A Little-Understood Engine of Campus Unrest: Racial Admissions Preferences

American Spectator ^ | November 23, 2015 | Stuart Taylor

[billorites]

Why are some of the most privileged students in the nation plunging into a racial grievance culture and upending their campuses as though oppressed by Halloween costumes they don’t approve, imagined racial slights, portraits of Woodrow Wilson, a tiny handful of real racial epithets, and the like?

The reasons are of course multifaceted. But one deserves far more attention than it has gotten: Many or most of the African-American student protesters really are victims — but not of old-fashioned racism.

Most are, rather, victims of the very large admissions preferences that set up racial-minority students for academic struggle at the selective universities that have cynically misled them into thinking they are well qualified to compete with classmates who are, in fact, far stronger academically.

The reality is that most good black and Hispanic students, who would be academically competitive at many selective schools, are not competitive at the more selective schools that they attend.

That's why it takes very large racial preferences to get them admitted. < SNIP>

[God luvs America]

Most are, rather, victims of the very large admissions preferences that set up racial-minority students for academic struggle at the selective universities that have cynically misled them into thinking they are well qualified to compete with classmates who are, in fact, far stronger academically.

---

another way to look at this is qualified white students were purposely denied or lost out on admission to unqualified non-white students at certain schools via gov’t edict ...

[LydiaLong]

I saw the same thing happen for 25 years as I taught in the gifted program in a local high school. Plan B was a system that put black students who didn’t qualify via IQ into these classes with truly gifted students. The result was predictable. They invariably could not keep up with the truly gifted students.

[utahagen]

This article is true, but it actually softens reality. Black students at even moderately competitive schools are dramatically less capable than the non-white students; it isn't merely that the black kids at Princeton would have thrived at, say, UNC.

[Vince Ferrer]

And don’t forget the qualified Asians who don’t get in at all.

[vladimir998]

At one of the universities I attended way back when some black students received spending money each semester from the university. When I would think of my family’s background (poor) and how my parents scrimped and saved and worked overtime so I could have the best they could afford knowing that some students got money for merely being black made my blood boil.

[Hulka]

Yeah. . .saw the same thing but the ed-u-cumated e-lights told us that by bringing in the academically challenged will provide an opportunity for the “gifted” to teach the not-so-gifted, to raise them up.

Didn’t work that way, slowed down the class, disrupted good order, mocked the smart kids. . .basically destroyed the gifted program. . .and, oh yeah, RAP noise and hats on sideways became standard with the previously attentive, nice clothes-wearing white kids.

[Timmy]

Thomas Sowell made this same point over 20 years ago in Inside American Education. Stuart should credit him here.

[Hulka]

Charles Murray provides an academically reasoned and sourced book explaining why that is the case (”The Bell Curve”)

[billorites]

"With most other minority students having similar problems, their personal academic struggles take on a collective, racial cast.

Consider the case of a student whom I will call Barack..."

[kaehurowing]

And now they are in the White House.

[Mears]

Are you telling me that unqualified blacks are admitted to hard-to-get-in universities?

I’m shocked ./s

.

[Gay State Conservative]

An old girlfriend of mine was a Radcliffe grad (now part of Harvard) who had a classmate friend who worked in Harvard's admissions office.This classmate told her that were it not for Harvard's affirmative action policy the Freshman classes there would be almost entirely Jews and Asians.

[ETL]

Because you have commie groups like the RCP on college campuses nationwide?

Who Is Doing the Community Organizing for Black Lives Matter Spectacle?

Not many Black Lives Matter morons would have the initiative to get a poster printed. But it's no mystery where they get the signs that they jab in the air as they chant "What do we want? Dead cops!" The supplier is printed right across the bottom: revcom.us .

'Rev' is for revolutionary.
'Com' is for communist.

Revcom.us bills itself as "the voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA." The explicit objective is to overthrow our constitutional republic and replace it with an oligarchical collectivist dictatorship along the lines of North Korea and the Soviet Union.

Why would advocates of a communist police state agitate against the police? Because as leftists used to admit openly, the issue is never the issue. This isn't about the police, any more than it is about blacks. It is about destabilizing the system so as to create opportunities to weaken it and eventually overthrow it.

That's what community organizing boils down to. These people have taken over the executive branch of the federal government; why would they stop there?

The next hill they take will be federal control of local police. After that, things will start to get scary.

http://moonbattery.com/?p=54033
____________________________________________

From the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party (revcom.us):

"Create Public Opinion, Seize Power: We are preparing minds and organizing forces for the time when there is a major crack in the system, whenever it comes and wherever it comes from: an opening that makes it possible to bring the future Revolutionary Army of the Proletariat (R.A.P.) into the field and wage a revolutionary armed struggle that actually has a chance of winning.

