MAKING NEW THOMAS SOWELL PING LIST.
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Posted on 01/10/2007 8:01:35 AM PST by jazusamo
A hundred years ago, there was talk of a "yellow peril" because of Chinese and Japanese immigration to the United States in general and to California in particular. Today, there are echoes of that notion in a front page headline on the education section of the New York Times of January 7th.
"At 41 percent Asian, Berkeley could be the new face of merit-based admissions. The problem for everybody else: lots less room at elite colleges."
Anybody of any race who takes a place at any college leaves one less place for somebody else. Does an Asian American take up any more space than anybody else? Are they all Sumo wrestlers?
This hand-wringing about too many Asians is an echo of the past in another painful way. Back in the early 20th century, various elite colleges decided that there were "too many Jews" applying and set quotas to restrict the number of Jewish students admitted.
One of the institutions that did not do this was the College of the City of New York, which admitted students according to their academic qualifications. Jewish students seemed to be an even higher percentage of the students at CCNY then than Asian students are today at Berkeley.
Because CCNY was both free and a high-quality academic institution, it became known as "the poor man's Harvard."
That was then. Today, CCNY has long since succumbed to the siren song of "inclusion" and flung its doors open to all and sundry, with no old-fashioned notions of academic qualifications. No one calls it a poor man's Harvard any more. Few would even call it adequate.
In the long and rambling New York Times article about Berkeley -- titled "Little Asia on the Hill" -- there is lots of space devoted to racial representation among the student body and remarkably little mention of qualifications and achievement. You might never guess that a university has purposes other than presenting a demographic profile that is politically correct.
In addition to such omissions, there is also misinformation. For example: "In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics."
There have been more black students in the University of California system than there were before affirmative action was outlawed. Black students have not been denied a college education. They have been redistributed within the University of California system, with fewer going to Berkeley and more going to Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and other institutions within the same system.
Something similar has happened within the University of Texas system after affirmative action was outlawed. Fewer black students went to the flagship campus at Austin but more went to the University of Texas system as a whole.
Back in the days when affirmative action or racial quotas were in full force, most black students admitted to Berkeley never graduated. Nor was Berkeley unique in that respect.
Critics of affirmative action have been saying for decades that putting black students in institutions where they are overmatched academically reduces their chances of graduating. This creates a wholly unnecessary problem, when most of those same black students would have far better chances of keeping up and graduating at other institutions where the rest of the students have similar academic qualifications.
The sheer speed at which material is taught can make it nearly impossible to keep up when the pace is geared to students with far higher SAT scores in math and English -- even though students with lower scores may be perfectly capable of learning the same material when taught at a more moderate pace.
What has happened to graduation rates of black students after being redistributed within the University of California system? Those who have asked that question have been denied the information. And of course the New York Times reporter does not even discuss such things.
Asians are no menace to blacks. They could serve as an example to blacks, as Bill Cosby once suggested. He told some black students: "They always get A's. That's why they call them Asians."
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.
MAKING NEW THOMAS SOWELL PING LIST.
Please FReepmail me to be added to it.
Thank you! I spotted the article as soon as you posted it and was reading it when your ping came in ;-)
Dr. Sowell's column is superb, as always.
Please add me to this ping list. Thanks!
Sowell nails it again.
(That was directed at the NYT)...
Aw, man. I thought this was an aircraft thread.
I figured it was. :-)
LOL!
I would like to be on the list. Thanks.
The world must be becoming REALLY confusing to liberals.
Oh, to have his pith.
Sowell BTT.
Please add me to the Thomas Sowell ping list.
I wish the GOP could attract men like Sowell to run for elected office instead of the spinless dopes we get who are unable to describe basic concepts of liberty and economics.
"The world must be becoming REALLY confusing to liberals."
No, they just each other what they want to hear, and when anything confusing is encountered, they put their fingers in their ears and dance about chanting "nah nah nah nah..."
Information filtering is one of the prime mechanisms of the mental disorder known as leftism.
"I wish the GOP could attract men like Sowell to run for elected office"
Sowell is much to smart to expose himself and his family to the character assassination the demonrats would subject them to.
Dr. Sowell and people like him are the type people the majority of our forefathers envisioned leading our country, IMO.
Why, are you having trouble pithing?
LOL!!!
bttt
There was a joke about this last night on "King of the Hill." Bobby and Khan, two preteens, are complaining about their parents. Bobby is a white Southerner. Khan is Laotian.
Khan: "My father's making me study 4,000 words so I can pass the SAT. He's such an autocrat."
Bobby: (hesitantly) "What's an S-A-T ?"
I see this in my classroom. It's culture - not just the ethnic culture of the student, but the family culture of the student, too.
I once asked the students to tell me the lowest possible grade they could get before their parents got angry with them. To a student, that lowest grade was the grade that they were earning in my class.
I couldn't agree more. When I was in school (longer ago than I care to mention) and then our kids and now our grandkids, that has been the case in my experience.
I'm probably wrong in saying there are more families now that don't seem to instill in their kids that a good education is very important but it sure seems like it.
"...I'm probably wrong in saying there are more families now that don't seem to instill in their kids that a good education is very important but it sure seems like it..."
Sadly, in my observation, you are correct. More and more people are under the impression that they can suckle on the grand teats of American affluence without contributing anything to the culture. It's not just a "minority" problem, either. I see it across the board in Americans of all ethnicities and races. The equivalence in the war against the Islamofascists is the idea that many people won't fight to defend our freedom and liberty. Perhaps it has to do with the enormous wealth in our culture which cushions people against their own bad decisions and lack of effort. Eventually, of course, it will all fall apart if that attitude continues, as it would on an individual level, but that's not the sort of place I want to live in.
I would like to be on the list.
Welcome CIC, I checked my FReepmail first. :-)
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