Breaking the diversity rule about race, math, science and success

Breaking the diversity rule about race, math, science and success By Craig J. Cantoni

The unwritten diversity rule in the pack media and government is to pander to those races and ethnic groups that underperform academically and economically, and to essentially ignore those races and ethnic groups that achieve outstanding performance. The following three articles attempt to correct this imbalance.

The first article is by Fred Reed on the success of Asians, especially Indians, in math and science. It mirrors my wife's experience at Intel and my experience consulting with various high-tech firms -- namely, that many firms would be out of business without Indian entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists.

The second article was published by me in 2001 as my response to Senator John Glenn's and Intel CEO Craig Barrett's claim that more money is needed to improve America's standing in math and science.

The third article also was published by me in 2001. It is my tribute to Korean grocery store owners who work long hours and risk being shot and robbed to provide for their families and realize the American dream.

Johnny can't add, but Suresh Venktasubramanian can by Fred Reed (First published in the American Conservative) by Fred Reed

The other day I went to the Web site of Bell Labs, one of the country's premier research outfits. I clicked at random on a research project, Programmable Networks for Tomorrow. The scientists working on the project were Gisli Hjalmstysson, Nikos Anerousis, Pawan Goyal, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Jennifer Rexford, Kobus Van der Merwe, and Sneha Kumar Kasera.

Clicking again at random, this time on the Information Visualization Research Group, the research team turned out to be John Ellson, Emden Gansner, John Mocenigo, Stephen North, Jeffery Korn, Eleftherios Koutsofios, Bin Wei, Shankar Krishnan, and Suresh Venktasubramanian.

Here is a pattern I've noticed in countless organizations at the high end of the research spectrum. In the personnel lists, certain groups are phenomenally over-represented with respect to their appearance in the general American population: Chinese, Koreans, Indians, and, though it doesn't show in the above lists, Jews. What the precise statistical breakdown across the world of American research might be, I don't know. An awful lot of personnel lists look like the foregoing.

Think about this: Asians make up a small percent of the population, yet there are company directories in Silicon Valley that read like a New Delhi phone book. Many of our premier universities have become heavily Asian, with many of these students going into the sciences. If Chinese citizens and Americans of Chinese descent left tomorrow for Beijing, American research, and graduate schools in the sciences and engineering, would be crippled.

Jews are two or three percent of the population. On the rough-cut assumption that Goldstein is probably Jewish, and Ferguson probably isn't, it is evident that Jews are doing lots more than their share of research – and, given that people named Miller may well be Jewish, the name-recognition approach probably produces a substantial undercount. I asked a friend, researching a book on Harvard, the percentage of Asian and Jewish students. Answer: "Asians close to 20%. Jews close to 25% – unofficial, because you are allowed to list by gender, ethnicity, geography, but not religion. Our last taboo."

None of this is original with me. In 1999, the National Academy of Sciences released a study noting that over half of U.S. engineering doctorates are awarded to foreign students. Where are Smith and Jones?

Why are members of these very small groups doing so much of the important research for the United States? That's easy. They're smart, they go into the sciences, and they work hard. Potatoes are more mysterious. It's not affirmative action. They produce. The qualifications of these students can easily be checked. They have them. The question is not whether these groups perform, or why, but why the rest of us no longer do. What has happened?

It is not an easy question, but a lot of it, I think, is the deliberate enstupidation of American education. Again, the idea is not original with me. Said the American Educational Research Association of the NAS report, "Serious deficiencies in American pre-college education, along with wavering support for basic research, were cited by the panel as major contributors to this problem."

Consider mathematics. In the mid-Sixties I took freshman chemistry at Hampden-Sydney College, a solid school in Virginia but not nearly MIT. It was assumed – assumed without thought – that students knew algebra cold. They had to. You can't do heavy loads of highly mathematical homework, or wrestle with ideas like integrating probability densities over three-space, or do endless gas-law and reaction-rate calculations, if you aren't sure how exponents work.

Remedial mathematics at the college level was unheard of. The assumption was that people who weren't ready for college work should be somewhere else. No one thought about it. Today, remedial classes in both reading and math are common at universities. We seem to be dumbing ourselves to death.

I recently had children go through the high schools of Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington. I watched them come home with badly misspelled chemistry handouts from half-educated teachers, watched them do stupid, make-work science projects that taught them nothing about the sciences but used lots of pretty paper.

The extent of scholastic decline is sometimes astonishing. So help me, I once saw, in a middle school in Arlington, a student's project on a bulletin board celebrating Enrico Fermi's contributions to "Nucler Physicts" (Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee champions: 2003, Sai Guntuyri; 2002, Pratyush Buddiga; 2001, Sean Conley; 2000, George Thampy; 1999, Nupur Lala).

It appears that a few groups are keeping their standards up and the rest of us are drowning our children in self-indulgent social engineering, political correctness, and feel-good substitutes for learning.

Some of our growing dependency is hidden. We do not merely rely on small industrious groups in America and on foreigners working here. Increasingly the United States contracts out its technical thinking to Asia.

