Posted on 06/06/2012 6:22:39 AM PDT by jmaroneps37
The thesis written by Michelle LaVaughn Robinson (now Obama) in 1985, contains three unmitigated impediments that would have rendered the paper an automatic F in the Introduction to the Research Paper course I taught at a Chicago area community college, yet it was accepted at her Ivy League Princeton University alma mater.
No attribution in the form of formal footnotes and very little author extrapolation are bad enough but using the school’s participation in the selection of field sample are unacceptable literary research flaws that would stop the grading process at page 17.
Robinson states: “With the permission of ___________, the President of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni and his office, the STAFF at the Alumni Records Office ASSISTED the Study BY SELECTING every fourth name on a mailing list of approximately 1,200 names until 400 names were collected!
This removes the paper’s author from the third person objective normative for independent research.
Furthermore, Robinson, page 1, releases her thesis for widespread circulation by Princeton “to lend this thesis to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research.”
Having no affidavit release forms for each sample participant can not be excused because some school alumni president or staff released these names without permission!
Nevertheless, for the purposes of this essay, I did a very cursory reading of the Robinson paper and found the first of many faulty pronoun antecedent errors, a grammatical problem the work never overcame.
“The purpose of this study is to examine various attitudes of Black Princeton alumni in their present state and as they are perceived by the alumni to have changed over time,” is a faulty thesis statement.
“They” should go back to its immediate noun antecedent of “alumni” but apparently refers to “attitudes,”
(Excerpt) Read more at coachisright.com ...
You work like I do. I believe in controlling my own destiny as much as I can.
This has been a conscious decision by the social engineers among us.
It seems to me that if one group is considered to have higher ability - yet in the system gets lower grades and less advancement - that it is THEY who are in a position to argue that they are being ‘discriminated against’.
This is what it means today to be a White Male in America. I keep trying to explain this to my college-bound son.
At the end of the day, it’s just another paradigm shift....
On the one hand it shifts left. On the other hand it shifts right....
... ducking...
You misspelled “Womyn’s”.
Just sayin’ . . .
;-P
It’s not a master’s thesis but an undergraduate thesis. I read the whole thing back in 2008, unlike you or the author of this article, and thought that while not world-class, it was entirely acceptable as an undergraduate piece of work, even for Princeton.
apparently she didn’t get that drug from “rise of the planet of the apes”.
>> it was entirely acceptable as an undergraduate piece of work <<
IBTZ?
Same here, do it yourself in less time and with better results.
Hitchen’s characteristically devastating critique of Michelle’s thesis:
“I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is ‘Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.’ To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.”
I've said the same thing here before and I'm still around. Perhaps this is because I actually read the thesis unlike so many others who have commented on it (apparently including Christopher Hitchens).
The thesis is politically narrow-minded. That may have something to do with the atmosphere of race relations at that particular time at that particular college as well as the fact that it was written by a young inexperienced person. But I didn't find all the grammatical and structural errors that were claimed by people who had not read the thesis.
It was NOT her Masters Thesis. It was an undergraduate thesis. The error was mine. Not the author’s.
I read the first chapter and it was execrable.
So, her wondering aloud what other blacks ‘felt’ on the Princeton campus was thesis material?
It’s no wonder that I hold the Liberal Arts in such low regard.
As I recall she constructed a research questionnaire which was filled out by a significant number of black Princeton alumni. She then analyzed the results.
One of the main purposes of a thesis is to show that you are qualified to do independent research in your major field. She did this.
I know on the acknowledgments page I would have told my friends and family "thank you" and not "thank-you."
After having Bessie Phillips for grammar in the 12 grade, I would have used consistent parallelism in the second sentence of the first paragraph, and I wouldn't have used "etc."
To begin the second paragraph, I would have referred to myself as a future alumna, not future alumnus; a future alumnus is a single male graduate, and alumnae is multiple alumna.
The semicolon in that second paragraph is not correct punctuation, and "often times I take" should be "I often take," at least when writing formally.
I'll continue to read, but my red editing pen would be in use on the first page.
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