditation they are going to have roughly similar standards for curriculum.
Gosh, what he might have accomplished, if only he had a better education.
I’ve taught in “elite” colleges, and not-so-elite colleges, and the difference is that if I am successful teaching the principles of writing, say, to a freshman class in English composition at a not-so-elite college, then by the end of the semester, my best students would be able to begin the same course at an elite college. I imagine the same principle applies to Calculus, as well. It’s not so much that you’re teaching the same stuff on the same schedule, it’s that you get to start the course at a higher level, and cover much more ground much more quickly, with no time needed for reviewing what you’ve already taught, time to answer ambitious questions. Plus, at the elite colleges I can ask them to read more advanced books–“more” cutting both ways, quantitatively as well as well as qualitatively–and at the elite colleges, they will get read. If you’ve ever taught even a rudimentary skills course at elite and not-so-elite institutions, the difference will jump out at you.
I taught at a selective university and a very selective one during my grad school days. The caliber of the students made the difference and influenced my syllabus. At the selective one, there were some students who were really really smart, and then others who, for a variety of reasons, were simply not prepared and despite what they looked like on paper, did not belong. At the more elite school, there was less heterogeneity in apititude and performance. You could pretty much guarantee that everyone was smart or at least achieved in a way that made them indistinguishable from the smart students.
Perhaps it’s because the very selective school was the most expensive school in the state, so if you were going to attend there, it didn’t make financial sense not to get the best education. Whereas at the selective but relativey inexpensive school, you had some kids who could afford to just use the institution as a holding pin until they grew up and figured out what they wanted to do. Also, the more seletive a school is, the more competition there tends to be. No one wants to be a loser, so that acts as a motivator to do well.
This is a question you should be asking those who are against Affirmative Action, like Trump apparently is. The sentiment behind their beef is that the system should be colorblind, objective, and merit-based. (Except, of course, unless you have alumni parents. Then it’s okay to lower the bar and let in a little ole mediocrity.)
No, I don’t. I’m not arguing against legacy as much I’m arguing against the hypocrisy behind Trump’s insinuations about Obama’s qualifications. And unlike you, I don’t think one defend legacy while decrying AA, and not expect to be called an elitist hypocrite.
Well first you need to show me how my comment about legacy is pointless and off base. Justifying the school’s rationale behind legacy (as you have done) doesn’t counter my point that the Trump et al. are being racist and hypocritical when they cast aspersions against the qualifications of minorities based on the assumption that they benefited from AA, when these fools routinely support white men who have long benefited from a system that rewards people on the basis of non-merit based criteria.
If becomes hypocritical when potential beneficiaries of AA are scrutinized by the public in a way that legacy beneficiaries are not. And when folks like Trump encourage this scrutiny, it is perfectly fair to point out how their method of scoring political points makes them look racially suspect.
Well, if these “spurious reasons” make them look racist and hypocritical, why shouldn’t this be pointed out? People are going to bash politicians they don’t like, for sure. But if you bash a politician because he once flirted with an intern in the hallway, for instance, you’ll be taken for a hypocritical clown if you have a long track record of supporting unapologetic philanderers.
It is one thing to support legacy but be against AA. It’s another to publically call into question an opponent’s credentials because they might have benefited from AA, while never directing that kind of scrutinity to legacy admittees even when they are your political opponents (e.g., Kerry). Do you see the difference? This is why I call this racism.
Not necessarily. What were his high school grades like? Unless the world has significantly changed between then and now, scores alone would not have been enough to land someone into a competitive school. The fact is we don’t know what he would have been able to do had his heritage been different. But there’s no real reason to assume that his father and grandfather didn’t help him to get in either. Given the way the world works and has always worked, I’d be more inclined to assume that they did. It’s not a biggie to me either way, and as far as I know McCain has never made a big stink about AA (like Bush did).
No, it’s true. Just ask someone who goes to MIT.
Someone pointed out that while Trump seems to be suggesting that the only reason Obama was admitted to Columbia and Harvard was due to affirmative action quotas, Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kusher, might not have been admitted to Harvard if not for a $2.5 million donation by his father, Charles Kushner. This story is described in the book, The Price of Admission.