If you read technically aware publications like Wired magazine (and how many people do?), you find that major American corporations have more and more of their computer programming done by people in, for example, India. In cities like Bombay, large colonies of Indians work for U.S. companies by Internet. This again means that counting names at American institutions underestimates the growth of intellectual dependence.

The Indians, and others, have discovered the suddenly important principle that intellectual capital is separable from physical capital. To program for Boeing, you don't have to be anywhere near Seattle. Nor do you need an aircraft plant. All you need is a $700 computer, a book called something like How to Program in C++, and a fast Internet connection. Crucial work like circuit-design can now be done abroad by bright people who don't need chip factories. They need workstations, the Internet, and engineering degrees.

This too we would be wise to ponder. Americans often think of India chiefly as a land of ghastly poverty. Well, yes. It is also a country with about three times our population and a lot of very bright people who want to get ahead. They're professionally hungry. We no longer are.

People speak of globalization. This is it, and it's just beginning. Where will it take us? How long can we maintain a technologically dominant economy if we are, as a country, no longer willing to do our own thinking? If we rely heavily on less than 10 percent of our own population while employing more and more foreigners abroad?

It's not them. It's us. I've heard the phrase, "the Asian challenge to the West." I don't think so. When Sally Chen gets a doctorate in biochemistry, she's not challenging America. She's getting a doctorate in biochemistry. Those who study have no reason to apologize to those who don't.

The Mathematical Association of America runs a contest for the extremely bright and prepared among high-school students. It is called the United States of America Mathematics Olympiad, and it "provides a means of identifying and encouraging the most creative secondary mathematics students in the country."

An unedited section of a list of those recently chosen: Sharat Bhat, Tongke Xue, Matthew Peairs, Wen Li, Jongmin Baek, Aaron Kleinman, David Stolp, Andrew Schwartz, Rishi Gupta, Jennifer Laaser, Inna Zakharevich, Neil Chua, Jonathan Lowd, Simon Rubinsteinsalze, Joshua Batson, Jimmy Jia, Jichao Qian, Dmitry Taubinsky, David Kaplan, Erica Wilson, Kai Dai, Julian Kolev, Jonathan Xiong, Stephen Guo.

Former Senator John Glenn and Intel CEO Craig Barrett have called for the federal government to make an investment in math and science education similar to the investment that was made 43 years ago in response to the Soviet Union leading the space race with the launch of the Sputnik satellite. The two esteemed gentlemen forget that public education and the nation were quite different in 1960. Consider:

- In 1960, the nation spent $2,535 per student. Today, it spends $7,597, or three times more, in constant dollars. Yet Messrs. Glenn and Barrett say that an additional $430 million is needed to teach science. They conveniently overlook the fact that the nation was able to improve science education and catch up with the Soviet Union during a time when total education spending was far, far less than it is today.

- Back then, the National Education Association was a professional organization concerned about the education of children. Now a labor union, it has become the most powerful lobby in the nation, a lobby that is more concerned with its self-interest than the interest of children. It is the major impediment to such reforms as requiring teachers to have degrees in math, science and other subject matter instead of dubious degrees in education.

- Lyndon Johnson did not take office until 1963. His Great Society Program would propel the rate of out-of-wedlock births in the Black inner-city into the stratosphere. In 1960, the rate was 23 percent. It now stands at 70 percent and is a major cause of school dropouts and learning problems. Even school districts like Newark, New Jersey, which spends $12,000 per student, cannot compensate for the social dysfunction caused by the absence of fathers in the inner-city. Tragically, many Black children graduate from high school with a third-grade reading comprehension. They cannot complete a job application, let alone design computer chips.

- It is not just the Black rate of out-of-wedlock births that has increased dramatically. The non-Hispanic White rate has climbed from 3 percent in 1960 to 22 percent today. The Hispanic rate stands at 42 percent. Why are those numbers important? Because fatherless children are nearly twice as likely to drop out of school as children from intact families. And children who live apart from their biological father are 75 percent more likely to repeat a grade and 70 percent more likely to be expelled from school. Longtime teachers know that the dramatic increase in single mothers is a major cause of learning and behavioral problems in the classroom, but political correctness keeps them from telling the truth. Also, after Vice President Dan Quayle got lambasted by the liberal media for his Murphy Brown speech, John Glenn and other politicians learned that it is much safer to throw money at public education than to tell the truth about the impact of single moms and irresponsible dads.

- The fevers of Vietnam had not yet infected the nation in 1960. But within 10 years, encephalitic permissiveness had wormed its way into the national cranium, where it continues to eat away at common sense and to undermine authority in homes and schools. Parents, principals and teachers do not have the moral authority that they had 43 years ago.

- The massive wave of poor, uneducated and unskilled immigrants from southern Europe that began in the early decades of the 19th century had run its course by 1960. The grandchildren of those immigrants had been assimilated into the middle-class and were just entering high school in 1960. Today, the wave of poor, uneducated and unskilled immigrants from Latin America is at its crest. For a variety of reasons, including multicultural nonsense that works against assimilation, the rate of assimilation of Latin Americans is much slower and the school dropout rate is much higher. For example, 44.2 percent of foreign-born Hispanics drop out of school, versus 7.4 percent of foreign-born non-Hispanics.

