Stu is one of the few people I've ever heard make sense on PBS.
Posted on 10/03/2012 9:46:18 AM PDT by hcmama
ffirmative action in university admissions started in the late 1960s as a noble effort to jump-start racial integration and foster equal opportunity. But somewhere along the decades, it has lost its way.
Over time, it has become a political lightning rod and one of our most divisive social policies. It has evolved into a regime of racial preferences at almost all selective schools -- preferences so strikingly large and politically unpopular that administrators work hard to conceal them. The largest, most aggressive preferences are usually reserved for upper-middle-class minorities on whom they often inflict significant academic harm, whereas more modest policies that could help working-class and poor people of all races are given short shrift. Academic leaders often find themselves flouting the law and acting in ways that aggravate the worst consequences of large preferences. They have become prisoners of a system that many privately deplore for its often-perverse unintended effects but feel they cannot escape.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
It’s now permanent. Just like all other entitlements. No way to change it, short of nuking Washington and starting over.
Welcome to the table Sir. Thomas Sowell was pointing this out 30 years ago.
Instead they sit there at their elite institution and simmer in their resentment. Unable to compete with their classmates, they embark on a course of grievance studies for which there are no standards of excellence or achievement.
It is a painful, needless recourse, once mandated by liberal lawgivers to attone for grievances long past.
Its practice today is merely because of unwarranted, leftover white guilt, and an ingrained attitude by blacks that “it will NEVER be enough”...it HAS to continue in perpetuity because white people are inherently racist. Absurd in its foundation, and absurd in its implementation and continuance.
I think Dr. Sowell explained how affirmative action has led to the propagation of BS like “critical race theory.” It is nothing more than a response by those who are out of their depth in academia to justify their continued presence.
Best example of affirmative actions disasterous outcome is sitting in the White House. Need to look no further
Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites.
Blacks who start college interested in pursuing a doctorate and an academic career are twice as likely to be derailed from this path if they attend a school where they are mismatched.
About half of black college students rank in the bottom 20 percent of their classes (and the bottom 10 percent in law school).
Black law school graduates are four times as likely to fail bar exams as are whites; mismatch explains half of this gap.
It is because these people are chosen for their color instead of their capability. They are pampered, prodded and protected throughout their academic tenure, but often are sorely ill equipped on ‘graduation’ to succeed in the real world where performance and innovation matter.
Indeed, how can you be innovative when your entire academic stint has been one of coaching and undue consideration for a basic inability to master a subject?
Should be “misconceived effort”. The use of racism to combat racism defies all sense of logic and justice.
Then when you put an indeterminate lack of time constraints on those racist “getting even” policies you create the monster of multigenerational metastatic malignancy of abandonement of personal responsibility.
It lost its way? It was wrong from the start. It was racial preferences with a nice name: “affirmative action.” Sounds harmless. Instead, it was the beginning of a whole set of special privileges given on the basis of skin shade.
In academia, black emphasis leads to heretofore unexplored critical subjects for theses like “Africa as the Cradle of World Scientific Advancement.” And other such drivel. It is actually funny to see what indicators these academic pretenders have the audacity to use as evidence. An example would be “Yes, African Urban Cities were centers of the Arts, Sciences and Culture.” Deep, deep down in the references, if there are any, is a cite to a stick drawing somewhere in mother Africa etched in a dried wadi-bed depicting a goat.
This article doe not address the corrosive effects AA has on the university itself. “Retention” has become the buzzword of the day on college campuses as they confront the miserable stats affirmative action admits rack up. Of course, “retention” inevitably equates to lowering standards so no one actually fails.
Affirmative action was originally meant for ancestors of
slaves who were denied their civil rights. Now affirmative action goes to any immigrant from Africa, Latin America, just so long as their non white. The whole thing is a crock of s#%t. How many white Americans have been told “sorry we’re only hiring blacks”? This crap was going on back in the 60’s and has been getting worse.
As a graduate of Wake Forest...all I can say is....OUCH !!!
{:<D ...
I think most people would be shocked to know how students game the system. I know a kid with very mediocre stats whose grandfather was Egyptian. She checked off “African-American” on the application to Stanford...and got in.
Stu is one of the few people I've ever heard make sense on PBS.
It is not exactly “lowering the standards” that bothers me. That just means there would need to be another level of achievement created to compensate (e.g., a Post PhD level).
What bothers me is the “lowering of the standards” seems only to be for black students and minorities. White students are held to an even higher standard in most cases. And, that I believe is why they don’t succeed. If you aren’t challenged to rise above it and learn, you won’t learn, period. Blacks and minorities are, in effect, being hamstrung from the git-go.
Hey, that was from the article! I see the author’s point, but I thought that was a rather gratuitous slam at Wake myself. It is a great school.
In a way, I find this hard to understand. The "body of knowledge" required to reach BS-level proficiency should be nearly identical at every school. If a student can't acquire it at Harvard and can acquire it at, say, UC Riverside, then either the UC Riverside BS is not a "real" BS or the Harvard BS has been made unnecessarily difficult due to the need to conform to some inner set of procedures and beliefs that aren't directly relevant to the body of knowledge.
The point being that a student who gets straight F's at Harvard after being let in as an affirmative action case shouldn't be capable of transferring to UC Riverside and getting any better than straight D's. Otherwise, a UC Riverside degree really doesn't mean anything.
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