And we have said that building our party itself is the most important part of organizing forces for revolution. This is true now, and it is true looking forward to the creation of that future R.A.P. and the waging of that armed struggle.":

http://revcom.us/a/v20/1000-1009/1000/barw.htm
__________________________________________

REVOLUTION: Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA [Maoist]
[Revolution] Interview with Bill Ayers, Revolution #63, October 1, 2006:
"On Progressive Education, Critical Thinking and the Cowardice of Some in Dangerous Times"
http://web.archive.org/web/20110727113745/http://rwor.org/a/063/ayers-en.html

*********************************************************

The 1992 LA/Rodney King riots were instigated by the Revolutionary Communist Party...

From David Horowitz's FrontpageMag.com /DiscoverTheNetworks.org:

"Throughout its history, one of RCP's [Revolutionary Communist Party] principal objectives has been to foment civil unrest in the United States. The most notable example of such efforts occurred on April 29, 1992, when RCP members looted and trashed the downtown and government districts of Los Angeles, triggering the infamous Rodney King riots. During the days immediately preceding the violence, RCP -- which maintained close ties to the L.A. gangs known as the Crips and the Bloods -- had circulated throughout South Central Los Angeles a leaflet featuring a statement by RCP National Spokesman Carl Dix, titled 'It's Right To Rebel' -- a quote popularized by Mao Zedong.

Encouraged by Dix, RCP activists helped lead the riots that would leave 58 people dead, more than 2,300 people injured, some 5,300 buildings burned, and $1 billion in property damaged or destroyed. On the ten-year anniversary of the rioting, RCP member Joseph Veale fondly recalled the violence as 'the most beautiful, the most heroic civil action in the history of the United States.'"
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6197

[seacapn]

It gets worse...

[tumblindice]

I knew some AA products in grad school.
Our conversations were, hmmm ... well, imagine trying to talk to an Irish setter. And this was a land grant university in the midwest.
They couldn’t really think for themselves. They were used to memorizing political cant and spewing it on to paper at exam time, you know, the methodology most of us left behind about 8th grade? So yeah, critical thinking was the problem.

Specific example in fact, Michelle Robinson wrote her Princeton senior thesis on what topic? She wrote about what it was like to be a black person at Princeton. Read the full thesis here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before,” the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2008/02/michelle-obama-thesis-was-on-racial-divide-008642#ixzz3sXyYd5Dw

It would be like yours truly writing about being a redneck duck hunter at Silo Tech. So why aren’t there Departments that teach things like that, about creeping up on mergansers (”The experience seared my soul, hunting those fowl in the mists, chanting the field songs of my ancestors ... “ just as they rubber-stamp a nice black kid’s scribblings about her “experiences” as a person of color?
Because as an academic subject it is risible, solipsistic navel gazing, but if applied to something like, gee, I dunno—Transaxled Queer-bait Studies or African-American Mathematics & Astrophysics, then it is not.
This may be why they are so angry. They owe tens of thousands of dollars in student loans and are just figuring out that about the only way their degree is going to be worth anything will be if they marry the president.

[driftless2]

The result was predictable. They invariably could not keep up with the truly gifted students

That is what is so infuriating. This scam has been going on for 40-50 years with the same results every time....black students either falling behind and dropping out, or taking worthless black studies courses to get a worthless degree.

How stupid are liberals to not realize the uselessness of pushing students into schools where they have no chance to succeed?

[Lizavetta]

He was easily admitted to Colgate, a moderately elite liberal arts college in rural New York; no one pointed out to Joe that his SAT scores were far below the class median.

Joe immediately found himself over his head academically, facing far more rigorous coursework than ever before ....I was immediately stereotyped and put into a box because I was African American, he recalled .... There was a general feeling that all blacks on campus were there either because they were athletes or they came through a minority recruitment program. That was just assumed right away."

Because that is what has been done to you, Joe. I refuse to believe blacks are inherently less intelligent but I most certainly believe that their wonderful Dem politicians they lockstep vote for keep them unprepared and thus reliant on government to "help" them.

His SAT scores were lousy, he takes advantage of affirmative action, yet complains people assume he was admitted because of minority recruitment. He's part of the problem and then complains that he's viewed as part of the problem.

Don't they get it?

[achilles2000]

Those of us who have lived through AA admissions knew this way before Sowell, but no one wanted or wants to tell the truth about “minority” academic “underachievement”. The unqualified blacks, especially, always had a chip on their shoulders because they really didn’t belong. They had to have “studies” programs so they could pretend to be students. I never encountered a single black chemistry, physics, or computer science major. I did know two pre-meds, a guy who had a knack for teaching math, and one really brilliant guy whose major may have been bio. That’s the score card for many years in three Ivy and “Ivy-type” schools.

[Cubs Fan]

BTW whatever happened to ward Connerly?