- The best and brightest students no longer gravitate to the manufacturing industry, much of which has moved offshore due to environmental extremism and the legal roulette of frivolous product liability suits. They now gravitate to the professions that live off the wealth created in America's smokestack past -- to the legal, investment banking and marketing professions. It is telling that most of Senator John Glenn's colleagues are attorneys, that America has the highest ratio of attorneys to population in the world, and that some of the most popular network shows are about attorneys, not about engineers and plant managers. It is also telling that Craig Barrett's Intel is dependent on computer engineers from India and other nations, not because America does not know how to grow its own engineers, but because American students do not want to work in a factory, and because upper-class Americans do not want one in their neighborhood.

- In 1960, Japan and Germany were recovering from World War II. Today, both nations are considered to produce the world's best engineers, yet both spend less on public education than the United States. Japan spends 3.6 percent of gross domestic product on public education; Germany, 4.5 percent; and the U.S., 5.2 percent. Much of America's higher spending is due to the fact that the U.S. has a higher percentage of school-age children than Japan or Germany, but even when that demographic fact is factored in, the U.S. still outspends the other two nations.

There are many more differences between the America of 1960 and the America of today. Although Glenn's and Barrett's concerns over America's dismal math and science scores are commendable, they need to come down to earth and be honest about how America has changed in the last 43 years. ____________

Mr. Cantoni is an author, public speaker and consultant. He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

America's unsung heroes By Craig J. Cantoni December 23, 2001

The word "hero" has become so overused after September 9/11 that I am reluctant to use it to describe some unsung heroes. But if the word means "a man with great courage," then it certainly applies to the Asian men who own and operate small grocery and convenience stores in the inner-city of Phoenix and other cities.

Another was shot last week. He will not be eulogized by the mayor or by the governor or by the president. He will not get a 21-gun salute or a flyover of fighter jets. His death will not even be investigated as a hate crime, although someone from a different race killed him in cold blood, similar to the way that African Americans attacked Korean grocers during the Rodney King riots solely because of their race.

The New York City firemen who risked and lost their lives trying to save others are certainly heroes and deserve all the recognition that they have received. But it is a leap of logic to say that all firemen are heroes -- that all of them have great courage or that all of them risk their lives each and every day. But it is accurate to say that someone who mans the counter of a small market in the wee hours of the morning in a bad neighborhood is putting himself at risk each and every day. National statistics are not available, but it is a safe bet that more Asian grocers lose their lives each year than firemen lose theirs.

The grocer does it without status or recognition. No fancy uniform. No health care benefits. No pension. No death benefits for his family. No protection of wage and hour laws.

Why does he do it? He does it for his family. He works 80 hours a week, saves money, takes risks and sees that his kids learn English and get good grades so that they can fulfill the American dream and climb the socioeconomic ladder. That entrepreneurial spirit more than anything else accounts for America's prosperity.

How does the nation thank him? It discriminates against his children. It slaps him in the face with race-based quotas on college campuses that discriminate against Asians, because they are too successful. It also slaps him in the face with diversity programs in corporate American and especially in news rooms that favor the preferred races of African Americans and Hispanics.

It is not just Korean grocers who do not get the recognition they deserve. Immigrants from India are also overlooked in the diversity charade. Indian engineers are the backbone of America's high tech industry. Indians also own most of the independently owned motels in America, including throughout small towns in the supposedly racist South and Texas. Many of them are Hindus who have dark complexions and dress in traditional garb. Yet they succeed where other races have failed, and they succeed without the help of race mongers in government and industry. That is their problem. They belie the conventional wisdom that minorities cannot succeed because America is a racist society.

Newspapers take special efforts to recruit Hispanic editorial writers and reporters to represent the views of Hispanics, in the mistaken and silly belief that all Hispanics come from one country and think alike. Those efforts are in clear violation of long-standing discrimination laws, which say that it is illegal to consider race in hiring decisions. Curiously, newspapers do not expend the same efforts to recruit Indian editorial writers and reporters to represent the views of Indians, who do come from one country and have a common culture.

Newspapers also have quota systems on news stories, making sure that condescending coverage is given to African Americans and Hispanics. But it is obvious from the lack of coverage on Koreans, Indians and other Asians that the quotas do not include much smaller minority groups. A cynic would say that newspaper diversity is not about diversity at all. It is about selling newspapers. Hispanics are the largest ethnic group in Arizona and many other states. Indians and Koreans are the smallest. Why cover groups that do not buy a lot of newspapers?

Because of the lack of coverage, readers are left in the dark about the struggles and successes of Asians in assimilating to the American culture. For example, readers do not know if Chinese immigrants who speak Mandarin Chinese are able to learn English more readily than Mexican immigrants who speak Spanish. That would be an interesting and enlightening story, given the fact that it is much more difficult to go from Mandarin Chinese to English than from Spanish to English. But again, a cynic would say that Mexican-American reporters would never write such a story, nor would politically correct editors assign such a story.

This cynic salutes America's unsung heroes. _______________

Mr. Cantoni is an author, public speaker and consultant. He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

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