Showing posts with label affirmative action. Show all posts
Showing posts with label affirmative action. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Why take out student loans to get an Ivy League degree when you can learn to be a bigot for less than twenty bucks?

 American universities have spent millions of dollars on affirmative action, women's varsity sports, litigation defending their race-based policies, and the newest race-obsessed fashion trend--Diversity. Equity and Inclusion (DEI). 

All these investments should produce kindlier and more tolerant college campuses--a collegiate nirvana, an idyllic state of perfect racial harmony.

But not so. Over the past few months, universities have shown themselves to be racist institutions and hotbeds of antisemitism. The most racist schools have been the most elite: Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and UCLA, among them.

And it's not just the students who are bigoted toward Jews. Professors have also attended disruptive anti-Israel rallies, and when college presidents call the cops, the faculty protest by passing votes of no confidence in them.

Few college leaders openly espouse anti-semitic opinions, but they often don't take campus anti-semitism seriously. For example, three college administrators were put on leave at Columbia recently for exchanging "unprofessional text messages while attending a panel discussion about antisemitism on campus. "

Young people might profitably ask themselves why they should take out $100,000 in student loans to surround themselves with bigots on an Ivy League campus. After all, you can school yourself in racial prejudice for the price of Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf, which you can purchase from Amazon for only twelve bucks.

Mein Kampf: Cheaper than a liberal arts degree from Harvard




Friday, June 30, 2023

The Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions: Ain’t nothing gonna change at the universities

Yesterday, in an opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the US Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. The vote was 6 to 3.

The Court's analysis was straightforward. When reviewing admission applications, the decision instructed, applicants should be judged based on their individual experience, not race.

Unfortunately. as Justice Roberts wrote
Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
Now that the Supreme Court has declared affirmative action in college admissions unconstitutional, will universities change how they do business? I don’t think so.

American universities are obsessed with race, and many university presidents, deans, and professors view American history as nothing more than a litany of oppression by white racists against people of color. University leaders will likely reject the Supreme Court’s ruling and continue admitting students based on race using their well-honed skills at subterfuge.

Indeed, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested as much in her dissenting opinion in Gratz v. Bollinger. This is what she wrote: 
"One can reasonably anticipate, therefore, the colleges and universities will seek to maintain their minority enrollment . . . whether or not they can do so in full candor . . . " Justice Ginsburg concluded her dissenting opinion by saying, "If honesty is the best policy, surely [Michigan University’s] accurately described, fully disclosed College affirmation program is preferable to achieving similar numbers through winks, nods, and disguises."

What kind of winks, nods, and disguises are we talking about? Here are a couple of examples from my personal experience. When I was a doctoral student at Harvard Graduate School of Education, the school sponsored a scholarly publication called the Harvard Education Review. Students could compete to get on the journal's editorial board, and new board members were appointed by students already on it. A Harvard faculty member described the Harvard Educational Review as a racial ghetto, and indeed it was. As best as I could determine, no heterosexual white students were on the board.

Despite warnings from fellow students that my application would be rejected, I applied for membership on the Harvard Educational Review's editorial board.

My application was rejected. Of course, there was no written policy banning white men from being on the journal's editorial board, and board members could surely articulate alternative reasons for the board's decisions. Nevertheless, I believe board members were selected based on race.

As my Harvard studies drew to a close, I traveled to Washington, DC, to attend a faculty recruitment conference sponsored by the Association of American Law Schools. I hoped to get a job as a law professor.

When I arrived at the conference, I found that job applicants were sorted into three waiting rooms. One room was reserved for women attendees, another was reserved for people of color, and a third waiting room was open to anybody. Only white men were in that room.

I got a couple of interviews, but I spent most of the day watching other white men reading the Washington Post in the white men's waiting room. Meanwhile, women and people of color were busy attending job reviews. In my opinion, I was witnessing affirmative action.

I am not bitter about those experiences. I had a good career as an educational policy researcher. I feel sure that I published more scholarly articles than the combined output of everyone else in my Harvard doctoral cohort.

I'd like to make one point regarding the Supreme Court's recent decision to strike down affirmative action in college admissions. The universities should be honest about what they are doing. If the Supreme Court declares affirmative action to violate the Constitution, universities should stop practicing affirmative action.

Supreme Court says bye bye to affirmative action




 

 

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Elitist Colleges Give Admissions Preferences to Children of Alumni: Let's Kick Them Out of the Federal Student Aid Program

Evan Mandery wrote an op ed essay in the New York Times recently decrying the preferential
admissions polices of our elitist colleges.  No--Mandery was not talking about affirmative action, whereby colleges give preference to minority applicants when making admissions decisions. He was talking about the special preferences many elitist colleges give to the children of alumni--often called legacies.

According to Mandery, the children of alumni have a 45 percent greater chance of admissions at 30 of our nation's most elite colleges than non-legacies. Mandery thinks it is wrong for colleges to favor the children of alumni when making admissions decisions, and I agree. The legacy preferences of our elitists colleges stink.

Almost in passing, Mandery acknowledged that our elitist institutions also give admission preferences to racial minorities.  In fact, Mandery noted that being a legacy is "the equivalent of 160 additional points on an applicant’s SAT, nearly as much as being a star athlete or African-American or Hispanic."  

So here is the bottom line. If you want to attend Harvard, Yale, or a couple of dozen other elitist universities, it will help enormously  if you are Hispanic, African American, or the child of an alumnus.


Like most New York Times essayists, Mandery probably thinks he is a liberal progressive. But his suggestions for ending legacy preferences are about as radical as 1950s era Reader's Digest article.  Here are  his suggestions: "a huge reform" of the nation's tax structure and "improved access to higher education."  My God, Mandery's an anarchist!


Such twaddle.


Mandery's suggested reforms have nothing to do with the rotten and corrupt way our nation's elitist colleges are admitting students.  As Mandery admits--these slimy institutions give preferences to their rich alums and to racial minorities.   What's more, they brag about it!


 I suppose laws could be passed to ban these practices, but as Justice  Ruth Ginsburg said in her dissenting opinion in Gratz v. Bollinger, our nation's colleges would probably continue giving racial preferences when admitting students even if it were illegal; they would just lie about it. 

Evan J. Mandery
photo credit: Amazon.com

As for me, I think we should kick the elitist colleges and universities out of the federal student loan program and invest this money solely in public universities and public community colleges.  I favor letting Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Wesleyan, Smith and all the other private elitist institutions stew in their own postmodern and often racist juices.  Let them admit  students however they want; just don't give them access to federal student loan money or  Pell Grants. 

Moreover, just as our elitist colleges give special preferences to minorities and the children of their alumni when making admissions decisions, I think the American public should give a special preference to anyone who did not graduate from one of these sleazeball institutions when choosing our nation's leaders.

In other words, people who graduate from Harvard or Yale should be penalized in the public mind if they run for president, seek a federal judgeship, or apply for a cabinet post .  As everyone knows, our government is now run almost entirely by elitist college graduates, and the Russians are showing them up to be fools.

References

Evan J. Mandery. End College Legacy Preferances. New York Times, April 24, 1014.  Accessible  at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/opinion/end-college-legacy-preferences.html?_r=0